“I don't know what else to say really”
“I don't know what else to say really”
Jon Rouse, Croydon Council's chief executive for almost six
years, has given his first ever in-depth local media interview. And now he's leaving.
He’s had a torrid time with the media – he always refused
to engage with them and at the end of his tenure threw reporters out from a
local meeting.
He recognised the importance of communications by recruiting
a very effective head of comms in house … but then appeared to leave him swinging
in the wind.
He started his career with an ill-advised ‘man in a suit
gets his hands dirty’ stint on the bins for the town hall magazine.
Now, in his farewell interview, he’s quoted apparently unedited
and verbatim. I wonder if that was the
deal Jon Rouse struck with the Croydon Advertiser.
The interview tells us almost nothing about the role of the Chief
Exec - an extraordinarily demanding one. It leaves Rouse stumbling for words when asked about his local
government-leaving salary of £177,000-248,000.
He rambles on about layers of management ending lamely, “I don't
know what else to say really," see final para.
And yet … he’s managed to cut a fair few middle managers
that seems to have had no effect on services, that saved £3m but led to a few
more £50k plus people. Croydon
Guardian
Crucially he doesn’t say, perhaps he wasn’t asked, why le’s
leaving top a less well-paid job in the civil service.
I particularly like this, clearly unedited, rationale for
the town hall salary structure:
"The difficulty is that you have a salary structure within an
organisation and in an organisation as complex as a local authority this size
clearly you've got quite a lot of layers and you have to create a certain
degree of space between those layers in salary terms. I think it's for others
to judge what a fair salary is. At the end of the day, I tried to recognise the
times we were in which is why I took voluntary reductions. I don't know what
else to say really."
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