Chief Exec’s wages should be cut to save jobs

How about Mr Rumbelow volunteering to take a cut from his £130,000 plus a year wages and save some of his fellow employees’ jobs.

Might I add, what a kick in the teeth for the town hall employees who will be losing their jobs while the town hall gets a nice facelift. Could the Chief Executive tell the taxpaying people of Burnley how much this is costing us?

J. Stanworth

• Burnley Council said it wishes to point out Mr Rumbelow’s salary is in fact £112,355 rather then £130,000 as quoted.

In response to the letter, Mr Colin Hill, Burnley Council’s head of facilities management, issued the following statement:

“The town hall is a major landmark listed building that we have a duty to look after. This is the first time in 50 years such extensive repairs have been carried out. Prevention is better than cure and it is only sensible to make sure we catch any issues early rather than letting the building fall into disrepair when work would cost far more. Just like any sensible homeowner would do, we’ve made repairs before they become a major problem.

The total bill is expected to be around £120,000 but a substantial part of that cost was for the specialist scaffolding needed to allow us to carry out the repairs. It also made sense for us to carry out necessary work while we had the scaffolding up and access to parts of the building we wouldn’t normally be able to reach.

Over the past 18 months we’ve had a number of instances of rain getting into the town hall causing internal damage. The work carried out included repairs to the roof, stone replacement including the fixing of loose stonework that could cause a danger, repointing the entire frontage, surface cleaning, removal of years of accumulated pigeon droppings, fitting of pigeon spikes, and repairing and repainting windows.”