Devon County Council has outsourced most of its education support services to Babcock LDP.

The six directors of the parent company of the latter, a conglomerate called Babcock International Group, earned £12.6 million between them in 2014/15.

The highest paid director received £4.16 million. The average remuneration was £2.1 million. Pity the lowest paid director who only received £1 million – albeit for only eight months of work.

There’s nothing in that company’s report and account which states how many of their employees had a remuneration of more than £100,000. They’re not obliged to disclose this in their report and accounts, and, of course, they aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So they’re not obliged to disclose such details at all.

Bear in mind that this is a company that, by its own admission, draws 80% of its customers from the public sector. So taxpayers ultimately pay these people. Not only that, they also fund the dividends that these companies pay to their shareholders.

The county council has outsourced most of its highways work to South West Highways whose accounts are far more opaque than those of Babcock. Total emoluments for the directors in their last annual accounts was stated as being £172 thousand of which £43 thousand related to pension contributions.

They had eight directors, but only one director benefitted from those pension contributions. I think it’s fair to say that there was only one executive director and that he/she received more than £100 thousand in emoluments.

South West Highways is jointly owned by Colas Ltd and Eurovia Ltd.

The former’s highest paid director received total emoluments of £315 thousand whereas the highest paid director of the latter received £410 thousand.

Colas Ltd. are ultimately owned by the French group Bouygues and Eurovia’s ultimate owner is the French group Vinci SA.

I have no idea what their directors, let alone highest paid employees, ‘earn’.

So, Taxpayers Alliance, please turn your somewhat myopic vision elsewhere. Let’s have a very good look at what all these private companies that benefit from the government’s (or rather taxpayer’s) largesse pay their directors and employees.

In particular why don’t you turn your beady, albeit extremely blinkered, eyes on PFI, and those many private companies that are making immense profits from this particular piece of financial engineering. All to the detriment of the taxpayers and the biggest con of all.

Cameron doesn’t appear to have a clue about local authorities and the services they need to provide.

This is aptly demonstrated by his recent well publicised letter to the (Conservative) leader of Oxfordshire County Council.  The letter can be seen here.

In that letter Cameron said that he was “Disappointed” with planned cuts to frontline services including children’s centres, elderly day centres, libraries and museums. (Does this sound familiar?)

He also said that the council should sell off its surplus assets.

The implication was that money from the sale of such assets should be used to run services.

The problem with that, is that it would be illegal!

Money from the sale of capital assets can only be used on capital expenditure. So, for example, a council could sell off playing fields (or car parks) for residential development and use that money to build a youth resource centre. But the council couldn’t use the proceeds of such sales for the day-to-day running of such a centre.  (Again does that sound familiar?)

Another issue with selling off assets is that it’s usually for short-term gain. Over the medium to long term it can actually result in reduced revenue, revenue that can be used to fund services.

Cameron also seems to have forgotten that whilst the grant that councils receive from central government has decreased enormously over the past decade, the number of new responsibilities has increased. For example, in April 2013 many public health functions were transferred from the NHS to local authorities. In October of this year public health commissioning responsibilities for children aged 0-5 were also transferred to local government.

So we see an increase in statutory responsibilities coupled with a decline in grants from central government, alongside an inability to raise council tax by more than 1.99% without holding an (expensive) referendum.

Is it surprising that local authorities are getting rid of services that they don’t have a statutory duty to provide and cutting back on those that they do have a statutory duty to provide?

Have you never wondered why there are now very few public toilets? Or why parking in council car parks can be so expensive?  Or why the grass verges are no longer trimmed? Traffic signs are so filthy? Roads are so badly maintained? Bus services are being cut? The list goes on and on.

These are, of course, individually, relatively small things, but taken together they markedly affect the quality of life. And they are things that people care about and notice.

Still, you get what you vote for, and Cameron, of all people, really ought to know that!

The roads in Devon are maintained on behalf of Devon County Council by South West Highways Ltd.

You might think that this is a nice local company.

You would be very much mistaken.

Its ultimate owners are actually two large French conglomerates, Bouygues SA and Vinci SA.

The Tax Payers Alliance (TPA) recently released figures showing the number of staff in each local authority in the UK that earned over £100,000 a year in 2014/15.

Apparently there is one employee in North Devon Council and another in Torridge who earn more than £100,000 a year, whilst Devon County Council has 24. A Devon County Council (DCC) spokesperson has said that the authority did not recognise the figures and that in 2014/15 Devon had only nine employees paid more than £100,000.

There would, therefore, seem to be a vast discrepancy between the figures released by the TPA and the real figures.

So are the TPA being economical with the truth?

Not exactly.

The TPA defined remuneration “as including, but not being limited to salary, fees, allowances, bonuses, benefits in kind, compensation for loss of office and employer pension contributions.”

The key to the difference lies in the fact that the TPA included employer pension contributions.

Once the employer pension contributions are included then the figures for the county council from the TPA do indeed stack up.

Or do they?

The TPA say they exclude school staff in their figures. If these staff are excluded, then, based on DCC’s figures, neither the TPA nor DCC are right!

Torridge District Council also dispute the TPA figures and have said that they don’t have anybody earning more than £100,000. Is that actually the case?

Figures from the Torridge website show that the highest paid employee had an annual salary of £82,247. So are the TPA telling porkies? Not according to their definition of remuneration.

In addition to their salary the highest paid officer also received an expense allowance of £5,351 (!), Benefits in Kind of £2,574 and Employer Pension Contributions of £15,462.

Add the four figures together and you get a grand total of £105,634. So , we conclude, the TPA were right (based on their methodology) and Torridge were wrong.

No, not quite.

The TPA were also wrong. Why? Because their methodology includes “compensation for loss of office”. Once that figure is included the number of employees paid over £100,000 in Torridge actually jumps from one, to the astounding number of five.

In 2014/2015 four senior officers were made redundant (at least I presume they were) and received compensation for loss of office which brought their total remuneration well above £100,000. The highest total figure being an incredible £274,181, including £195,540 compensation for loss of office.

The devil, as always, is in the detail.

According to the BT Openreach website, superfast broadband is now also available in Kingsway, South Street, Mill Street, East Street, the western half of North Street (from the junior school to the junction with Duke Street), Hugh Squier Avenue, Deans Park, West Street, and the Artizans Dwellings.

BT contractors had the pavement up in Poltimore Road last week to enable duct to be laid. The duct is there  so that a fibre optic cable can be laid from the cabinet in Poltimore Road all the way to the telephone exchange.

Hopefully the cabinet in Poltimore Road will thus go ‘live’ quite quickly. Once it does go live, Poltimore Road, Poltimore Close and Aclands should all be able to order superfast broadband.

Just one simple question.

Why do none of the reviews of smart phones that I’ve seen ever give any indication of how the phone performs as a phone?

As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter whether the phone has got two cameras, can record video in 4k, has a massive screen, many megabytes of storage and a huge number of apps. If it’s poor at actually receiving mobile signals it’s not deserving of a good rating!

I wonder why three ‘agents’ from the the Gangmasters Licensing Authority are staying at the George tonight. I’m not at all impressed. They really ought to learn to button their lips in public places. And to think that these people have the power of arrest! To learn more about the GLA have a look at Wikipedia or go to www.gla.gov.uk. Marc Sent from my iPhone

It appears that a planning application for the new primary school at Exeter Gate has now been made.

Absolutely no details are yet available – par for the course for NDC I’m afraid.

I’m surprised that this application has taken so long to appear. After all, the need for new primary school places is far more urgent than a replacement building for the community college!

The big question is: What will happen to the old school?

School children of Year 6 age who live in Bishops Nympton are in the top ten of the country . . .  when it comes to being overweight that is!

According to data published by Public Health England an incredible 50% of Year 6 school children who live in Bishops Nympton were considered to be overweight – almost 30% were considered to be obese. This puts Bishops Nympton in eighth place in terms of being overweight, with the Town and Pier ward of Dover in first place, with just over 56% of Year 6 children classified as being overweight.

In bottom place (or first place from a health perspective!) was the ward of North in Oxford with less than 8% of Year 6 children being classified as overweight. That’s an extraordinary difference.

South Molton comes out reasonably well. But none of these figures are good, and it shows how many health problems (e.g. Type II diabetes) will come to the fore in a generation’s time – or possibly even sooner.

It’s probably quite difficult for you to see these graphs in detail, particularly on a mobile phone, but in both cases Bishops Nympton is the longest bar, South Molton is in green, and England, North Devon and Devon are in red.  On both graphs the scales run from 0% to 50%.

Instow and Lynton and Lynmouth aren’t shown on the “Overweight” graph because their sample sizes were too small. The former plus Marwood and Georgeham and Mortehoe aren’t shown on the “Obesity” graph for the same reason.

All this data, plus explanatory comments, can be found on the Public Health England website here.

I think that the upper echelons of the Tory party are acting rather like schoolchildren.

The House of Lord didn’t like a piece of legislation and voted against it (sort of) and now Cameron, Osborne and others are throwing a hissy fit.

It might well be the first time in 100 years that the Lords have voted down a piece of financial legislation, but the whole reason we have a second chamber is to act as a moderating influence on the first chamber i.e. the Houses of Parliament.

But they didn’t really vote it down.  They actually wanted more information on the affects of the government legislation. The motion was (my italics):

“this House [the Lords] declines to consider the draft Regulations laid before the House on 7 September until the Government lay a report before the House, detailing their response to the analysis of the draft Regulations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies [IFS], and considering possible mitigating action.”

Apparently Osborne, in the past, said this about the IFS, describing it as one of the most “credible independent voices on the public finances, taxation and public spending”.

What’s changed?

Do you trust Cameron and Osborne?

I certainly don’t! Mind you, I wouldn’t want Corbyn in charge of anything either!