Blackpool top earners

Reacting to the report, Matthew Sinclair, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Taxpayers are still paying far too much for bloated bureaucracies that have been established in too many town halls over the last decade. It is incredible that some councils have even increased spending on high earning staff this year after a decade in which council tax doubled across the country and when every local authority needs to find savings and ease the burden. In those cases where it is the result of redundancy payments then we need to see the savings soon. Councillors need to insist that their local authority does more to find savings and cut back on staff costs that residents cannot afford.”

 Councils must cut spending and should look at pay – one of the biggest items of expenditure – as an area for savings. Previous TaxPayers’ Alliance research showed that over the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of local authority staff with remuneration of more than £50,000 had increased more than three times as quickly as in the private sector. In 1996-97, the average local authority employed 7 people earning more than £50,000. This number rose to 20 by 2001-02 and again to 66 in 2006-07. In 2011-12, the number of people earning more than £50,000 was 71 – more than before the financial crisis.This research note looks at the progress being made by every local authority in the UK in slimming down bureaucracy. Overall, the total salary bill for officers earning £50,000 or more at local authorities fell by £270 million last year – a reduction of just over 12 per cent. But some of that reduction is accounted for by the large number of redundancy