Being fourth in the queue will deny Northumberland the strong Chief Executive it wants, needs and deserves.

 

The Max Caller report on the disastrous state of Tory Governance at County Hall in Morpeth and his demands for new Leadership and Management in top office brings out the question of who will we as residents get after a tiny glimpse of what's been going on since May 2017 has been exposed to public scrutiny.

His report doesn’t quite shed light on how bad it's been, with Councillors believing they are the officers of the Council and staff fighting back. His new governance report replaces the model written and promoted by the Current Leader of Council in 2021 Glen Sanderson, which apparently was just as bad as the Peter Jackson version introduced by the Tories on their election into office in 2017 if two Tory leaders can’t get it right then a new Leader needs to be sought who isn’t a freemason and can handle the pressures of bringing all parties together to resolve the needs of the electorate.

Then we need to ask who or even how will they get the right Chief Executive into office when we have four Unitary Councils now vying for top bods with two of them as actual neighbours of Northumberland.

Somerset has come out as the top job for the top person offering a starting salary of around £200,000 way above the level of pay Councillors Wearmouth and Sanderson want to pay in Northumberland as they whinged at their now forced out CEO’s pay all of the time. 

Then our neighbours are next, Cumberland and Westmorland & Furness with newly elected Councillors talking about ‘Total Package Costs’ and not just
wages, being well over a quarter of a million pound per year, leaving Northumberland’s dodgy one party cabinet with the dilemma of upsetting Conservatives who are also taxpayers alliance members or going for a second rate CEO who has an olympic gold in a martial art or who holds a lonsdale belt to be able to fight their own corner and knock back the urges for power of the Morpeth Mob.

What a dilemma!