I'm worth it: The town hall official who's paid more than the PM

Town hall bureaucrats deserve huge salaries because their jobs are so 'high-risk', according to the chief executive of one council.

Andrea Hill, who earns £220,000 a year at Suffolk County Council, claims few are willing to face the risks and demands of local authority work.

'There are less people prepared to do the job, so naturally where there's a shortage the going rate goes up,' said the mother of three, who earns £30,000 more than Gordon Brown.

Of pay packets such as hers, the 44-year-old said: 'You would find it's the norm now.'

She added: 'We should be using the salary debate to demonstrate what big organisations county councils are.

'In the private sector, there are big organisations, but they essentially deliver the same product. We are very different  -  we have lots of products.'

And, she said, when councils do not hit Whitehall targets, bosses lose their jobs. 'Nowadays people are chief executives much longer in their career and it's a much riskier job.

'It's a high risk job and no longer a job for life,' Mrs Hill told the Local Government Chronicle.

However, last week the Audit Commission said chief executives rarely 'pay the price' for poor performance.

The Whitehall spending watchdog found that the salaries of senior council officials have almost doubled in a decade.

It put this down to a jobs merry-go-round, in which town halls poach each others' bureaucrats. In the last four years, council managers' pay has risen twice as fast as that of private-sector executives, it said.

Meanwhile, over a decade, council tax bills and charges to the public that are levied by town halls, have doubled.

And this month council workers mounted strikes to try to improve a 2.45 per cent pay offer.

Mrs Hill, who is married and enjoys running marathons and windsurfing, has never worked outside local government.

She left Birmingham University with a qualification in public sector administration, and has since worked her way up through jobs in 'policy' and 'strategy'. She moved from Bedfordshire to take charge in Suffolk this year.

Analysis by the Taxpayers' Alliance pressure group found that 800 council managers earn more than £100,000 a year, 132 are paid more than a Cabinet minister, and eight earn more than £200,000 a year.

Matthew Elliott, of the Alliance, said: 'Andrea Hill seems to have a cavalier attitude to taxpayers' money. People in Suffolk are struggling to make ends meet thanks to the burden on council tax, a large amount of which ends up straight in her pocket.

'She is part of a wider, worrying trend of senior town hall executives seeing their salaries grow through the roof, despite that poor deal taxpayers are getting from councils.

'Council tax has doubled, but services are stagnant or being cut back  -  there's no justification for these massive salaries. If there's any shortage of people wanting to become council managers, it certainly isn't because they aren't being paid enough.'

Christine Melsom, of the council tax protest group Is It Fair?, said: 'I beg leave to doubt whether there would be a rush to employ Mrs Hill in the private sector.

'She would also be hard put to find a pension scheme in the private sector quite as generous as the one she enjoys as a local government executive.

'I do not believe there is a shortage of people willing to be council chief executives.'