Wednesday, 4th February, 2015
Bryn’s ‘mid-life crisis’
Pickles: Bryn’s Porsche money would have been better spent on ‘getting him professional help’
The following tip comes from a reader.
During a council tax question and answer session in Westminster on Monday, parliamentarians got the chance to grill the cabinet member for local government, Eric Pickles.
Crawley’s Tory MP, backbencher Henry Smith – and former leader of West Sussex County Council – asked:
“A recent TaxPayers’ Alliance study identified that the chief executive of Pembrokeshire council had a Porsche funded at a cost of some £90,000 and that, in Camden, £3.25 million had been spent on so-called gagging orders for employees who were leaving.
What more can be done to bear down on these unnecessary costs that burden the taxpayer?”
Well-padded Pickles dignified the reference to PCC’s indulgent ex-chief – and highlighted his own inability to have any influence in Wales due to devolution – with an inspired offering:
“Transparency is the order of the day. It is sad that the kind of information available to English taxpayers is not available to their Welsh counterparts.
With regard to Mr Bryn Parry Jones’s Porsche, if any chief executive puts in a Porsche as part of their terms of contract, I think that is a cry for help.
The chap is obviously suffering from a mid-life crisis, and the council would have been better spending money on getting him some professional help.”
❏The footage of this exchange will be available for the next month on BBC iPlayer. It starts at six and a half minutes into the video, at this link.
❏UPDATE 5TH FEB: The Pembrokeshire Herald has uploaded the clip to Facebook:
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You may well be right Mr Pickles. Lovely post Jacob.
I do hope that as many people as possible attend the public meetings arranged by PCC over the next few weeks. Surely the proposed rise of 4.5% in council tax that councillors have been asked to agree to and the salaries paid at County Hall will feature prominently in the debates.
Looking at the bigger picture here, the nation probably owes BPJ thanks for what he has done. As an analogy, consider the transformation of Japanese manufacturing. Their process of continuous improvement involved speeding up production lines to stress them until a weakness was exposed. Teams then focussed on engineering out the problems, and then cranked up the speed of the line to find the next point of weakness. And so the process continued.
BPJ (along with IPPG) has stressed our systems and exposed weaknesses in Local Government governance arrangements and brought them to national attention.
Readers of this blog may be interested in responding to the WG consultation released yesterday at http://wales.gov.uk/consultations/localgovernment/power-to-local-people/?lang=en
Clearly PCC’s antics have flavoured this document. Lots of opportunities to raise issues such as requiring an annual vote of confidence in Leaders, breaking the line of authority between Monitoring Officers and Chief Executives, Audit committee structure etc.
I suggest that readers of this blog get stuck into the consultation – the more representations there are the more likely changes might be considered.
Not a cry for help but an indication of his total disdain for the taxpayers of the county, aided and abetted by Jamie Adams and the self serving mongrels of the IPPG.
I sincerely hope it’s NOT a mid-life crisis.
If it is, BPJ could be drawing his hundred grand a year Local Government pension for the next sixty years or more!
When are the people who approved all BPJ’s perks going to be identified and shamed? And who was the other PCC employee who benefited from the pension scheme?
Pickles is a very apt name to describe the goings on at the Kremlin. Thank you Eric for imposing the one word I was looking for the last 16 months (if not longer)!
Welshman, they are called the (Independent) Group, and who indeed is the other one?
Can they legislate to stop SRAs being used as bribes? Despite all the bluster from the recipients and donor it’s quite plain that they are used as nothing but a payoff.
It just proves how easy it is to bribe a councillor and the lesson learned from that is they are not to be trusted.
I am sorry Flashbang but there is a genuine need for SRAs.
The problem arises out of the integrity of those given the positions and I am afraid that is down to the electorate who have deemed these people to be honourable. You say it is easy to bribe a councillor, that may be so, but an honourable person would not accept a bribe in whatever form it comes.
The county councillors have been elected by a majority of the electors in their wards and I am afraid we have to accept that is how our democracy works.
I note that the Welsh Assembly is calling for more women to be elected as county councillors but on the experience of Pembrokeshire, this may not be a good thing, considering two have jumped ship without any apology to their electorate.
Eric Pickles seems to know his onions…sorry I know it’s pathetic but I couldn’t resist it.
The IPPG were led to believe that they overpaid BPJ for years because he was worth it. Being mostly conservatives and businessmen when not IPPG, they deluded themselves that they needed to recruit talent to achieve results, very much as a business is run.
The fact is that a local authority is a bureaucracy, bound by complex rules to mostly administer services. We have a culture of bending the rules to achieve mostly financial targets.
BPJ was possibly having a mid-life crisis, but until the advent of televised council meetings, Pembs Herald and a growing number of individuals such as Jacob and Old Grumpy he was simply unaccountable for his actions. Successive council leaders took their own perks and let BPJ take his.
His position simply became untenable as more and more daylight permeated the hitherto dark recesses of his office. Rather than a mid-life crisis, he could have bought his own Porsche, it was simply his greed and arrogance became public knowledge. The Porsche was just simply stupid.
Malcolm Calver’s “genuine need for SRAs” is not always true – how many of these SRAs have been created in order to reward and provide inducements?
If indeed SRAs are appropriate, the system whereby those appointments are made by one man whose position is dependent on the support of those who are in receipt of the SRA he provides, is in conflict with any definition of democracy. Principle, decency fairness and integrity have given way to avarice, greed and power.
What’s gone on in our County Hall cannot by any stretch of the imagination be laid at the door of democracy.
When I put my X on the ballot paper, I have taken into account what the candidate has said and what he/she stands for. If subsequently he/she does not do as promised, I am stuck and stuffed until the next election date when a further attempt to con me comes along.
Having paid “the most for the best”, it must have come as a shock to the IPG faithful that the advice provided by professional well qualified officers may not have always been impartial and dare I say, correct in all respects.
In the same way that “the Council” regards budget reductions (including increased charges for services) as saving the council money, there does seem to be a culture whereby the council as a corporate body exists as a separate entity, to be defended at all costs and regarded as infallible.
Demonstrably, this ethos can no longer be sustained, and councillors must begin to question, challenge and scrutinise matters with a degree of applied common sense. Sadly this even includes legal advice that seems to be confused by the job description of “Chairman” and the associated roles and responsibilities of a “Chairman”. (Or was this a required effort to justify, or confuse, the issue over an action taken previously?)
The lowest council tax in Wales may not be sustainable in the future, and there has got to be a clear balance exposed between the income sought from council tax and from direct charges made for services.
How stands the strong corporate governance provided by the CEO and the Leader now? Has anyone any confidence left?