I AM sure we are all obliged to Councillor Barker for reassuring us that the departure of former chief executive John Burrows from the councils employ was for reasons solely to do with the management of the authority. The brevity of Mr. Burrows' sojourn amongst us is, like so many other council matters, something I know little about but would like to know more of since, as with other matters of local public concern, it is difficult to make sense of the few facts which our council is prepared to divulge about them. Since Councillor Barker is not inhibited by questions of privilege from discussing this particular issue he might care to offer us further reassurance on some of the puzzling aspects of it. For example, when Mr. Burrows was offered employment by our council, either the plan to reshuffle the management team had been conceived or it had not. If it had been, then, when it employed Mr. Burrows, the council could have told him of the plan and offered him a temporary contract until the date when his post was due to disappear so that we could have been spared the expense of his redundancy payment. Or the council could have kept the existence of the plan from Mr. Burrows until after his appointment. Of course if that had been done, once Mr. Burrows was in post, the news that his job was to vanish would have come as something of a shock and a compensatory payment might well have been called for.

Alternatively, if there was no such plan at the time of Mr. Burrows' appointment, that means that he must have spent a significant part of his brief time as Head of Service in the town hall presiding over a restructuring of posts which, inter alia, would do away with his own job - an odd thing for a man who had no thoughts of retirement to do. Or the plan must have been developed after his appointment but without his knowledge and participation.

So reassure us a little further, Councillor, do. Tell us what happened. Was the plan to reorder the management team in existence when Mr. Burrows was appointed? If so, was he told about it before his appointment? If he was, why did we have to pay him off? If he was not told, tell us why not. Or are we to believe that this career-officer really did arrange the abolition of his own highly-paid, prestigious and coveted job almost as soon as he had got it? Or did someone else do that for him? If so, please tell us who, and why Mr. Burrows, the council's most senior officer, was excluded from involvement in a plan in which he had so much professional and personal interest.

John Wilson Morecambe

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