Is it suprising we read of huge pay rises and pay rises for chief officials at a time when many councils are slashing budgets and axing front line staff? Obviously there are some councils which are run very well, and pay awards should reflect this. However, there are other councils (such as Wirral Council) which have been consistenly underperforming, yet the axe never seems to be taken to officals perks and allowances, but rather to dedicated front line staff. Do you understand how this type of action angers the public, and creates the contempt that many hold local government in?

Hopefully a Conservative adminstration might try and make local government more accountable, so that if another phone mast error was to occur, then this time there would be clear line of accountability, and heads would roll. Instead we have the situation where the CEO and the Director of Technical Services have the gall to tell the Scrutiny Committee that mistakes were made, but nobody has been sacked, lessons have been learnt etc etc —— this lesson was mant to have been learnt 7 years ago, when they made exactly the same mistake! To be fair, the Director of Technical Services was not in his post at that time, but why on earth did senior managers not take the blame for this error? Again, because there is no accountability

I would ask you Chris – what is the mechanism by which council officials or managers in the various departments can be removed? Is it at the discretion of the Executive, or the Councillors as a whole?

The sad state of affairs is that the views of the Elected Members were (and not for the first time) ignored by officers of WMBC!

If in your former life, a junior manager were to ignore the will of the Board of Directors (which Councillors are!) what would his or her job tenure expectancy be?

And with that in mind, what would their Boss’s shelf life be?

I am not surprised at the Labour-Lib Dem decision to sweep it under the carpet, and it probably will work, as people will move onto other thing over time… but this should not mean that it another case of the “lessons learned, ho hum” attitude, that is no evident at Wirral Council, and particularly in Technical Services. Senior managers are just as responsible for failing to lay down proper guidelines- such as having the Officers involved following up their cases to make sure the decision notice was sent, rather than palming it off to admin. I notice both the Planning officers involved are still working there, so again it doesn’t fill you with confidence that hard decisions have been taken.