A prospective salary of up to £190,000 for the council’s new chief executive has been slammed by the Greens, who say the city doesn’t need one.
Brighton and Hove City Council has been without a permanent top officer since May, when Geoff Raw left for a new role in London.
This week, the council started advertising for the role, with a salary of between £180,000 and £190,000.
But Green councillor Chloë Goldsmith, the group’s spokesperson for equalities and workers’ rights, said that salary is far too high.
She said: “Greens don’t think the council needs a CEO. Disappointingly, the Labour leadership have missed an opportunity to explore different models, and instead opted for unnecessary expense and a corporate management model.”
Current interim chief executive Will Tuckley took over from former Mr Raw and will remain in post until a permanent appointment is made.
Council leader Bella Sankey said: “We have a huge task on our hands to achieve transformative change at Brighton and Hove City Council and deliver the high-quality services that our residents deserve and so, if we want to attract the best, we must pay an appropriate salary for the role.
“Senior local government roles command salaries that most people can only dream of.
“However, in setting the salary for this role we rightly carried out extensive research into the salaries of other comparable local authority chief executives to ensure we were being competitive.
“It was clear from this research that the existing salary was lower than nearly all comparable authorities.
“Being chief executive of Brighton and Hove City Council is an extremely important and demanding role.
“The person we appoint will be responsible for running a budget of around £1 billion and managing more than 4,000 staff.
They will also be accountable for delivering hundreds of services every day of the year to almost 300,000 residents, thousands of businesses and millions of visitors.
Finding a first-class chief executive who can deliver everything that it expected of them is vital to building a better Brighton and Hove.”
The closing date to apply is Friday 13 October, with interviews taking place in November and possibly December.
The role must be agreed at a meeting of the full council, which all 54 councillors are expected to attend, set to take place on Thursday 14 December.
That’s is right! Get J@son K!tk@t or M@c C@ff£rty in.
Perhaps the Greens want to bring in Jason i360 Kitkat as CE as he made such a good job as council leader!
But what ‘different model’ of management are they actually advocating?
Wait a minute….the Greens are worried about budgetary prudence?
Christ on a bike! They pished away so much taxpayer money on pointless vanity projects and cycling infrastructure. Stand up, cllr Davis!
Indeed, the irony of the statement is very much pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?
Greens moaning that having good management is money wasting…. anyone who believes that should walk south a couple of miles…
The salary is far too high for an average manager who’s just moving from one council to another without any real ability or intention of changing anything. Employ someone who’s business savvy and knows how to shake up an inert system to achieve results. Oh, and make the pay results based – lowish basic and a system of bonusses when targets are met. Next problem, is anyone capable of setting proper targets?
Average salary is about £170,000, so this isn’t too far off that. I don’t know what basis Chloe is basing her opinion on, but it just comes across as Greens being petty in defeat, again.
I like your idea of a lower base with larger target focused bonuses, I think that would incentive the role well. I think this administration is more than capable of setting targets, from my experience of them so far.
A lack of strategy does make it difficult to be proactive, and it will be good for this council to be able to move from reactionary firefighting and repairing the damage caused by the Green administration previous.
Of course the Greens know all about squandering expenses, an activity of which they have had plenty of experience.
You’re not wrong there Hendrik.
It is good to have an opposition that challenges things, but in this case the credentials of the opposition are, it must be said, somewhat tarnished. Funny how Labour rarely challenged the greens when it was the other way round. It is almost tlike they had a secret pact or something.
Be like other councils and share a chief executive ?
Brighton is a bit too big and has a lot of unique challenges. I’d personally would like a person fully devoted to the city, rather than splitting their time between several and getting a split amount of effectiveness.
The councils that share senior offices are neighbours and have the same set of functions.
Lewes and Eastbourne do for example but they are the same type of council. Ditto Adur and Worthing.
But Brighton has no such neighbours that are responsible for ALL local government functions where even considering charing a chief exec is possible.
Wage doesn’t matter as it isn’t their money they are spending as usual it’s the public’s
“People in greenhouses, shouldn’t throw stones.”