Why short-change our business leaders while we give £millions to footballers?
DERBYSHIRE County Council recently announced it was on the hunt for a new “managing director” and that his or her salary would set the taxpayer back up to £176,000 per year.
And this has made lots of people very cross. But not me.
Of course, it’s a huge amount of money being paid out at a time when all local authorities are having to scrape pennies together to empty our bins and fix our potholes, but one has to remember that running a local authority isn’t exactly menial work.
How much should a council big cheese get paid then? £20,000? £35,000? £60,000? Where is the line drawn between too much money being spent, and not enough being spent?
Personally, as much as we might not like the idea that councils spend huge amounts on their top brass, I think sometimes they’re not spending enough.
The boss of Severn Trent, Liv Garfield, reportedly trousers an annual basic salary of £674,000. It might seem a shocking amount, but here’s a boss who’s built up a CV impressive enough to put her in charge of the water supply for 8 million people. It’s a pretty big responsibility, so I think she fully deserves a pretty big salary.
And if Mrs Garfield is capable of maintaining Severn Trent’s success, and turning over the best part of £2 billion, then someone of her ability might be the ideal person to take on a top role in a local authority. It could transform Derbyshire County Council’s fortunes to have someone with such a keen eye for business.
But I doubt Mrs Garfield would be interested in a salary more than three times smaller than the one she’s on now. And, likewise, I can’t see Derbyshire County Council altering the pay scale to lure her into the managing director’s chair.
And here’s the rub. If you’re going to employ the right person, the person with the best possible chance of running a successful local authority, you need to be offering an attractive package.
Former chief executives who have a track record of transforming ailing companies would be ideal for our local county council. Quality leadership comes at a price. There’s an idiom about monkeys and peanuts I could drop in here, but that’s already obvious.
And I think this philosophy also carries over to charities. People might recoil in horror to know that the chief executive of Cancer Research UK takes home a basic salary of nearly a quarter of a million pounds. Apparently, the highest earner in the global health charity Wellcome Trust will be earning £3.18 million this year.
But charities need strong leaders. While they rely on volunteers to act as their backbone, they need to have the best possible brain at the top of the structure. And you can only get the best possible brain on the job if you attract them with a decent income.
These days, £176,000 a year is not an obscenely large salary. It’s probably about a quarter of what a professional footballer earns in a week.
So I won’t be joining the chorus in judging Derbyshire County Council for offering up an attractive package for its new top boss. I’d judge them if they employed someone who didn’t deserve such a healthy sum but, thankfully, offering the sort of money a successful leader will be used to earning should give them plenty of choice.
As we might not like the idea that councils spend huge amounts on their top brass, I think sometimes they’re not spending enough.