Tag Archives: Jan Ormondroyd

WHACKO JOINS THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

The appointment of North Somerset Council boss, Mike “BILLIE JEAN” Jackson, as Executive Director: Resources and Head of Paid Service on £165k a year at Bristol City Council continues the merry-go-round of big wages, changing job titles and eye-watering pay-offs for poor performance at the top of the council.

This leadership farrago really gathered steam in the summer of 2012 when the Bradford Sun Queen, Chief Executive Jan Ormondroyd on a cool £190k a year, JUMPED SHIP after trying and failing to rig the outcome of the Town Green application at Ashton Vale in favour off Bristol City FC. The Sun Queen “TOOK EARLY RETIREMENT”, scooping a £50k pay-out as the door slammed on her way out.

In the autumn of 2012 Mayor Old Fool arrived in the hot seat and immediately decided that the big problem with the top job at Bristol City Council was its NAME! So the great leader scrapped the Chief Executive post and introduced a CITY DIRECTOR instead.

Step forward Nicola “Lady Gaga” Yates who swanned into this new role from Hull in 2013 scooping a generous £192k a year through various salary enhancements we weren’t told about. By 2016, she had departed IN DISGRACE with a £200k pay-out when a £30million hole emerged in the council’s budget.

Now, with the Reverend was at the helm, he decided the problem was, er … the JOB TITLE! So, in early 2017, he appointed Anna “Big Wedge” Klonowski as Chief Executive on £160k a year. SIX MONTHS later she departed with a controversial £70k pay off, currently being investigated by the council’s auditors.

This brings us to new boy “Whacko” Jackson. He arrives with yet another NEW JOB TITLE and the usual bollocks from the mayor and his patsy HR Committee of councillors insisting we must pay top dollar to get the skills they need. Although which of Ormondroyd, Yates and Klonowski was in any way a success or value for money?

£320k in SIX YEARS spent on pay-offs o council top bosses? That’s over £50k every year just to get rid of the last liability

So how much will Billie Jean really cost us?

SWANKY OFFICE WATCH

George buys 100 Temple Street for a bargain £18 million

The current multi-million pound refurbishment of the Counts Louse will include the THIRD refurbishment of the building’s third floor management suite for profligate twats on six-figure salaries in SIX YEARS!

In 2009 former Chief Exec JAN ORMONDROYD spent a six figure sum refurbishing her office suite in the regal style with purple carpeting, bullet proof glass and the legendary strategic leadership fridge.

Then last year, new Chief Exec Nicola “LADY GAGA” Yates spent a load of money on furniture and IT kit to stamp her personal style on the third floor. Indeed, she even threw a tantrum and fired the council’s Workplace Programme Manager, GRAHAM SKINNER when her new furniture didn’t arrive on time and thus putting a £60m project into chaos!

Now, in this age of austerity, more money is being spent refurbing the management suite all over again! This time to create an ‘AGILE WORKSPACE‘ we’re told.

Let’s just hope when we get a new mayor next year they like the results or, no doubt, we’ll be forking out another six figure sum for new carpets, soft furnishings and an a la mode mayoral cappuccino machine!

PAYOFFS TO FAILED COUNCIL MANAGERS NOW TOTAL NEARLY £900K!

The BRISTOLIAN has learned that in the last year the city’s council taxpayers have doled out an astonishing £875,000 to council leaders for leaving! That’s OVER HALF A MILLION QUID going to failed service directors, and MORE THAN £300K being forked out for two former council bosses to put their feet up at home!

Jan Ormondroyd: doesn't badly run councils for free, you know

Jan Ormondroyd: doesn’t badly run councils for free, you know

First up, Bristol’s former Chief Exec THE BRADFORD SUN QUEEN, Jan Ormondroyd. She mysteriously ‘quit’ in a bit of a hurry in July 2012 and was handed a SECRET CASH HANDOUT in of around £50k in pay for work she never did – a figure way beyond any redundancy entitlement for a post that wasn’t redundant anyway.

The 57 year old was also given a whopping pension enhancement that saw Bristolians stumping up a further £135k or so. So the total bill to the council taxpayer for the SUN QUEEN to sit at home retired is not far short of £200k.

Stephen McNamara - no wonder he's smiling with a six figure payout from YOU!

Stephen McNamara: with a six figure payout courtesy of YOU, no wonder he’s smiling

Former legal boss, STEPHEN ‘LYCRA’ MCNAMARA followed the SUN QUEEN out the back door last Christmas. Having reinterpreted the law to suit the city’s richest man Steve (“Tax is for the little people”) Lansdown and landed Bristol with an expensive and UNDEFENDABLE JUDICIAL REVIEW into the ASHTON VALE Town Green, Lycra was considered surplus to requirements – and allegedly made redundant. Although, strangely, the post of Chief Legal Officer and Monitoring Officer, Lycra’s old job, still appears to exist and is not redundant at all.

To ease 55 year old Lycra on his way, he was “retired” and given a pension enhancement worth around £60k, three months pay worth around £14k per month, and a further £40k in “COMPENSATION FOR LOSS OF OFFICE”. Of course, Lycra thinks he’s too good for B&Q, so he has a tasty post-retirement ‘consultancy’ with expensive law firm Veale Wasbrough Vizards – best known for (have we mentioned this before?) representing a Catholic private school facing a paedo priest scandal.

The BRISTOLIAN can also reveal that another FIVE council managers, all on six figure salaries, last year shared “exit packages” worth £548K – that’s almost £110k each!!! Obviously all these payments massively exceed pay outs available through the redundancy policy created by Ormondroyd herself to, erm, prevent “excessive pay outs to top managers”.

Perhaps Ormondroyd’s redundancy policy – like taxation, in the opinion of McNamara’s chum Lansdown – only applies to “THE LITTLE PEOPLE”?

Welcome to austerity – Bristol style.

MASSIVE PAYOUTS! MASSIVE CUTS! MASSIVE BELLENDS! …PLUS SOME GOOD NEWS TOO IN THE LATEST EDITION OF ‘THE BRISTOLIAN’!

The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 - coverOctober’s edition of The BRISTOLIAN is another PACKED ISSUE, featuring…

» NEARLY £900k IN PAYOFFS TO CRAP COUNCIL BOSSES!
Ex-Chief Executive and six Directors squeeze almost a million quid out of us

» FAT CAT GAGA’S DOSH SENSATION!
Second choice ‘City Director’ Nicola Yates’s well-funded departure from Hull

» GARGAN GETS FEAR OVER INTERNET PROFILE PIC!
Avon & Somerset Police’s Arch-Druid Nick Gargan confuses fictional copper for real thing

» INDYREDPANTS MAN AND THE AFFAIR OF THE ACCIDENTAL WORKFARE
PR guru Oliver Mochizuki fails to silence concerns over festival’s forced labour ‘volunteers’

» LABOUR’S NON-MAYOR: REES-KING RIDICULE?
Failed Shitty Hall candidate Marvin Rees shamelessly puts himself in same category as MLK

» HAVE A KITCAT? BREAK A STRIKE
Councillor Telford and Mayor Ferguson get chummy with Brighton’s binman-hating council boss

PLUS: NEWS IN BRIEF!!!

» BRISTOLIAN BITES
Tantalising titbits including…

  • MERCHANT VENTURER LANDGRABhow Fergo’s pals want your libraries and parks!
  • CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST who does John Hirst remind us of?
  • CABINET KNOWS BESThow Council leaders think they have nothing to learn

» VICTORY NEWS
Positive stories from across the city!

  • V FOR VALERIANpressure from The BRISTOLIAN helps trapped residents
  • ALLOTMENTS SAVED – Lynmouth Road gardeners don’t lose the plot
  • BLACKLISTERS IN RETREATsafety-hating construction companies on back foot

PLUS: COMMENT!!!

» BRISTOL’S BROKEN DEMOCRACY?
Outgoing Finance boss Peter Robinson leaves a ‘Zero Budget’ shit-in-a-box for Mayor Fergo

» TOWN GREENS: LATEST
Why you can’t trust councillors to do the right thing

PLUS: NEW D.I.Y GUIDES!!!

» TOP TIPS TO BEAT THE BEDROOM TAX!
Practical lawyer’s advice on how to survive the ‘Spare Room Subsidy’

Blimey! And all that for FREE!

See the Distribution page for your local stockist – and if there isn’t one near you, let us know!

CAN’T WAIT TO GET HOLD OF A PAPER COPY?

Then you can DOWNLOAD a PDF version here:

» The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 – October 2013

THE (E)X-BOSS FILES #2 – ‘MAD’ HOUSE IN PRIVATE SECTOR!

The (E)X Boss Files

News comes in that our old friend ex-copper JON ‘MAD’ HOUSE has fucked up again. House, you might recall, briefly pitched up in Bristol at the height of the profligate Council House reign of gag-happy Bradford Sun Queen Jan Ormondroyd, when she anointed him as her Deputy Chief Exec on a ridiculous six-figure salary to play a DAFT TOUGH GUY enforcer role.

Alas, all Mad House ever enforced was his own speedy exit after the application of his copper’s intellect resulted in a series of blunders and embarrassments – and at least one mini-riot in Queen Square during the 2010 World Cup – too enormous for even the half-blind and braindead Sun Queen to ignore.

Jon House: NOT MISSEDArriving in Bristol in 2008 after being headhunted from corpse-looting South Yorkshire Police, House was off again in 2010 to Cardiff where the local political idiots gave him the job of Chief Executive of their city council.

Now House is making yet another fast exit after yet more COSTLY BLUNDERS – it appears his elegant new local authority staff structure, designed to save lots of money for the citizens of Cardiff, resulted in £1m extra a year to council tax payers – while his senior management team have all pocketed pay rises of up to an incredible 73%!

Just days after House was forced to throw in the towel, further ignominy for the hapless copper came when a report by the Welsh Local Government Association into his basket-case council identified “SIGNIFICANT FAILINGS dating back over years.

So where’s Mad House off to next then? Notorious consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, of course, to advise senior local authority managers, foolish enough to pay large sums of cash for the expert advice of an officially-designated idiot on how to, err… Save money!!

The simplest way to save money might be not to employ the likes of House?

Stop Press: TREBLES ALL ROUND AS RUNAWAY COUNCIL MANAGERS TROUSER A WEDGE!

Rumours of a Shitty Hall meltdown emerge as news reaches your caring, sharing BRISTOLIAN that no less than THREE senior Bristol City Council senior managers sensationally QUIT last week.

All – apparently – are unable to work any longer in Mayor Fergo’s shambolic ‘rule-by-Twitter’ and ‘manage-by-foolish-announcement-on-BBC-Radio-Bristol’ regime. Sources in the council have also revealed to us that these exits are being accompanied by UNUSUALLY LARGE CASH PAYMENTS from our cash-strapped council to some of the quitters.

The quitters so far identified to The BRISTOLIAN include senior finance boss, Peter ‘Robbin-us’ Robinson; communications boss, Peter ‘Claudia-Jean’ Holt and belly-flopping major projects manager Alun ‘It’s a Fuck Up’ Owen, the man in charge of the rubbish BRT project and who tried, a few years ago, to swap – with the city’s wealthiest man – a piece of our land at Ashton Gate worth millions for a few hundred cut-price health club memberships. A deal he laughably described as “good value”.

In a further extraordinary twist, a source has confirmed to The BRISTOLIAN that Peter Robbin-us, who fled for the shires on Friday, was handed £50,0000 of our money as he went out of the door. This is unusual as Robbin-us, who voluntarily resigned to take up a post in Hereford – deep in the Tory shires where, traditionally, bent accountants have oiled the wheels of commerce and power – would not usually be entitled to a redundancy payment. How many times have you voluntarily put in notice to take up another job and then been rewarded with a massive redundancy payment?

And even if this was a redundancy payment, the amount involved has raised eyebrows. Just three years ago, the council’s former Chief Exec, the BRADFORD SUN QUEEN, Jan Ormondroyd introduced strict limits on redundancy payments to senior managers ensuring all payments were capped to reflect a pay maximum of £35,0000 a year, less than half Robbin-us’s generous wage. So even in the unlikely event Robbin-us was entitled to the maximum amount of redundancy over the maximum time period, he’s still received an amount of our money some 50% over his entitlement!

Our source confirms that this is because Robbin-us did not receive redundancy at all. Instead he was paid handsomely for signing a COMPROMISE AGREEMENT with a convenient GAGGING CLAUSE agreed by Mayor Fergo’s new City Director Nicola ‘LADY GAGA’ Yates, who has a bit of form for shutting her staff up. Such agreements should be used to settle genuine legal disputes not cover-up dodgy public money payments to senior bosses. However, any details of this agreement are conveniently now secret thanks to this little clause in the deal:

Secrecy

What a joke! Bristol City Council has effectively GAGGED ITSELF from discussing with the public, its councillors or journalists its own dodgy pay outs to its former managers. Where’s the accountability? This news comes just a few months after a national scandal over the city’s excessive use of compromise deals to gag staff, which had senior managers assuring councillors that these deals  “are only ever used in exceptional circumstances”.

Yeah. An exceptional circumstance like when they want to give one of their mates a generous, top secret pay-off.

Staff at the council, meanwhile, are said to be livid at the deal. Robin-us’s reputation at Shitty Hall is appalling. In the last year he’s purchased a new finance system from Agilisys, “one of the UK’s most innovative IT and business services providers”, as part of a £40m outsourcing deal, which has been described to the BRISTOLIAN reliably as, “a load of shit that doesn’t work … that must have been bought by a cretin who’s never operated a computer before”.

He’s also DELIBERATELY DRAGGED HIS FEET over locating £165k missing from the council’s Markets Service (BRISTOLIAN passim). Insiders tell us, “he’s more interested in COVERING HIS MIDDLE MANAGEMENT CRONIES’ ARSES than the sound management of public money.”

While so degraded was Robin-us’s financial management culture that his own internal auditors, responsible for investigating irregularity, fraud and corruption, are now openly admitting that they can no longer protect whistleblowers from what’s been described to us as A SLEAZY CULTURE OF MANAGEMENT BULLYING AND COVER-UP”.

So, while kids go hungry, families queue at food banks and our streets remain uncleaned you can rest assured that our local authority’s former senior managers are all doing just fine, thanks.

SEE The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 (out in October) FOR EVEN MORE:

  • Robin-us’s parting shot the finance boss’s exit plan to slash our services and create a Barnet-style ‘easyCouncil’
  • The Sun Queen’s pay-offhow Jan Ormondroyd avoided her own redundancy rules to trouser her own secret wedge

TOTAL GAG AND BALLS-UP: COUNCIL CAUGHT PUTTING OUT WRONG FIGURES ON ‘COMPROMISE AGREEMENTS’

A political row has broken out after the last BRISTOLIAN exposed Bristol City Council for signing off gagging orders to staff at the rate of TWO A MONTH.

Within just days of The BRISTOLIAN hitting the streets, Bristol North West’s Tory MP ‘Sugar Ray’ Charlotte Leslie was calling for Bristol City Council to implement an immediate ban on these orders due to their CORROSIVE EFFECT on open and honest government.

Sugar Ray Charlotte’s efforts eventually elicited a bizarre response from the Shitty Hall’s West Wing-obsessed public schoolboy twit of a PR boss Peter ‘Claudia Jean’ Holt, who claimed Bristol City Council “has used 54 compromise agreements in the last five years,” adding that they “are only ever used in exceptional circumstances”.

Going by Claudia Jean’s figures that’s a rate of just one month… So that’s okay, then. Except it’s not – because it’s BULLSHIT. According to information provided by Bristol City Council in 2011, they signed off 46 of these orders in 2008/09 alone, and a further 54 in 2009/10 – that’s one hundred gagging orders in just two of the last five years! No figures are yet available for the years 2010 – 2013 but on present evidence it looks like Claudia Jean’s misreported the numbers of these orders by a factor of about four…

It’s also interesting to note that there was a MASSIVE SPIKE in the use of these gagging orders in 2008 when Bradford Sun Queen Jan Ormondroyd arrived in Bristol as Chief Executive. In the year immediately before she arrived – 2006/07 – Bristol City Council signed off none. Within two years of her arrival, staff were being legally gagged at the rate of one a week.

So not only did she introduce a bloated, under performing management structure and enormous pay hikes for the chosen few, but she proactively gagged any staff who attempted to criticise her mess. And remember: this is the management that gave us the hated BRT, the loathed green spaces strategy, and attempted to destroy the Bristol and Bath Railway Path – all whilst promoting utter nonsense like promising to spend £50m on hosting the 2018 World Cup – a kamikaze pledge that cost Bristol £363,000 with nil return.

So just how many people tried to sound the alarm and got gagged?

Get in touch if you were one of the ones silenced…

BUMBLING BUFFOON ‘SIMPLE’ SIMS PAID OFF IN TASTY PENSION SCAM

Council austerity not a problem for outgoing Chief Executive

One thing not threatened by any cuts is the fat cat pension of Bristol City Council’s interim Chief Executive GRAHAM ‘SIMPLE’ SIMS.

Graham Sims is alright, JackSo keen is incoming Mayor GEORGE FERGUSON to be rid of the bumbling timeserver, he’s agreed – despite Sims only having worked 36 years – to sign him off with the equivalent of forty years’ service so he can get a full gold-plated pension when he takes retirement in March. Quite a nice little earner in the age of austerity for the £150k a year bureaucrat.

It’s yet another piece of good fortune for this chronically over-promoted middle manager Sims. When BRADFORD SUN QUEEN Jan Ormondroyd swanned into Bristol in 2008 to become Chief Executive, the first thing she did was get rid of Sims’s Housing Department boss IAN CRAWLEY, whose above average intellect and competence was considered a dangerous threat in the court of the Sun Queen. It was into this vacuum that the hopelessly lightweight yes-man Sims stepped, to hoover up a £120k salary as well as promotion for fawning over Jan and her strategic leadership friends.

Fast forward two years to 2010 and Jan’s sidekick and pathetic wannabe enforcer JON HOUSE, the former cop turned local authority Deputy Chief Executive, had to urgently enforce his own speedy exit to avoid an embarrassing scandal. And who should pop up to pick up the pieces, as well as a tasty pay rise? Yes – Graham Sims!

By mid-2012 Jan finally had to throw in the towel herself after four years of high spending and low achieving. But who should get the top job (solely on the basis of not being weird, provably bent or Finance boss WILL GODFREY)? Yes, it’s our man Graham – once again on hand to collect a nice little salary bump, now boosting him up to £150k a year. Very handy indeed when you’re only fit for retirement and on a final salary pension scheme.

Following this cast of horrors, we can only speculate on the calibre of candidate GORGEOUS GEORGE has in mind for the Chief Operating Officer position he plans to replace the Chief Executive with.

One thing is certain, though – someone will be (red) trousering a pretty penny. Here’s to austerity!