It's Good to see Someone's Making Money in the UK

Procrastinator333

If u advertised the chief exec job at a council with a 40-48k salary range, you would not come within a mile of the right sort of person. What position in the private sector has a budget of £150m and pays 48k?

Take the finance director, u could probably get a newly qualified plus a year or 2 for that. Such a person would simply not have the knowledge to run the finance of a council.

Generali

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

If u advertised the chief exec job at a council with a 40-48k salary range, you would not come within a mile of the right sort of person. What position in the private sector has a budget of £150m and pays 48k?

Take the finance director, u could probably get a newly qualified plus a year or 2 for that. Such a person would simply not have the knowledge to run the finance of a council.

You should be able to get a decent accountant for £80,000 I would imagine. There's no selling and comparatively little strategic decision making so you don't need anyone at partner level.

vivatifosi

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

Councils are pretty complex organisations. Much more than most private companies of a comparable size.

One of my main frustrations with local government is that it thinks and behaves as "silo" style management. In practice this means that there is little or no overlap between the big departments (say Children Schools and Families will have little to do with the people responsible for Roads/Environment). One result of this is that one part of the council could be calling out for funding - to fill potholes say - at the same time as another is frantically trying to spend their end of year budgets in order that they aren't cut next year. This would NEVER happen in any private organisation I've worked for and I've worked for some that are complex multinationals that have many more workers than local councils.

Generali wrote: »

You should be able to get a decent accountant for £80,000 I would imagine. There's no selling and comparatively little strategic decision making so you don't need anyone at partner level.

That's another potential area for savings imo. Keep the front-line staff exactly where they are and have shared services for the back office. I've never understood why different municipal councils can't share more back office staff between each other. AIUI there are some examples of this, but not enough. I'm talking about those councils smaller than county level here.

StevieJ

DaddyBear wrote: »

That would be a great tag line for the tories' election campaign:

Labour: cutting output and increasing cost.

But then would they do something about it when elected?

StevieJ

Generali wrote: »

I am a great believer in performance related pay. Public sector unions have fought against it tooth and nail AIUI.

Do you mean like in the banks :eek:

amcluesent

> I've never understood why different municipal councils can't share more back office staff between each other.<

Same with Police. Crazy that each county force has it's own HR, Finance and IT depts. Does Tesco have an IT centre in each English county...I don't think so!

Public sector finance is dead simple, there's no treasury function, no hedges, no stock to revalue etc. etc. It can be run as a set of cash accounts TBH. And when these £100K+ FD's decided to get fancy, the numpties ended up losing £M in Icelandic banking wheezes.

carolt

vivatifosi wrote: »

One of my main frustrations with local government is that it thinks and behaves as "silo" style management. In practice this means that there is little or no overlap between the big departments (say Children Schools and Families will have little to do with the people responsible for Roads/Environment). One result of this is that one part of the council could be calling out for funding - to fill potholes say - at the same time as another is frantically trying to spend their end of year budgets in order that they aren't cut next year. This would NEVER happen in any private organisation I've worked for and I've worked for some that are complex multinationals that have many more workers than local councils.

But the depts you quoted are central, not local govt. I know, from friends who work there, that central govt depts do routinely work together on all matters - if an issue cut across departmental boundaries, it would be standard pactice to work together on this.

I don't know aout local govt though - did you mean the education depts and transport depts of local govt? If you meant central govt, though, I can categorically state that what you stated is simply not the case.

carolt

Generali wrote: »

You should be able to get a decent accountant for £80,000 I would imagine. There's no selling and comparatively little strategic decision making so you don't need anyone at partner level.

Comparatively little strategic decision making?

What gives you that idea?

I'm sure there is loads - big organisation, complex finances.

Procrastinator333

Couldn't agree more on the huge waste that occurs because of the overlap on shared services etc. But that is a different question to wages, so not going to start on it here..

Public finance is dead simple? I'm sorry, but that is simply not true. Have another look at that statement of accounts for Peterborough. How many pages just filled with table after table of financial data. That stuff doesn't just appear at the end of the year. Public sector accounts are governed by similar accounting principles to the private sector.

1 example - No treasury function - Yes there is, councils often have masses of cash sitting around that needs to be invested. But on top of that, in order to invest cash efficiently, you need decent cash flow forecasting. Councils have a myriad of different revenue sources and expenses. Accurately forecasting cash in flow and out flow to allow for an efficient investment strategy is not an easy game. Mess that up and it will cost you big time. Not quite sure you want a newly qualified accountant with !!!!!! all experience (which is what you get for sub £50k) playing those games.

Yes some lost money in the Iceland, but far from all and so did a lot of non public institutions too.

If public finance is that easy, you apply for the job, agree to only take half the wages and you do it. I do not wish to be rude, and apologise if it comes across that way, but such a sweeping statement that public finance is easy and therefore implying a public finance accountant should be paid significantly less than the private sector is simply not based in reality.

I so wish I had more time to write a proper answer to this post.

vivatifosi

carolt wrote: »

But the depts you quoted are central, not local govt. I know, from friends who work there, that central govt depts do routinely work together on all matters - if an issue cut across departmental boundaries, it would be standard pactice to work together on this.

Hi Carol,

To avoid confusion, I'm talking about local government. Local government will have teams that deal with children, teams that deal with adults, teams that deal with roads etc. Sometimes these teams will work together on issues. For example, the libraries team may receive training in the safety of children, the roads team may also have some dealing with the schools team regarding crossings etc.

However it is not these "issue" based collaborations I'm talking about, its their team budgets. Specifically, we know because local government has said so, that they need more money to fix the roads. Similarly we know because several people who work in both local and central government have said so, that budgets needed to be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

Chief Execs of councils should be able to pull in any underspend to put into areas with shortfalls. AIUI they don't have the latitude to do this without those budgets getting their budgets cut (crystalising their underspend) for future years. This situation would never exist in a company. I could of course have the wrong end of the stick, and they could have the ability to do this. If that's the case, why are the roads still in a parlous state while end of year money has been spent elsewhere? That's the crux of my question.