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Council's Chief Executive earns £174,000

Date published: 03 September 2010

Rochdale Council’s Chief Executive earns £174,000, according to figures published by the GMB trade union.

In a table of the most recent published accounts of local councils it was shown that Rochdale’s Roger Ellis earns £174,000, including pension contributions.

The highest paid council boss in the North West is Colin Hilton of Liverpool City Council, who earned £278,714 in 2009/10. Cumbria’s Peter Stybelski earned the most, taking £464,114, although over £350,000 came from pension contributions.

Paul McCarty, GMB Regional Secretary said: “Council workers will be sickened to learn how much their bosses are creaming off and the levels of their bosses pay. This is at a time when councils say they are hard up and are slashing jobs and services while telling staff to put up with a pay freeze. These same chief executives have had the gall to say their lowest paid workers will not get any pay rise this year.

“I can’t believe that the council chief executives salaries have got so high with no obvious logic to explain this. You have to ask what our elected councilors are doing, voting through such obscene remuneration packages.

“To GMB members the real point is the difference between how those at the top treat themselves compared to what they impose on those on the front line. There are good chief executives who deserve a decent salary for running multibillion pound authorities but there are also hundreds of thousands of care assistants, school dinner ladies, refuse staff, social workers, classroom assistants, and street cleaners who also deserve decent pay, not the pittance they are on. There has to be restraint at the top combined with fairness at the bottom and there is no point having one without the other.”

Comments

I feel sick to the stomach that we actually pay Mr Ellis anything at all. This is the man that has let Rochdale slip into the seventh level of hell that it is now with ridiculous road schemes, the sale and privatisation of almost anything and anybody that isn't concreted down, and we won't even mention the farce that is the town centre redevelopment scheme.

Meanwhile dedicated members of staff from crucial services are paid peanuts and are made to feel grateful they still have a job while work mates get the elbow.
Something is very wrong when this guy is paid so much money to do a bad job.

Ah!, I see it all makes sense now!
That's WHY RMBC's online petition site requires 3000 votes from us lesser mortals for legitimate local issues to be discussed at Rochdale Town Hall Full Cabinet, whilst David Cameron's, No 10 Downing Street petition site considers anything over 500 signatures "worthy of consideration". The Prime Minister's time is cheap compared to RMBC's Chief Exec - some of us just thought they'd just got delusions of grandeur and their own elitist local self importance.

Can we expect him to be forwarding future all expenses paid trip to Kajima Corporation Ltd in Japan shortly too? One wonders if he'll be commenting on their parent company's alleged past during the second world war, or their well documented scandals in Japan and the US in the 1990s? Surely someone so well paid will have a public view on this and will have done his well paid hours of research on this potential scandal.

My only grumble about Roger Ellis is not the amount of salary he gets, it is his employers who are to blame. They offered him the position of Chief Executive. If I had applied for the job and been successful, I wouldn't have said that salary is too much. Surely he was employed to do a particular job. If those in control thought he was doing an excellent job, they should have been removed.

Can anyone actually and specifically tell us all exactly what Mr Ellis does to justify £174,000 per annum?

Councillors voted to raise his wage by over 50% over five years and he pushes through free phones, computers and expenses rises for the councillors. One hand washes the other.

Will Mr Ellis be contributing to the cost of work done on Drake Street over the past few days out of his obscene wages. It's very fortunate that the 'renovations' to along Drake Street coincides with the timing and route of the bike race on Saturday. How can he justify spending thousands on a long neglected thoroughfare for Rochdale's 'two minutes of fame' on a fourth rate TV channel? I am sure many of the council workers facing the chop in the near future would welcome his comments.