News from Westminster Labour

Westminster City Council “costly, expensive and too many layers of unnecessary management”

Westminster Conservatives have decided to hire four new ‘Group Directors’, each earning £135,000 a year, each with a further £61,000 in support and on-costs, in order to rectify major flaws in the running of the City Council. The total bill of £792,000, has been recommended by new Chief Executive, Mike More, following his in-depth investigation of the City Council since his arrival in April.

Mr More’s findings paint a bleak and dysfunctional picture of a Council which recently invested £17 million in now-failed Icelandic banks, and include:

“The different departments (with multiple layers of senior managers, managers and deputy managers) often duplicate each other and often one department doesn’t realise what other departments are doing, even if they are engaging in very similar activities.”

“We have too big a divide between the centre and the front-line and too many layers between senior management and the staff who deliver services. We have too strong a hierarchical structure which is expensive and inhibits innovation and ambitions.”

“(There are) difficulties in joint working across departments; it makes it difficult to get a single version of the truth and it potentially creates artificial ceilings in career and experience terms that lead to too many layers of unnecessary management.”

“Having generic functions spread across different parts of the Council is costly and leads to an unnecessary fragmentation.”

Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg, Leader of the Labour Group, said;

“It has not taken Mike More very long to realise the gravity of the problems at the City Council. The way that the Conservatives have run Westminster has been “expensive”, “costly”, with “too many layers of unnecessary management”. Residents have known about these problems for years but the Conservatives have refused to listen and have done nothing to deal with these obvious flaws in the way the City Council operates”

“At a time of economic difficulties it makes no sense to spend another £800,000 on hiring even more senior staff, while front-line services have been starved of funds for years. Tenants waiting for housing repairs and elderly people waiting for aids and adaptations to their homes will not be impressed by the appointment of four more highly paid bureaucrats to sort out the mess made by the Conservatives.”

Other news from Westminster Labour

• Labour's five point plan for fairer parking in Westminster - 15 March 2010
• 5-star dinner as Westminster's "Dinosaur" Conservatives axe hotlines - 12 March 2010
• Westminster Labour welcomes dog micro-chipping plan - 11 March 2010