Elliot Keck: A record-breaking 3,906 council employees are earning over £100,000

Elliot Keck is the Head of Campaigns for the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

There is a very interesting contrast between Labour’s approach to bureaucrats nationally and locally. When they first came to office, ministers bent over backwards to demonstrate their devotion to the public sector. Without a single condition attached, they handed out billions of pounds worth of pay rises and insulated the sector from the national insurance rise on employers.

Since then relations have grown frosty. Ministers have recognised what their Conservative predecessors long ago did, but did too little about: levers are pulled, and nothing happens. Since then we’ve had a succession of announcements about creating a leaner, more focused, more effective bureaucracy, particularly in Whitehall.

None of this has been seen in Labour’s relationship with local government. They handed them a handsome funding settlement, rubber-stamped above council tax referendum caps, and then told them to crack on.

That may need to change. The TaxPayers’ Alliance’s 19th annual town hall rich list is a marmalade-dropper. A record-breaking 3,906 council employees received over £100,000 in remuneration in 2023-24, the latest financial year for which we have comprehensive data. This is up by over 800 from the 2024 edition. What are taxpayers getting from all this extra muscle? How about hare-brained proposals to reduce the frequency of bin collections?

But first, before delving into the gory details, some points about the purpose of this list, and how we produce the data. The critical point is that this is the only comprehensive list of its kind with a council-by-council breakdown of local government executive pay deals. This is a crucial part of lifting the lid on what happens in government, in particular local government. While all this data is publicly accessible, it is usually buried in council accounts and often presented counter-intuitively. It’s not as simple as typing your council into a dataset.

It’s also important to note for the uninitiated that we use remuneration, not just salary. The former includes the latter, but also any exit payments, expenses, bonuses, and their (almost certainly) gold-plated pension. We do this to reflect their actual cost to taxpayers, which necessarily incorporates all these elements.

Now we are not in a position to judge each and every employee on this list – there are thousands of them and just a few of us. That’s up to local residents. There are few things that can be said, however.

Firstly, the size of the increase is striking. While some of this can be explained by the significant improvement in the status of local authority auditing (a rare good news story from the sector) even accounting for this, the increase is significant. The biggest percentage increases have been in the categories over £150,000 – a 32 per cent increase to 1,092 – and over £200,000 – a 50 per cent increase to 262. This strongly suggests significant pay hikes for senior staff in town halls up and down the country, despite the fact that by 2023-24 inflation had receded as a problem. We are almost certainly looking at the top brass benefitting from real terms bumps in wages, as well as juicier pension contributions.

Secondly, the really big pay packets, usually made up in large part by significant golden goodbyes, are not quite as eye-catching as previous years. Two employees – in Castle Point and Glasgow – received over £500,000 and £600,000 in remuneration in 2023-24. A further employee in Brighton received between £400,000 and £500,000. But that doesn’t compare to the £651,000 received by Hampshire’s Felicity Roe in 2022-23, plus the seven additional town hall bosses who received over £400,000. There may be no trend here, or perhaps town halls have got slightly better at restraining some of the biggest exit packages.

The final point that should really strike anyone going through the list is how stark the contrast is with the language coming from councils and their industry representatives over the last year, as well as the budgetary decisions they have been making in terms of services. Search almost any council in this list along with the term “cuts to services” and there will be numerous articles detailing changes to bin collections, grass-cutting, street lighting, park opening times, library hours and so on.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that far too many of these town hall bosses are simply not delivering. If the Conservatives are to get into power, they need to identify ways to transform the culture in town halls that so often rewards mediocrity and failure. Critically, regulations should be strengthened so that all senior job vacancies are advertised externally. Reforms to local government pension schemes should be looked at, including a shift to defined contribution schemes for all new employees. A cap, of say £95,000, should be placed on exit packages. And where a council declares a section 114 notice, or only avoids it due to an injection of funding from central government, any senior staff departing as a result should be restricted from working in another town hall for an extended period of time. Removing failing bosses from their positions should also be made much easier.

A job of this seniority and remuneration should be an insecure one, as uncomfortable as it may be to say so. There should be genuine fear of failure. Local government is too often seen as a place for the mediocre and indolent to escape the high-pressure environment of other sectors. It’s not enough for them to appear on our annual town hall rich list. They need to be told to buck up, or be shown the door.