£100,000 cost of town hall humbug

The new, incoming self-run local authority does not want him as boss. It dumped him last May and gave the £80,000-a-year job to his deputy Phil Watson.

Mr Watson formally takes charge tomorrow. And Mr Davies?

Amazingly, he will still be at the town hall - as he has been since May in a highly invidious position while the council has, in effect, had two chief executives rather than one.

Now, he has been given the option of carrying on. Notionally, he will continue to run "old" authority until the end of March while Mr Watson runs the new one. More likely, he will be twiddling his thumbs.

This is, of course, a farce. A somewhat bitter one for the ousted Mr Davies.

But a darned unfunny one for the council tax payers who get a bill of around £100,000 for it. For today we have the council's political leaders, who have worked out this bizarre and expensive go-but-stay deal, praising him to the hilt and paying tribute to the work he did to help Blackburn with Darwen win the unitary status that, in turn, prompted them to give him the heave-ho.

What hollow humbug! If he was so wonderful, why replace him?

Yet, having done that, why now allow one chief executive to take over and ask the present one to continue for another six months?

And look at the cost of all this. Mr Davies carries on being paid his salary until the end of March; he collects a redundancy payment of £60,000 to £70,000 - and a bizarre "legal costs" bonus of £5,000 to, in effect, stop him suing for losing his job.

Would such a ludicrous situation occur in the private sector? We think not.

Then why should it happen in the public sector?

The council leaders made a mess when they allowed the silly two-bosses-at-once state of affairs to occur. Now, they are making it worse and playing with public money in order to do so.

Ridiculous!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.