It’s starting to feel like every edition of Private Eye has the Isle of Wight council in it these days.
The latest copy has an article about Dave Burbage Ltd – the company that the Dave Burbage, head of finance at the Isle of Wight council, works for IWC through.
As the piece says, “Islanders had thought that the director of finance was a council employee.”
“Why the ‘consultancy’ ploy?”
Posing the question, “Why the ‘consultancy’ ploy?”, it explains that the ex-Newham Chief Exec Dave Burbage, arrived on the Isle of Wight as Director of Finance and interim Chief Executive, from Newham council in London, when the Island’s previous Chief Exec, Joe Duckworth, left the Island suddenly to go to …. Newham … as its Chief Exec. Effectively swapping positions.
Private Eye says local government rules state that the generous pension that Dave Burbage gained from his £158k/year Newham job, would have been in danger of being cut if he had taken a job in local government.
No loss of pension
They say every pound that he was paid over his new salary + old pension payments, would have been taken away from him – if he’d been employed by the Isle of Wight council.
Given this has been subsequently estimated by someone with knowledge of the situation at a possible loss to Dave Burbage of £40,000+, the fact that it’s Dave Burbage Consulting Ltd that is providing the services to the council, none of that £40k+ is lost. He can continue to receive his full pension allowance – because he’s not ‘working’ for the council, he’s working for Dave Burbage Consulting Ltd.
How Dave Burbage Consulting Ltd came to light
The VentnorBlog article on the final release of the IWC spending was published at 12:14 pm. Less than an hour later, Dave Burbage Ltd was raised by Media watcher.
Ten minutes later, after a quick bit of further digging and adding up, we’d found out that Dave Burbage Ltd has been paid £73,962.50 in just six months.
The comments that followed that are well worth a read, showing the collective skills of the VB readers, as they find out more details about the situation.
(BTW, digging into these details are all the more simple these days thanks to the Armchair Auditor project [background])
