{"id":113,"date":"2011-02-20T19:25:52","date_gmt":"2011-02-20T19:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/?p=113"},"modified":"2011-03-17T17:28:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-17T17:28:02","slug":"the-south-somerset-jackpot-1-3-million-shared-by-3-senior-officers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/?p=113","title":{"rendered":"The South Somerset Jackpot &#8211; \u00a31.3 million shared by 3 senior officers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/files\/2011\/02\/Fatcat.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"119\" data-permalink=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/?attachment_id=119\" data-orig-file=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/files\/2011\/02\/Fatcat.png\" data-orig-size=\"235,192\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fatcat\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/files\/2011\/02\/Fatcat.png\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-119\" src=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/files\/2011\/02\/Fatcat.png\" alt=\"Fat cat\" width=\"235\" height=\"192\" \/><\/a>It normally takes a mass murder to get a minor rural area like South Somerset in the headlines, but this weekend our beloved Council ( Band D: \u00a31449.47 per year) hit the jackpot with the front page and an inside story in the<em> Telegraph<\/em>. The essential facts:\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0Phil Dolan trousered \u00a3569,000 of Council Taxpayers\u2019 money after voluntarily leaving his post as Chief Executive of SSDC after just 6 years- \u00a3157,000 for salary, a redundancy payment of \u00a3167,000 and a lovely pension top up of \u00a3239,000. Breathtaking.\u00a0 He is quoted in the\u00a0 Daily Telegraph \u201cThere are no fat cat golden handshakes\u201d. So that&#8217;s all right then.<\/li>\n<li>Corporate Director Mark Pollock earned \u00a352,000 for seven months\u2019 work, plus \u00a3112,000 for loss of office, and \u00a3164,000 for his pension fund.<\/li>\n<li>David Stapleton was paid \u00a356,000 for 8 months\u2019 work, plus \u00a3121,000 for loss of office and \u00a3131,000 for pension contributions.The total, \u00a31.2 million, is not far short of the \u00a31.35 million Somerset County Council achieved by reducing library opening hours . Or, to put it another way, 827 band D householders \u2013 say the populations of Horsington and South, possibly North Cheriton &#8211; coughed up their entire council tax for these guys.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Phil Dolan, no doubt exhausted, has taken early retirement. The other two, one of whose jobs was to liaise with Somerset County Council on the Hinkley Point power station (no we don\u2019t believe it either), and the other was in charge of \u201chealth and wellbeing\u201d (we thought the NHS did that), have both gone on to lucrative employment in the local government mafia of quangoes, talkshops and consultancies.<\/p>\n<p>In its defence, the council states \u201cThis restructure involved a reduction in staff from having a Chief Executive and four Corporate Directors to having a shared Chief Executive and two directors.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe departure of the former CEO and the 2 Directors, who were all made redundant, has helped facilitate annual savings of \u00a3431k per annum. It is normal practice and a legal requirement in both the public and the private sector for senior executives to receive payment for their loss of employment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All very well, but it begs the question of why were at least two of these people were paid so much in the first place for what look like non jobs, already duplicated by the work of\u00a0 other agencies?<\/p>\n<p>And did any of our elected councillors speak out about the poor value for money these roles represented or their severance terms?\u00a0Or were they too busy?<\/p>\n<p>How many other publicly-funded non jobsworths\u00a0are lurking in the undergrowth\u00a0at SSDC or SCC?<br \/>\n<em>Tell us. <a href=\"mailto:editor@idnet.com\">Email the editor<\/a> with your story. In total confidence, of course<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/newstopics\/politics\/8334915\/The-council-fat-cat-earning-570000.html\" target=\"_blank\">More information here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It normally takes a mass murder to get a minor rural area like South Somerset in the headlines, but this weekend our beloved Council ( Band D: \u00a31449.47 per year) hit the jackpot with the front page and an inside story in the Telegraph. The essential facts:\u00a0 \u00a0Phil Dolan trousered \u00a3569,000 of Council Taxpayers\u2019 money &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/?p=113\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The South Somerset Jackpot &#8211; \u00a31.3 million shared by 3 senior officers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2757],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6glYD-1P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/horsington.blog2.idnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}