Sharing pain (From The Oxford Times)

Sharing pain

6:20am Thursday 8th July 2010 in

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You would not employ city councillor John Tanner as a public relations consultant. Faced with a report about huge pay rises for a small number of Oxford City Council managers at a time when austerity is the order of the day, most would have advised keeping your head down and allowing the issue to blow over.

Not Mr Tanner, he launched into a full-blown defence, sparking a torrent of correspondence that our original report failed to elicit.

We will leave it to our correspondents to respond to Mr Tanner’s letter. They have made a good job of dissecting it line by line.

There have been calls for the salary increases to be revoked. Whether that is contractually possible without the consent of those receiving them is a moot point.

There is, however, much the council can do to sensibly reduce the cost of its managers to the taxpayer. It only has to look around it to see how.

At South Oxfordshire, the Vale of White Horse and West Oxfordshire district councils, the top managers are paid less than in Oxford — and those costs are split with other councils for which those officers also take the same management responsibility. The only remaining district council in Oxfordshire, Cherwell, is also investigating a similar relationship with South Northamptonshire.

While the city council claims it has benchmarked its top salaries against other district councils, it is clearly hugely out of step with the rest of Oxfordshire where council taxpayers are, or will be, paying less than half for officers doing similar jobs.

This week, the Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles indicated that more councils should be looking to share the costs of their back-office functions.

Oxford City Council may well argue that there are no obvious partners left with which it could share back-office functions. It may have a case in respect of district councils, but there does remain the Oxford-based Oxfordshire County Council.

Politically, it would be anathema to both authorities to start sharing a chief executive and other chief officers. They may also argue that they have different functions. In an age of austerity, however, anything should be possible.

One can imagine that there are purely administrative tasks, such as finance, that can be run from one centre. Indeed, there are other areas where services overlap or complement such as planning and waste collection and disposal.

One could even go further with related services such as housing and social services.

We recognise that this is difficult for both officers and politicians but, at a time when we need to ensure that the limited money available remains at the sharp end, it is right that these questions should be asked.