Cumbria’s Town Hall Fat Cats – Page 2

CRUMBRIA: 27/04/2025: EXCLUSIVE

THE Taxpayers Alliance – a campaigning watchdog that highlights where our money goes – is rarely, if ever, reported by Cumbria’s comics.

The TPA has just published its Quango Rich List 2025 which has, again, floated past our Media unnoticed – despite containing a massive Cumbrian ‘angle’.

Churnalists here are no doubt busy writing up thick-as-pigshit ‘Fakecation’ articles: “The Top Five Places on Instagram To Escape With Everyone Else!”

Quangos in Cumbria spend a lot of money on newspaper advertising and award sponsorships, and can always be relied upon by Ad Execs to splash out on hefty promotional supplements.

Therefore it must be entirely coincidental and not at all related that our Media here has zero interest in ever enlightening us with the eye-watering Public Sector salaries being paid out at the county’s Quangos!

When it comes to Quangos in Cumbria, think along the lines of various ‘regeneration’ incarnations that have come and gone.

Barrow Vision; West Lakes Renaissance; Britain’s Energy Coast, Cumbria Vision, and the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, recently reincarnated as “Enterprising Cumbria!”

These Quangos have all had Chief Execs; directors; staff, budgets, committees, members, and hangers-on. Even the Lake District Rain Appreciation Task Force. (That last one is a lie.)

Long-term Quango survivors in Cumbria include the Lake District National Park Authority and The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

This year’s TPA Quango list contained a clear Cumbrian ‘story’.

David Peattie, (left), group CEO of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in West Cumbria, was paid £710,633 in 2023-24, its record shows.

Peattie’s pay packet therefore put him at Number 3, pop pickers, on The TPA’s list of the highest remunerated Quango staff in the UK.

The only Quangocrats paid more were the Chief Executive of the BBC (#2) and the boss of Channel 4 (#1)!

Peattie’s pay packet was swollen by bonuses amounting to £282,429.

It elevated him into a very exclusive bracket of top earners, said the TPA.

Generally, Peattie is paid circa £362,229 with ‘benefits’ of £65,905.

This is then topped up if he achieves certain long-term and short-term objectives.

To be fair, decommissioning all of the UK’s nuclear sites over the next 120 years is hardly shelling peas.

And unlike many of those swanning around at the top of Cumbria’s Public Sector, he has at least worked in the ‘real world’ and could probably quit on Friday and walk into a top job in Civvy Street on Monday.

But, whether one man should trouser a Public Sector bonus that would take the average £35k a year Joe in West Cumbria more than EIGHT years to earn, is for the rabies sufferers in our local newspaper Comment sections.

STOP PRESS: An unidentified director at Sellafield Ltd was also listed by the TPA for getting a bonus of £94,000.

Also on the list, because of an £84,025 bonus, was the NDA’s chief finance officer, Kate Bowyer.

No director at the National Farce Authority in Kendal was ever going to make much of a splash on the national Quango list.

Mind you, the National Park Authority’s top three directors still shared £307,000 in salaries and £46,000 into their pensions – chicken feed to the Nuke sector.

Only one of the LDNPA’s staff is paid more than £1o0,000-a-year and that’s the chief exec (£107,000). His annual pension payment is nearly £20,000.

Nationwide the TPA found that 1,472 Quango staff are paid salaries over £100,000 a year.

343 Quango staff were on more than £200,000.

Meanwhile, our local newspapers put all their journalistic heft into exposing society’s real scandals…er, humiliating the local fella up before The Beak for shoplifting meat and veg!

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