Eric Pickles to urge councils to share chief executives

Jul 6 2010 by Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Post

Councils across Britain are being urged to save money by sharing chief executives.

Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles was today (Tuesday) calling on authorities to consider sharing one chief executive with their neighbours, after funding for his department was cut by another £220 million.

It comes on top of an earlier cut in local government spending of £780 million, which led to initial cuts in Birmingham City Council’s funding of £12.5 million.

Mr Pickles said council leaders could do some of the work currently carried out by chief executives.

And he called on authorities to save money by merging departments such as accounting, instead of cutting front line services.

Speaking to the Local Government Association annual conference in Bournemouth, Mr Pickles will say: “Is it really right, in this day and age, to have separate planning departments?  Lawyers?  Communications teams?

“Wouldn’t it be better if people were working together?

“That’s especially important for the highest levels and the most expensive people. 

“It’s obviously a bad week to raise things that Germany does better than us, but they’ve really got the idea in local government.

“Where they’ve ended up with chief executives and executive leaders doing more or less the same thing; they’ve flat out stopped it.”

He added: “Couldn’t chief execs bring more to the table by working across boundaries, rather than replicating what the leader should be doing?”

The Government cut spending by £6.2 billion within days of the May local election. However, Ministers announced in June that they had discovered a £1.5 billion black hole in the public finances.

Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander told the House of Commons he was cutting spending for local government by £220 million, for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills by £265 million, for the Home Office by £55 million.

Education funding will be cut by £1 billion, although the Department for Education insisted most of this would be funded “through better financial management and tighter controls”.