Nice money if you can get it

Further to my post yesterday on people having to work well into their retirement comes along this little gem...
BBC.

Kent County Council has revealed its former managing director received a £420,000 payoff after she lost her job.
Katherine Kerswell, who left her post in December, was one of 1,500 staff who were made redundant as part of the council's spending cuts.
At the time the council refused to confirm her severance package, but it has now published its statement of accounts, detailing the amount.
Council leader Paul Carter said director salaries had reduced in Kent.
He said: "We've taken £1m out of the cost of running the senior directors' cadre and £45m of staff savings across the piece.
"I can't talk specifically as we're bound to a confidentiality agreement, but this job was one of the top jobs in local government.
"So if somebody had left a job to come to a new job then 16 months in you've restructured and decided a post is no longer needed, there has to be a severance payment that pays for that loss."

Yes, if a post is no longer needed you have to pay redundancy, but surely whoever is negotiating for Kent under these circumstances needs their wrist slapped (at the very least) for writing this severance figure into a contract. But there again it's perhaps not real money to them, they have a never-ending source of it via the rates. Years ago most if not all councils did not have managing directors, nor chief executives, the actual work of running their demesne was done by councillors themselves with the help of a few specialists in specific areas, managers mostly. There was no oversight save that done by councillors via committee. Then new Labour got elected and suddenly it was jobs for the boys (and girls) as cabinet style council management was introduced and the gravy train enabled various executives to cash in at the ratepayers expense.
What do they do that's any different? Well not a lot really except exclude elected officials from the decision making process, leaving them to vote on proposals rather than do oversight.
Big money, big wages, big payoffs to the powers that be. None of it their own...
As ever.