‘Time for full story over CEO’S exit’

I WOULD like to alert your readers to yet another world-beating record from Staffordshire Moorlands District Council.

According to the Taxpayer Alliance’s Town Hall Rich List, former CEO Simon Baker claimed a whopping £38,043 in expenses for the financial year 2019-20.

That put him at the top of the receipts pile for the whole of the United Kingdom that year. We’re bigger than Birmingham and greater than Glasgow! This is the kind of distinction that we could live without in the Moorlands.

Admittedly, Baker’s expenses were shared between SMDC and High Peak Borough Council, where he was also CEO.

But super-exec though he may have been, there’s a limit to how many hotel rooms one man can stay in at any one time. Or make the bus trip between Leek and Glossop.

This shared role just cannot begin to explain Baker’s dab hand with the credit card.

Nor can it account for the stunning jump in his expenses from the previous year 2018-19, when

Baker scraped by on just £13,749 in expenses, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

That year turned out to be Baker’s last in his £200k+ job (he got a salary, too). In March 2020 he suddenly cleared his desk, shortly after his deputy Mary Walker had exited.

One year on, their hasty departure remains unexplained. One year on, the average wage in the UK stands at £36,000, less than Baker pocketed for cab fares, meals (or whatever) in his last year of pomp.

Surely, it is now time for Cllr

Sybil Ralphs to give all Moorlands residents the lowdown on this sorry story of lack of control at the very top of SMDC?

Laura Marcus Leek