Monkeys and peanuts

A subject guaranteed to upset just about anyone who has to pay council tax is how much we pay our council chief executives.

Here in Carmarthenshire, we have long known that ours is one of the best paid, as befits the best council in Wales. Meryl Gravell argued on several occasions, after all, that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Councils are obliged to disclose what they pay their top officers, and to publish bandings showing how many senior officers fall into which salary bands.

Unfortunately, local government being what it is, it is not altogether easy to compare the pay of one local authority chief executive with another.Some include payments made in respect of duties as returning officers; others exclude those figures. Some include employers pension contributions and other benefits in a sum showing total renumeration; others don't.

All of which means that the figures in the table below serve as a guide only. All these figures were taken from the respective annual Statement of Accounts for each Welsh authority for 2011-12, except for Wrexham where a changing of the guard part way through the year means that the 2010/11 figures are shown.

The table also shows population figures for each authority, and as we can see, the relative size and complexity of each authority is not an indicator of renumeration. Cardiff, which has almost twice the population of Carmarthenshire, paid its chief executive only £10,000 more.

Contrary to the Gravell doctrine, it also seems to be the case that councils which hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons are quite often those that pay the most peanuts.

As we know, the patchwork quilt of Welsh local government with its 22 local authorities looks strange in comparison with the much larger units which make up local government in England.

Devon, with a population of 1.14 million (over six times the size of Carmarthenshire) paid its chief executive just £177,000 in 2011/12. Gloucestershire (population 858,000) forked out £198,000 on its top man. By any measure, we Welsh are extraordinarily generous.

So here for your reading pleasure is an alphabetical run-down of chief executive renumeration for 2011/12, including returning officer fees and employer pension contributions (subject to the qualification stated above).

 

Authority	Chief Executive total renumeration 2011-12	Population (2009) (000s)
Anglesey	£127k (a)	70
Blaenau Gwent	£126	70
Bridgend	£170k	134
Caerffili	£128k (b)	178
Cardiff	£219k	336
Carmarthenshire	£209k	180
Ceredigion	£125k	76
Conwy	£139k	110
Denbighshire	£153k	97
Flintshire	£191k	150
Gwynedd	£131k	118
Merthyr Tydfil	£138k	59
Monmouthshire	£140k	91
Neath Port Talbot	£148k	137
Newport	£147k	140
Pembrokeshire	£194k	117
Powys	£160k	131
Rhondda Cynon Taf	£159k	234
Swansea	£169k	231
Torfaen	£140k	90
Vale of Glamorgan	£183k	126
Wrexham	£134k (c)	133

(a)  Chief executive commenced on 1 May 2011, so not quite a full year. 

(b)   Best estimate based on information provided

(c)    Figure for 2010/11