The scandal of council worker salaries that no political party wants to address ahead of the UK local elections on 7 May
can't be bothered? - just continue to overpay your local council for grift, ignorance and incompetence. HEY, you have a vote coming up - ASK your politicians some hard questions.
Let’s use Staffordshire Council as an example – using Brave AI as the source of the information.
Staffordshire County Council serves a non-metropolitan county with a population of 907,153 (2024) across an area of 2,620 km² (1,010 sq mi), making it the 11th largest county council by area and 9th by population in England.
The council is governed by 62 councillors representing 60 electoral divisions, with a cabinet of 10 members elected from the majority party, currently Reform UK following the May 2025 election. It operates alongside eight district councils (including Stoke-on-Trent as a unitary authority) within the wider ceremonial county, which has a total population of 1,177,578.
A county with a population of around a million people.
The job title of the highest-earning Staffordshire Council employee, who received £457,500 in the 2024-25 financial year, has not been disclosed.
According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List, the individual was subject to a non-disclosure agreement, and the council stated that the figure did not relate to a standard officer’s salary. The report confirmed this was the highest remuneration paid to any council worker in the UK for that year, but neither the name nor the specific job title was provided.
Not only is the name of the joker earning close to half a million pounds a year not public, the job title is also a secret!
Democracy in action – NOT!!!
That’s not all – of course it isn’t – there is some -dated disclosure:
The second-highest earner at the council was Chief Executive Patrick Flaherty, who was paid £263,544 during the same period. In total, Staffordshire Council paid six-figure packages to 17 officials, costing nearly £2.9 million, with four of them earning over £200,000.
Other notable high earners within the West Midlands region during this period included:
Walsall Council Chief Executive Emma Bennett: £235,629
Wolverhampton Council Executive Director of Pensions Rachel Brothwood: £195,803
Dudley Council former CEO Kevin O’Keefe: £207,000 (including an £80,000 severance payout)
Sandwell Council Chief Executive Shokat Lal: £201,566
These figures were revealed in the TaxPayers’ Alliance 2026 Town Hall Rich List, which reported that 4,733 council staff across the UK earned over £100,000 in total remuneration.
There ought to be considerable support for merging those 4 councils and eliminating the duplicated roles -but no.
England is undergoing a major local government reorganisation to replace the two-tier system of county and district councils with single-tier unitary authorities, a process set to be completed by 1 April 2028.
The next major local council elections in the UK are scheduled for Thursday 7 May 2026, covering 5,014 council seats across 136 English local authorities, including all 32 London boroughs, 32 metropolitan boroughs, 18 unitary authorities, 6 county councils, and 48 district councils.
No, the councils are not being merged into a single entity. While Sandwell, Dudley, Wolverhampton, and Walsall have explored sharing services and collaborating on specific departments like IT, legal services, and trading standards to save money, no decisions have been made to formally merge the four authorities.
Staffordshire is not the only council vastly overpaying its staff.
Enter Westminster:
In the 2024-25 financial year, Westminster City Council employed 92 staff members earning over £100,000, the highest number of any council in the UK. However, the specific names and exact remuneration figures for the highest-paid individuals at Westminster are not disclosed in the available 2026 Town Hall Rich List data, which only highlights national leaders like a Staffordshire Council employee earning £457,500.
While individual Westminster names are redacted, the council is noted for having 15 staff members earning more than Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s salary entitlement of £172,153. This represents a twelve-fold increase from 2005-06, when only seven employees earned over six figures.
To repeat -Westminster had 92 staff on £100k+, compared to 73 in 2025 and just 7 in 2005-06.
The Labour Party currently runs the Westminster City Council, having secured a majority for the first time in the council’s history following the May 2022 election. Political Shift:
This marked the end of 58 years of continuous Conservative control, which lasted from the council’s formation in 1965 until 2022.
Here is some more information o the consequences of h appallingly run local councils in the UK, that NO political party will campaign on to win those May local elections because they are all incapable of solving teh problems created by a self-perpetuating bureaucratic swamp that pays itself huge salaries for teams of people ha desig the gordian knots of local bureaucracy.
Try sifting through the ‘transparent annual accounts for all the ‘complexities’:
https://www.westminsterco.gov/DocumentCenter/View/5535/2026-Adopted-Budget_Oct-2025_000
All this is funded by increases I local authority rates or by borrowing.
These examples f local authority corruption by bureaucrats are replicated throughout the world from South Australia, through the US, Germany, Italy, and Spain etc.
Some one neds to look a what they are paying and why.
Local taxes could be reduced by a least 75% if the grift was excised?!?
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