Tonight:
9°c
Dozens of bean counters but nobody in charge of snow chaos
09.02.09
The list of top jobs provided to the Standard includes many with apparently overlapping job titles and descriptions.
Six-figure salaries are paid to a managing director of finance, chief finance officer, head of corporate finance, finance director, programme manager, programme director group procurement (finance), four principal corporate finance officers, head of investment programme oversight, head of group treasury, head of group financial accounting, head of financial shared services, head of finance, head of finance group property, head of assets management and director of group procurement.
Also in this bracket, TfL's surface transport division has a chief operating officer, a director of operations and a director of traffic operations. The Underground has a chief of operational engineering, a chief engineer and a director of engineering. TfL's “London Rail” division, which employs only 194 staff, has nine top managers on salaries over £100,000, including a human resources director earning up to £125,000 a year and a managing director on up to £225,000.
London Rail is responsible for the strategic direction of the Overground and DLR and the East London line project, but does not actually run any of these services, which are provided by private contractors. It has no responsibility for the Underground.
Among the six-figure managers is a “head of group organisational capacity and people development” for “leading the development ... of people development processes”.
An energy contracts manager, a head of occupational health, a “head of process and change” and a “head of group equality and inclusion” earn between £100,000 and £125,000 a year. Even the official in charge of arranging insurance at TfL is paid a six-figure salary. The official in charge of the so far abortive project to provide cooling on deep-level Tube lines is also paid in excess of £100,000 a year.
But there appears to be nobody whose job description includes emergency or contingency planning, such as for extreme winter weather; nobody whose main responsibility is reducing the impact of TfL services on the environment. The words “green”, “sustainable”, “sustainability”, “carbon”, “CO2” and “climate change” do not appear in any six-figure manager's job description, apart from one whose responsibilities include “sustainable procurement”.
There is a “group director of health, safety and environment” and other officials whose job descriptions mention the environment but they seem concerned mainly with policing internal environmental standards.
Only eight of the 108 top managers' job descriptions given to the Standard mention “customer service”. Only nine include the words “efficient” or “efficiency”, only one of which is in the context of services to passengers. The others refer to efficient procurement of goods or support services.
Only one of the 108 job descriptions includes the word “crime” and one includes the word “terrorism”, though other managers do have shared responsibility for security.
TfL said: “Huge senior management focus is applied to emergency and contingency planning. It is simply integral to the roles of all our senior management from the Commissioner on down. Similarly, sustainability, efficiency and customer service is a common thread running across senior management and the whole organisation.”
