At Thursday’s council meeting Cllr Vicky Nicolson has questioned the “indefensible” salary being offered to an interim appointee who will be recruited to Director of Adult Social Care.
Chief Executive of The City of Edinburgh Council, Andrew Kerr, OBE, said that the person taking up the appointment would ‘primarily focus on the delivery and leadership of the adult social care portfolio of the Health and Social Care Partnership and drive forward the Improvement Plan’.
The SNP say the job will be half of the job which Judith Proctor, the Director of the Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership and Chief Officer of the Edinburgh Integration Joint Board, quit following a damning report by the Care Inspectorate, and will attract twice the salary – “one of the most expensive public sector appointments in Scotland’s history”. The Integration Joint Board has a deficit of £35 million which the council have said is being tackled successfully.
SNP group Social Care spokesperson, Cllr Nicolson said: “I can’t look my constituents in the eye and tell them that this appointment is a good use of public money. This is indefensible. When money is desperately needed to fix the problems in Health and Social Care in Edinburgh, residents and staff will rightly condemn this scale of pay when Edinburgh is failing to provide care and clawing back millions in self-directed support payments.
“Edinburgh’s services need proper reform and health services and social care services need to be properly integrated or the City will remain in crisis. Savings proposals are coming forward to date and I lack confidence that the current approach provides any real change. Throwing obscene amounts of money at one role, I feel, will undermine relations with staff, undermine progress and undermine the integration work needed to move people from receiving crisis care to early intervention care. Preventing people needing costly crisis interventions is the only way we will get the significant service improvement required and bring the budget back under control.”
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