KCC being economical with the actualité rather than tax payers money

A £200,000 windfall payment to Kent County Council’s former chief executive actually cost the taxpayer twice as much as originally stated.

Peter Gilroy was given the six-figure sum after agreeing to extend his contract for a year.

It was designed to ensure that his pension was not affected by his decision to stay on.

Now KCC’s auditors have disclosed that agreeing to pay Mr Gilroy actually cost £408,000, taking into account relevant National Insurance and income tax contributions.

The revelation comes in a formal report by the Audit Commission that makes a number of criticisms of the authority over a series of six-figure severance payouts to top officers.

The Auditors have been  critical of how the county council negotiated the settlements, saying it failed to properly set out why they were considered value for money.

In the case of Mr Gilroy, who was paid £214,000 last year, the report says councillors were given too little information to allow them to make an informed decision about the proposed payout.

It criticises the council over its failure to assess whether the agreement with the chief executive was value for money, saying no alternatives were explored.

It also says the finance director was not told.

Reasons to vote Green

Disgraceful KCC Child Protection Failure

Kent County Council leader Paul Carter has admitted being unaware of how poorly run the authority’s child protection service is.

Last week County Hall’s most senior politician was forced to issue an apology after a damning Ofsted report rated the safeguarding and looked-after children services at KCC as "inadequate".

Areas of concern raised after a two-week inspection last month include the management and supervision of services, low educational attainment of looked-after children, high number of cases not receiving quality assessments, and social workers with high case loads.

 Cllr Carter admitted he only now appreciated the full scale of the problem."We’ve got some poor management, which the report highlights," he said. So it will be interesting to see what action will be taken over this "poor management" bonuses all round?

"The service is under pressure, but  the report highlights issues that are more severe than I  have been aware of."We’ve got to make sure members of staff are appropriately managed and tasked because there’s an element of people being overwhelmed here."

This from a council that wants to spend our money funding and running commercial businesses, that has bid and won the rights to the new Local Enterprise Partnership scheme.  Yet they can't successfully organise and manage their core services. When will KCC let go of their vanity empire building and focus their time and resources and our money on core services.

Oh by the way it's also snowing again, please let's see if we can avoid a similar fiasco as we had when it snowed last time.

SOCIALNOMICS 1

Kent.gov.uk – local government incompetence in PPC

‘Austerity’ is a much more familiar word nowadays and the public sector is embarking on a series of cutbacks to help towards saving the £Billions needed.  A few months back I had reason to type ‘things to do in Kent’ and saw a PPC advert that enticed me in …. to a dead page on the www.kent.gov.uk website.     At the time I was annoyed that public money was being used to fund a PPC advert that led to a dead page.

And then I forgot all about it.  Until now, having seen something in the news about cutbacks being too severe and people losing their jobs in council departments.

So I used the tools at my disposal to research what PPC adverts have been used by Kent County Council in the past 12 months.  

The good news is that they’ve stopped using PPC advertising (at least for now).   But what about how they were handling it beforehand?  Has there been wastage on PPC that was unnecessary?   Yes, there certainly has been.

For example, there was a whole campaign focusing on attracting in people who had typed certain phrases into Google.  As an example, if someone typed the phrase ‘management jobs in Dubai’ they would have seen an advert that displayed as:

Environment Graduate Jobs
At Kent County Council
Environment Stream – £23,054

If you’d typed ‘financial services authority jobs’ or numerous other types of phrases (I have them all for anyone interested) then you would have seen the same advert appear.

OK, someone thought they’d be clever by picking up on phrases that people type and then trying to tempt them into clicking on an advert, hoping that they’d be swayed into considering a type of job that was nothing to do with what they’d searched for.   What they demonstrated was a clear lack of knowledge about how PPC actually works, and they would have been penalised for that (by Google).

So what about when someone typed ‘Los Angeles things to do’, ‘where to go Paris’, ‘what do do Miami’ and ‘things to do Hong Kong’?   What do you think appeared in Google?   Try this:

What To Do Fun Day
Free Family Fun Day
Next Saturday In Canterbury

Why on earth would someone interested in Los Angeles or other places be interested in a family fun day in Canterbury?  What possessed the monkey that created that PPC campaign?!

There are numerous such examples I could come up with.  For example, Google searches on ‘Bouncy Castle’ and ‘facepaint’ brought up the Canterbury fun day advert and a search on ‘pyrenees walking holidays’ brought up an advert promoting a walking festival. 

I think that underneath the incompetence there was someone who had the best intentions – attract people to get involved at a local level, having searched for something very vaguely related, or to encourage graduates looking for numerous types of work to instead consider an Environment Graduate job.   But I wonder how well it was all measured?   What did the cost of clicks actually achieve?    And how many people clicked on adverts after the landing pages had disappeared?

The point of all this is to demonstrate that it’s easily possible to identify the PPC and SEO keywords that any organisation is visible under and while such research is generally used by those in business to identify what competitors are doing (ask me how, if wanting to know more), it can also highlight significant weaknesses.

The big question in my mind is this:

“Out of thousands of staff, plus the presence of numerous PPC experts within Kent, how was it possible to make such a mess of something that could have achieved much better results at minimal cost to the public purse?”

So yes, I do feel sorry for some of those who will lose their jobs in the public sector as time goes on but I do have to wonder whether incompetences like the one shown here are replicated in numerous other ways that lead to wastage and ultimately, to job losses when the belts have to be tightened because there’s no money left.   Finally, for an added laugh, look at the strapline on the council website … ‘A council that performs excellently’.

Article by Andy Harris at Custwin   http://tinyurl.com/2vh5572

The Real Scale of the Debt

It's a start

By January 2011 every council will have to publish details of invoices over £500.

Kent County Council have started by publishing details of invoices over £500 that have been paid by their Environment, Highways and Waste services.  In the months ahead they plan to publish all expenditure over £500.

They  will be publishing the data each month in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF to make the data as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Making sense of the invoice information

This is what the data looks like:

The files contain details of all invoices paid in the reporting month that have a value of £500 or more (excluding VAT). We will not be publishing details of payments that are of a personal nature, such as those to foster carers.

The data is split into six columns containing:

• the reference number for the payment being made
• the name of the supplier/organisation receiving the payment
• the date the payment was processed by our payments system
• the value of the payment on the invoice in pounds excluding VAT
• the part of the council (we call them directorates) that made the payment
• the cost type which shows how we categorise the payment (we use more than 700 different cost types to help us identify and manage our spending).

For accounting purposes, the council is organised into five areas:

• Adult Social Services
• Chief Executive's Department
• Children, Families and Education
• Communities
• Environment, Highways and Waste

Invoice details

Details of the invoices they  pay are available  in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF.

Full details here http://kent.gov.uk/your_council/council_spending/invoices_over_500_pounds.aspx

KCC Wasting Taxpayers money again

Council officials have spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on staff away days to teach them the secrets behind becoming a successful team.

Activities ranging from two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch to outdoor pursuits at Paddock Wood have been laid on, with a total of £30,086 being spent in two-and-a-half years.

The figures cover events organised by the corporate personnel team for County Hall staff. 

Kent County Council admitted it was not a complete list of events, and said it would take too long and be too expensive to provide a comprehensive breakdown for the Freedom of Information request submitted by KOS Media.

This means the true cost of days out could be substantially higher. 

Of the details available through FoI, it was revealed that in one case £4,613 was spent on two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch for 25 County Hall workers to show them what made a successful team.

A spokeswoman from KCC, however, said one of the days was a Saturday and no excursions were taken anywhere else, for example, to the racing circuit nearby.

On another day, 54 staff were treated to a day of outdoor pursuits at Treejumpers in Paddock Wood at a cost of £6,404 to the taxpayer. 

The reason stated for the Treejumpers away day – which was repeated just nine days later for a smaller number of workers at a cost of £2,891 – was that it was a ‘team event’. 

Training days also racked up high bills, with £6,189 being spent to equip 23 staff from the Information Services Group at KCC with a ‘toolkit’ of skills for high performance.

The event, held at the four-star Eastwell Manor in Ashford, aimed to increase levels of self-awareness to allow the team to understand the motivation behind their own and others’ behaviour.

And on another team development day, this time for Kent Extended Services, which works on activities for school children, families and communities, £1,080 was spent on learning to understand each other better.

Six members of staff were also treated to a day at Buckmore Park, a karting circuit in Chatham, at a cost of £1,149.

Reasons stated for the trip were to enable them to improve communication, forge positive links with each other, adopt a ‘joined-up’ approach and work together positively. 

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said Kent residents would be outraged their council tax is funding tree-jumping under the guise of training.

He said: “It is worrying that this is not even the full picture of how much departments are spending on these jollies, as there are cases that are not documented.”

Details obtained from KCC outlined the number of delegates involved for each away day, with numbers as high as 184 for one event. Of the 27 set out, some 671 staff took part. 

Although in many cases this would have been the same workers involved on different away days, Mr Elliott questioned the amount of working time lost.

“These spending totals do not reflect the cost of the lost time of those staff members attending days out,” he said.

“Taxpayers will wonder why senior staff at KCC are being paid such huge sums if they aren’t up to the job and need all this extra training. 

It is perfectly possible to hold team building events in-house at no extra cost to taxpayers, which is really important, especially in a time of fiscal crisis.”

Of the details obtained from KCC, the most recent team days, in June and July, were held in-house for free.

Amanda Beer, director of personnel and development at County Hall, said the council was committed to delivering the highest standard of services to residents.

“We see successful team-working as equally important as individual skills and it is entirely appropriate that team-building events form part of our staff development,” she said.

“All such events must have clearly stated purposes and outcomes and we encourage teams to organise volunteering days that help local communities at the same time.”

Yeh Right !

Kent  County Council leader Paul Carter has  apologised to staff upset that senior officers pocketed £53,000 in bonuses last year.

The cash was paid despite a promise made by former chief executive Peter Gilroy in January, 2009, that members of the chief officers group would not accept any bonuses for 2009-10 in recognition of the current financial situation.

His statement followed an announcement in last year’s budget that staff would only receive a one per cent pay rise.

However, Cllr Carter pointed out at Thursday’s full council meeting that the money relates to performance in 2008-09.

“I do admit the Peter Gilroy statement could have been better worded,” he said.

 “There was certainly no intention to mislead staff but because it was not explicit it was open to misinterpretation.”

Cllr Carter went on to explain that bonuses for chief officers can only be paid in the financial year that follows that in which they are awarded.

Therefore there will be none paid for 2010-11, nor for 2011-12.

He added: “I hope this finally ends the matter and I apologise to staff who may have felt misled.”


Er  no  Mr Carter  it  doesn't..  Whether  the  staff  accept  your  weasel  words  or  not  I  don't  know.   As  a  taxpayer  that  is actually  footing  the  bill  though  I  can  tell  you  I'm  far  from  happy.  Please  explain  what  these  bonuses  were  for.  Was it the  amount  of  taxpayer  money  saved,  or  maybe  the  vast  improvement  in  core  services.  There  again  maybe  the senior  management  opted  to  reduce  their  enormous  salary  and  pension  pots  in  lieu of  performance  related  pay? 


No  thought  not,  just  lining  your  pockets  at  taxpayers  expense  as  usual

European Union Economy Explained

Council Sends delegates to Golf Open

Dover District Council sent a four-strong delegation to St Andrews, with one tourism official staying for nine days to take accommodation bookings.

During the visit, council officials held meetings with Kent Police representatives who were also present at the event to prepare for next year.

In a statement, the council said the visit enabled it to "maximise the tremendous opportunities presented by the Open to promote the area to a worldwide audience and bring in major economic benefits." 

The statement added that the council was determined to ensure that its success in staging the 2003 event was repeated.

Next Year's open is due to be staged once again in Sandwich, which is their excuse for sending all these people to "learn from the experience" but as the council claim that they successfully managed it in 2003 why do they need to find out how to do it, have they all forgotten ?

However, the decision is likely to prompt questions about the value of the visit and whether it was necessary, as both Canterbury City Council and Kent County Council also sent fact-finding delegations to the competition.

I hope you think your tax money is being wisely spent and remember this when they start telling you that the 20% budget cuts will affect front line services.

IT MUST BE TRUE IT WAS IN THE DAILY MAIL

We need crazy entrepreneurs

 

 

 

 

 

           

                           

 

Europe must embrace “crazy entrepreneurs” if it is to build more technology companies that challenge American firms, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive has said. 

 

Read more from The Daily Telegraph interview

 

Council chief given staggering £365,000 pay-off when he quit job after just 12 months

A Kent County Council boss was given a £365,000 payment when he quit a job after a year.

Adam Wilkinson, now chief executive of Derby City Council, received the huge pay out from Kent County Council where he had worked as director of environment and regeneration.

He terminated his £170,000-a-year job after just 12 months and was given the sum - which amounted to nearly £1,000 for every day he worked at the authority.

Mr Wilkinson said he left the Conservative-run council in 2008 because he was returning to West Yorkshire each weekend, where his wife and four daughters lived.

'My family weren't happy and it wasn't working out with the commute,' he said.

'I was living in Maidstone during the week and going back to West Yorkshire at the weekend. It was tiring and stressful.

'The salary was great from the financial perspective and the job was a great challenge, but the work and life balance was not working.

'Kent were very supportive and didn't think it was sustainable. We agreed that departure was best for me and my family. Contractually, Kent had a responsibility to make me a payment.

'What I was entitled to on departure was a proportion of my salary and bonus and that's what I was paid.'

After leaving the council, he set up his own consultancy firm whose services were used by City of York Council, where he took on the role of interim director of neighbourhoods.

A spokesman for Kent County Council said Mr Wilkinson was not alone in having received such a large pay-out.

'The individuals who received total remuneration over £300,000 received termination payments which appear in the statement of accounts alongside their salaries for the year,' he said.

'It is not unusual for a major employer like Kent County Council, which has a workforce of 44,000, to agree termination payments.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1287332/Council-chief-received-staggering-365-000-pay-quit-job-just-12-months.html#ixzz0rmtH176Z


This is an outrageous use of tax payers money. Who in Kent County Council has taken responsibility for their failure to carry out a correct recruitment and interview process?  Don't you think it's also ironic that KCC spends £millions of taxpayers money on locate in Kent propaganda, telling us about the quality and talent that is available in the county yet repeatedly hires from other areas of the country and indeed went on a recruitment drive to Boston, USA to recruit social workers for Thanet one of the  county's and indeed country's worst employment areas.

KCC Bonus Payments

KCC  paid its top officers more than £188,000 in bonuses over two years, according to figures released for the first time today.

The figures published by KCC as part of their accounts cover the last two financial years and show bonuses totalling nearly £53,000 were paid in 2009-2010.
Nearly three times as much was paid the previous year when senior officers, already on six-figure salaries, shared £135,686 in bonuses.
It has also emerged the council paid more than £180,000 to a private consultant to review its highways department.
Marcus Hobbs was taken on as head of business performance and communications and paid the equivalent of £16,715 a month for less than a year's work.
The bonuses for 2009-2010 were shared between eight senior officers,with the highest given to former chief executive Peter Gilroy who retired in May.
He was paid a bonus of £10,615 and his overall remuneration, including pension contributions, was £299,611.
The previous year, he received a bonus of £31,065 on top of his basic salary of £212,300.
Three others each received bonuses of nearly £8,000 on top of their six figure salaries in 2009-2010.
They were Oliver Mills, managing director of adult social services (£7,875); Amanda Honey, communities director (£7,875) and David Cockburn, economic development director (£7,850).
Geoff Wild, director of law and governance, received a bonus of £6,350, taking his earnings to £141,473 while Kevin Harlock, director of commercial services, received £5,000 making his remuneration for the year £109,199.
Tanya Oliver, strategic director of development and public access, received a bonus of £3,396 to take her earnings to £112,306.
Amanda Beer, director of personnel, received a bonus of £3,880 to take her remuneration for the year to £125,414.


I'm sure as long suffering Kent residents we all noticed how much better things have been for us paying these people vast amounts to manage our County. After all the winter snow fall was cleared promptly and caused minimal disruption, Kent schools were never performing below par according to Dept Children Schools and Families. The county's major roads are pothole free, our motorways remain open at all times and do not suffer from a lack of lorry parking facilities. and of course Kent TV was a rip roaring success, that was way ahead of it's time and if only the stupid residents of Kent had bothered to watch it then it would have been really successful . NOT

How the poor got richer

You'd never guess it from the constant wailing of the poverty lobby, but over the last half century the poor have got a whole lot richer.

To read more  go to Burning Our Money

KCC Closes money wasting TV station

Kent County Council is to close its online TV station, Kent TV. The Internet venture, which costs a reported £600,000 a year to run, will close next month.

The  blend of website and TV station, which started in 2007, is to be closed as the council prioritises spending.

Kent County Council Leader Paul Carter said, "Kent TV has proved itself to be a brave and bold innovation and we have learned a great deal from it. It has provided a source of practical, useful information for residents. And it has particularly appealed to younger residents with its Sound Clash song-writing competition; its Animate and Create animation competition and its groundbreaking soap opera Hollywould, which tackled young people's health issues.

read the full story Romney Marsh Times

Drowning in debt

The United Kingdom now has the world's worst debt problem. Yet still our talentless, venal, tribal politicians cannot grasp the damage their pathetic policies do. They scrabble around talking about cuts and investments whilst profligatly wasting hundreds of billions of pounds.

Two things are needed immediately. A 20% cut in public spending ( that's £120 billion) and a set of incentives to revitalise the private job and wealth creating sector.

Boris on Bankers

The London mayor calls on bankers to stay in the City and eschew the temptation to move to Switzerland, warning them they could face unexpected perils.


"I'm told there are parts of the Berne Canton where a man may not urinate standing up after 10 p.m. for fear of disturbing the neighbours," Johnson told a reception hosted by Japanese investment bank Nomura in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.


Full story Reuters

Ex-Dragon breathes fire

Former Dragons' Den panellist Doug Richard has called for a major overhaul of the way the government supports small businesses with ineffective schemes ditched in favour of incentives for investors.

In a damning document, the California-born businessman says the UK is plagued by "Kafkaeseque bureaucracy" so it is time for the government to step back, sweep away the burden of regulation and let entrepreneurs, the UK's "wealth creators", thrive.

Read more at Business Zone

Kent Latest Unemployment figures December 09

The Kent County unemployment rate remains at 3.3% which is below the national average of 4.1%.

Three Kent districts are still above national levels. Gravesham (4.2%), Shepway (4.6%) and Thanet (5.9%).

Ashford has suffered another small increase in unemployment since last month with a rise of 0.6% which now means that the Ashford unemployed number has risen by 47.5% since December 2008.

Anger as Government says people heavily in debt can pay off bailiffs with credit cards

Bailiffs have been given permission to collect debts by credit card from people who are already struggling with monthly bills.

read more at The Daily Telegraph

Tom Woods - Meltdown

10 Reasons to leave the EU, Dan Hannan

Here's Tory rebel Dan Hannan's list of 10 reasons why the UK would be better off out of the European Union. UKIP welcomes his support!

1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.

2. In 2010 our gross contribution to the EU budget will be £14 billion. To put this figure in context, all the reductions announced by George Osborne at the Conservative Party Conference would, collectively, save £7 billion a year across the whole of government spending.

Read the rest of Hannan's blog here.

Non-job of the week

This week’s non-job was spotted and sent in by a TPA activist and is really is the archetypal wishy-washy, semi-indefinable role that has proliferated in local government over the past few years. Let’s not forget there’s a squeeze on public finances and there will be for the foreseeable future, so such ‘right-on’ positions – presumably invented to keep us sweet – should surely be axed to free up funds for tax-cuts and the frontline services we actually want?

Come on Aberdeen City Council, do assess how vital this role really is:

“Development Officer
£25,608-£29,245 p.a.

Post Specific Requirements: Experience of working in a developmental role, of promoting customer or citizen engagement and an understanding of the corporate goals. Presentational, facilitation and communication skills, ability to produce clear reports for a broad range of audiences and to work with diverse community interests and to promote equal opportunities. Ability to use ICT, eg. mail, word processing, databases, internet research.”

Answers on a postcard as to what ‘facilitation skills’ are…

How completely and utterly vague, but of course the second sentence manages to reveal as much as we need to know. Perhaps they should’ve called this the ‘Just Checking Everyone’s Okay Officer’– possibly well-meaning but ultimately intrusive and offensively patronising.

It must be tiring forever trying to dream up ways to ‘tap in’ to minority communities and foist yourselves upon them, but someone’s got to do it (or at least that’s what local government seems to believe). Why must such communities be treated like a different, endangered species that require such molly-coddling and protection from the government, and on such an intensive basis? Are they not now more conspicuous by being constantly declared as ‘equal’, whilst the rest of us are presumably the sort of closed-minded throwbacks that might assume that these folk are ‘unequal’ without our governmental betters there to tell us differently?

On the full job description, the whole Development Officer role is encapsulated in two enigmatic points:

1. The development and mainstreaming of the Council's social inclusion, equalities, sustainable development, community engagement, and strengthening local democracy strategies.
2. Partnership and forum development to ensure that communities' and partners' needs are identified and represented in strategic and neighbourhood action programmes

Is this not just state-sponsored busy-bodying? Even the extended job profile fails to tell us what actual, practical tasks are required to ‘promote equal opportunities’ or develop ‘community engagement’. This is just a collection of buzzwords, not a job and it’s both baffling and worrying at once that the taxpayer will be called upon to pay for such a nonsense position when we're consistently denied the proof of any measurable impact of such schemes that seem to satisfy the conscience of the council more than actually serving the needs of the community.