Pickles 'Insulted' By Pooter Cockell

The Dame could not resist the temptation to share this from the Local Government Chronicle.
A target of Pickles's anger is his old friend Pooter Cockell. Pooter has told Pickles to s*d off as he has Soooo many staff earning more that £58k the task would be impossible. But then as he and Mr Myers are top of the list for big bucks earners it is not a great surprise!

Nobody Takes Me Seriously

The refusal of some councils to publish details of staff earning more than £58,200 a year is ‘insulting’, communities secretary Eric Pickles has claimed. Mr Pickles ordered councils to publish details of higher earning staff last year under a pay transparency drive.
But some council chiefs have refused to collate the lists, claiming that the costs of listing them would run into ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds’. Some councils also said staff safety could be at risk if the public knew how much employees earn, and claimed taxpayers lacked the ‘evaluation skills’ to decide whether such spending was good value for money.
Mr Pickles said the reasons were ‘not credible’.
‘It’s quite frankly insulting and not credible to say the public won’t understand spending data put online,’ Mr Pickles told The Daily Telegraph. ‘This is about a number of vested interests trying to dodge the sight of transparency and cover up their expenditure.’
‘You have to ask, what have they got to hide? The statutory code came into force in September but has been disregarded by a number of councils, which have only published the salaries of the topmost tier of management,’ he added.