Newham and the Law of Inverse Relationships

The Recorder broke the news that Newham Council employs some 46 Newham staff are paid more than £100,000 per year. This gives Newham the distinction of being seventh in the country (out of something like 12,000 councils in the UK), when it comes to generously compensating their senior staff. And the number is steadily increasing, having risen by 20 over the past five years.

They were using figures obtained by The Taxpayers Alliance, who issued a report on councils across the country.

What is of interest to us is the value of this astonishing generosity. Remember, Newham had to go cap in hand to the government recently begging for an additional £51m to balance the books. You would expect that all of these highly paid individuals would bringing down costs and making the council run more efficiently. That is certainly what they would have us believe.

The Recorder asked Newham for comment and were told the following.

"Our senior salaries are benchmarked across the sector and other relevant information.

"We continually review our senior staffing to look at how we can deliver the most effective, modern and financially efficient council."

Sounds good, unfortunately, it does appear that the only performance correlation is between the amount of money being paid to senior staff and the decline in performance by the council.

To be fair, this also coincides with the period in office of a certain R. Fiaz. A less charitable opinion of the practice might be that Newham’s reputation is now so low, that the only way to get senior staff in is to pay them way over the odds.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance have helpfully shown how the money is distributed, at least so far as information is available. It seems that in 34 cases, the names and even the job titles of the lucky recipients are “undisclosed”.