Management shake-up saves Arun taxpayers £600,000 per year

ARUN District Council’s streamlined management structure is saving council tax payers about £600,000 a year, according to chief executive Nigel Lynn.

Over the past four years, Arun’s senior management team has been reduced from 19 to 13, and the overall number of posts, counted as the equivalent of full-timers, has fallen from 465 to 363.

Mr Lynn sets out the savings and job cuts in a report to Arun’s overview select committee meeting on Tuesday.

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The new top management team, set up a year ago, is made up of a corporate management team of five, led by Mr Lynn, with the resources director/deputy chief executive Nigel Croad and three assistant directors, together with eight heads of service.

In his report, Mr Lynn says: “This revised structure now provides the leadership and capacity to focus on implementing the council’s agreed corporate priorities 2013-2017 and has saved around £100,000 during a challenging economic period and where public expectations of local government continue to increase despite dramatically reduced resources.”

Local government union Unison was consulted over the management reorganisation, Mr Lynn states.

His report recommends the committee to “note progress made on the new management structure and the positive effect on the council’s budget and staff posts”.

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Last July, Mr Lynn told the council the restructuring would “deliver a significant amount of savings to contribute towards the £2m-plus savings requires for the council’s 20134-14 budget”.

He added that the figures showed that resources were being switched to “frontline services, as opposed to senior management”.

When Mr Lynn joined as chief executive just over 18 months ago, his starting salary was £95,000, almost £25,000 less than the overall package paid to his predecessor Ian Sumnall, as councils like Arun began to tighten their belts and trim not just executive salaries, but the number of management posts, too.

Two weeks ago, the council agreed to increase Mr Lynn’s pay to £100,000 a year, backdated to October, following a review by a panel of councillors in February.

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Director of services Colin Rogers, like Mr Sumnall another long-serving chief officer, who also left in the past couple of years, was another boss on a six-figure salary.

In February last year, a meeting of the joint staff panel, bringing together management and councillors with employees, including union representatives, was told that the highest paid Arun officer in 2012-13 would be receiving a salary of £112,000 a year, just over three times the average pay of £31,327.