The Daily Telegraph‘s hostile piece about some of the payments being made to Returning Officers from the General Election highlights the unusual way in which key staff are paid for their role in organising elections:
At least six of the officials responsible for the chaos which left hundreds unable to vote have collected substantial bonuses for their work on polling day.
The use of the word “bonus” here is debatable. From one perspective, the payments made to Returning Officers are not bonuses but rather the standard fee payable for running an election. However, the role of being Returning Officer goes with having a job – typically council chief executive – that is usually well paid to begin with (often six figure salaries) and where anyone taking on the job knows that it will involve them being Returning Officer. So from the other perspective they are doing what they expected to have to do – but do indeed get a bonus payment on top of their usual pay packet.
The idea that there is a special extra payment for running an election stretches back to a time when contested elections were far less frequent (fewer elected bodies and uncontested seats more common). When having to run an election was an unusual requirement, an extra payment made sense. Now that regularly running elections is the norm it looks a rather unsatisfactory arrangement. As the Telegraph adds:
John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, said: “The whole question of returning officer fees needs to be reviewed and brought up to date. It is just another aspect of elections where we need to ask whether it is fit for purpose and appropriate in the modern age.”
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4 Comments
On the other hand (and not disagreeing, just counterpointing).
Locally, we had a normal Borough election, and two closely contested constituency elections. The election staff were there until 7am Friday morning, and came back at 4.30pm that evening, some of them had to go back to the day job during the day so had no real rest, some had worked all day, since 6am in some cases, on the Thursday.
Running a General Election is outside of the normal, planned remit, and should have extra/different pay, same for Euro elections whish are counted Sundays, etc. But how it shoudl work, and whether the current setup makes sense, is something that needs discussion on.
Clearly counting staff etc outside their normal hours should be paid a fair rate for the job – having the returning officer task as one of the chief executives requirements and hence part of his/her nromal salary is entirely reasonable as senior staff are paid large sums to do “what is necessry to get the job done”. However this is a fee not a bonus!
Counting staff should be paid for overtime, but bonus payments of up to £27,000 to returning officers for doing what they are paid to do is indefensible.
I have long felt that Chief Executives are not the best people to do this job and in reality the Head of Democratic Services does most of the leg work. Chief Executives have used this to top up their large salaries. If you removed the pay you would see them quickly pass the responsibility on. Many Chief Executives in this day and age are good managers and not very good at the legal/formal side of the Council.
It would be cheaper to have a dedicated returning officer, or to give the head of demcoratic services a pay rise.