Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what compensation payments have been made to senior executives of Rotherham Borough Council leaving their posts since 2012.

The Department does not collate or hold this information. Local authorities are independent employers and it is for each council to make local, accountable decisions on the management of its workforce, including any payment made to staff leaving their employment. While Government has no involvement in these local decisions, we expect councils to be open and transparent about the decisions they make about the pay and rewards for staff, particularly senior staff. Under the Localism Act 2011, councils are required to prepare and publish an annual pay policy statement setting out their approach to pay matters, particularly senior pay. In our pay accountability guidance to accompany measures in the Localism Act, councils are asked to give full council the opportunity to vote on severance packages of £100,000 or more before they are rubber-stamped. It is unacceptable for information about compensation payments to be withheld from local taxpayers and we welcome the CLG Select Committee’s recent comments that councils should publish the rationale for, and amount of, any financial payment to a departing chief officer within a month of the decision so that the public can understand why such a payment has been made. Severance payments made to senior staff must already be disclosed in an authority’s annual Statement of Accounts and cannot be protected from disclosure by confidentiality agreements.

On 3 October, the Department further strengthened the public's ability to scrutinise councils by ensuring that they get the data they deserve through the local government transparency code. Part of that code is the requirement for councils to publish information on salaries for employees earning £50,000 or more, alongside a range of other pay and workforce information.