Sandwell Council has an incredible 72 Councillors - far too many, some say. There are 70 Labour Councillors and as all the decision making is made by the inner "cabinet" in cahoots with a few highly-paid officers there is very little for this lot to do. There are only around 7 full council meetings each year and one of those is the largely ceremonial "mayor-making" - which is followed by a knees-up!
Thus the multitude have to be given spurious jobs and positions, not only to justify their annual allowances but to get some extra "special responsibility" payments on top - important as a large number of the comrades are unemployed!
It is well known that the laughable "leader" and twitter troll is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and Hussain is, well, Mahboob. They seem to defer on all technical matters to Steve "Mr Rotherham" Eling who recently lied to the Express and Star about lost legal costs and spectacularly cocked-up the Council Tax Benefit scheme, costing Sandwell over £700,000.
Unfortunately, the collective skills possessed by the Labour Group (as above, many unemployed) appear woefully inadequate to assess complex financial decisions so that dodgy deals are simply forced through by those at the top - eg the multi-million pound, untendered, Public conversion "contract". There is no apparent scrutiny of this sort of thing at all. It is Labour tribalism of the very worst sort.
Thus we come to a tyro Councillor such as Joanne Hadley (unemployed) who has been placed on various Licensing Panels etc to justify extra moolah - and a lot of it. In the last year for which figures are available she received the normal attendance allowance of £10,619.04 but also scored a handsome £8,751.96 for "special responsibilities"!
In addition to committee work, the Politburo also placed her for a short while as a Director of Sandwell Homes Limited and she has also been placed as a Trustee of (multi-million pound budget) Sandwell Leisure Trust (sport being an area where, because "The Turdmeister" likes it, Labour are still spending like drunken sailors).
For once, however, Pooper S. Cooper seems to have made a most suitable choice as he leads the lemmings towards the edge of the financial cliff - Joanne Hadley being a former, er, bankrupt. She has been discharged but was declared bankrupt at Dudley County Court in 2008 (Matter 159 of 2008) following the failure of her florists. No doubt her experience of insolvency will come in very handy in the months to come which are going to be no bed of roses for the long-suffering folk of Sandwell.
(Special thanks to X for this info).
Don't forget the Police fraud team no: 0121 251 2175 - DS Wayne Haynes
THE SANDWELL SKIDDER - A COMMUNITY BLOG - READ THE SKIDDER, KIDDER!
E-mail: thesandwellskidder@gmail.com Twitter: @bcrover (Vernon Grant)
Confidential phone no: 07599 983737
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