Town hall admits: ‘We cut too many management jobs’

filled. The move comes two years after Children’s Services was put into special measures by the government.

Ms Meggs, currently Deputy Director of Children’s Services at Rotherham, will join Kirklees on a six-figure salary on December 3.

Initially she will work alongside Steve Walker, Director of Children’s Services at Leeds City Council, who was seconded to Kirklees in the wake of a damning Ofsted report.

That 38-page report, published in November 2016, said services for vulnerable children in Kirklees were “inadequate, due to serious widespread failures which result in some children not being protected or having their needs met.”

Other key appointments include Eamonn Croston as Kirklees’ S.151 officer to handle the proper administration of its affairs, Naz Parkar as Service Director for Planning and Housing Growth, and Angela Blake, who moves across from North East Lincolnshire Council to become Service Director for Economy and Regeneration.

Mrs Blake will take up her new job on January 24. It is understood the roles offer salaries between £85,000 and £98,615.

The temporary role of Strategic Director of Corporate Strategy will be made permanent and expanded to include Commissioning. That role is occupied by Rachel SpencerHenshall.

Ms Gedman says the new appointments take the council back towards a better level of delivery.

In 2010 the authority reduced its heads of service from seven to three.

It also drastically cut its assistant directors as part of a redundancy programme that saw its non-school workforce fall from 11,200 to 9,700 in the face of widespread spending reductions demanded by the government.

“We are still 30 per cent down on the figures that we started with back in 2010,” advised Ms Gedman.

“We had seven strategic directors at one point, and then all the assistant directors.

“My view was you could have reduced from seven but I think we cut too far. What I am trying to do now is put one back.”

She said other organisations had made cutbacks to their top teams but not as deeply as in Kirklees.

“Most – if they’ve reduced – have gone to four but they’ve not gone to three. Even at that stage it was pretty obvious that we’d probably done too much. And you could see that in the organisation in terms of the corporate strength. It wasn’t quite what it needed to be.

“We’ve complemented the team quite well and I’m confident that we’ve got the capacity because in regeneration we were struggling a bit.

“Hopefully when they come we’ll be full-on.”