Shropshire Council finances on the right path, says Leader
The finances of Shropshire Council are in good health, Keith Barrow, Leader of Shropshire Council, has said.
A little over 12 months ago, Shropshire Council began in earnest the second phase of the restructuring of the way the entire authority worked in the wake of huge saving targets needing to be met.
Taking stock, Cllr Barrow reviewed how Shropshire Council had restructured the senior management in the authority over previous years, saying:
“We had a Chief Executive on £186,000 per annum. Our current Chief Executive, Clive [Wright], is actually on £99,000 per annum and he’s the lowest paid Chief Executive at our level in the country. Of course he’s the highest paid in our organisation but everyone else earns less.”
Cllr Barrow added:
“I’ve seen today some pretty strange figures relating to senior management pay at Shropshire Council from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, which I must say I’m surprised they have gone ahead with. These are old figures and no longer applicable to the council because we have completely restructured our management team over the past two years, which has been well documented by the local media. As a result of that restructure, we no longer have anyone on the council payroll with a salary over £100,000 but the quality of staff we have at the council is high and Clive has done and continues to do an excellent job in taking the organisation through this period of change.”.”
The reduction of senior pay saved the authority £5 million per annum, with Cllr Barrow confirming that further restructuring was not the main method for meeting the £80 million savings target with an emphasis on service redesign instead, saying:
“In first 12 months we’re going to save £40 million. That sounds quite a challenge, and it is. We’re going to do it largely by looking at how we do things and asking ‘is that the best way of doing it?’, ‘is that the most efficient way of doing it?’ and ‘can we do it better?’ In every instance where we’ve asked that we’ve found the answer to be ‘yes’ and we can get better outcomes for the customer.”
Watch Keith Barrow talk about Shropshire Council’s finances:
