Headhunter to find council park chair

£18K SPENT TO FIND THE PERFECT CANDIDATE AFTER ADVERT FAILS TO DELIVER

CITY chiefs are spending £18,000 on a headhunter after failing to find a leader for a pioneering charity trust that will run Newcastle’s parks.

Council bosses have yet to appoint a chair for the Newcastle Parks Charitable Trust’s board, more than three months after the top job was advertised.

It has now been revealed that a headhunter has been appointed to recruit a chair, as well as a chief executive, for the trust – which will control 32 parks and more than 60 allotment sites in the city.

A £10,000 salary could also be offered as an incentive for the chair’s role, which was meant to be a volunteer position. The chief executive will be paid around £70,000 a year.

Tony Durcan, Newcastle City Council’s assistant director of transformation, told an overview and scrutiny committee meeting: “We had an initial advert for chair and trustees, and we only had four applicants for chair.

“We interviewed them all but felt we were not able to appoint.

“We had some strong candidates, but this is quite a unique position.”

After confirming a headhunter had been appointed at a cost of £18,000, he added: “That is why we placed our own advert first. Sometimes you find that you can appoint someone without having to go to a headhunter.”

Newcastle is the first major metropolitan authority in the UK to hand over its parks and allotment sites to an independent charitable trust, after its parks budget was slashed by 91 per cent from £2.58million in 2010/11 to less than £1million last year.

The council is spending an initial £9.5million to set up the trust, but council officers insist it should become self-sustaining after 10 years, saving up to £110million.

It has successfully recruited nine of the 10 trustee roles advertised in January, though the identities of the trustees have not been revealed.

Mr Durcan said that they include a lawyer, an academic, and businesspeople, adding that there is a ‘good’ gender mix and disability representation.

However, he confirmed that no black, Asian and minority ethnic trustees have been appointed, despite the council working ‘really, really hard.’

He added: “We had a really good response to the trustee advert, the big challenge there was who to turn away. “We could have had a board of 30.” It is hoped that the trust, which will be able to secure new sources of funding not available to a directly council-run organisation, will be up and running between January and April next year.