Hartlepool Council’s £56,000 Savings Promise: A Financial Fumble Five Years On
- teessidetoday
- Apr 6
- 5 min read
Hartlepool Borough Councils promises of significant savings in its 'top heavy' management structure fail to materialise, as its revealed HBC's top officers now cost locals over £40k MORE than it did five years ago !
6th April 2025
If you’ve been keeping an eye on Hartlepool Borough Council’s budget promises over the years, you might remember the big announcement made by councillors of the then Conservative / Independent Coalition back in 2020, when Hartlepool Borough Council told locals that they were finally restructuring their top management—sweeping out the Dusty Old Chief Executive's role for a new 'Managing Director's' position—and that this move would save locals around £56,000 every year.
At the time, it sounded like a smart way to tighten the belt of a top heavy organisation whilst keeping frontline services running smoothly. However, fast forward five years to April 2025, and it seems the promises of reeling in what many claim to be 'runaway' senior director spending hasn't really worked out as it should have...
Let’s break it down.
The Big Promise: £56,000 a Year in Savings
In March 2020, the council’s Finance and Policy Committee approved a plan to replace the Chief Executive position with a Managing Director role after Gill Alexander, the former Chief Executive at the time, retired in September 2020. The idea was simple: the new role would come with a lower salary, saving the council £56,000 annually. Over five years, that’s £280,000 of money that could have been used for pothole repairs, community programs, or keeping our libraries open. With Hartlepool Borough Council seemingly always blubbering on about 'financial pressures', it seemed like a no-brainer. But did it actually work?
The Reality: A Fraction of the Savings Delivered
HBC Exposed looked at the council’s financial accounts from 2020/21 (before the restructure) and 2023/24 (some three years into the new setup) to see what's really happened.
In 2020/21, Gill Alexander was paid £79,263 for her time as Chief Executive from April 1 to September 6, 2020—a little over five months. When you stretch that out to a full year, her total pay (including pension contributions) would have been around £183,104. That’s our baseline: the cost of the Chief Executive role before the restructure.
Now, let’s look at Denise McGuckin, who took over as Managing Director in late 2020 or early 2021.
By 2023/24, her total pay was £182,510—almost the same as what Gill Alexander would have earned for a full year back in 2020.
That means the savings in 2023/24 were actually a measly £594. Not £56,000—just £594.
2021/22: Savings of about £11,072 (McGuckin’s estimated pay: £172,032)
2022/23: Savings of about £5,911 (estimated pay: £177,193)
2023/24: Savings of £594 (actual pay: £182,510)
2024/25: A loss of £4,880 (estimated pay: £187,984)
2025/26 (up to April 6, 2025): A small loss of £174 (estimated pay for the partial year)
Locals are still paying more.....
What's worse, is that if you look at it on a paper to paper basis, comparing the 2020/21 accounts against the most recent published accounts by Hartlepool Borough Council, It now actually costs locals £33,379 MORE than what it did to keep the councils seven senior top officers in their jobs back in 2021/22.
Add it all up, and the total savings the council made over five years comes to just £12,523. That’s less than 5% of the £280,000 locals were initially promised. Instead of saving £56,000 a year, in reality the council barely scraped together £12,500 over half a decade. So what's gone wrong?
Why has the Savings Vanished ?
Let’s be real: £12,523 over five years isn’t even close to what locals were told they'd get. So why did this plan quickly fall apart?
Here are the culprits:
Inflation and Pay Rises: Between 2020 and 2025, the UK saw some serious inflation, especially in 2022 and 2023 when prices were soaring. Local government workers, including the Managing Director, got pay rises to keep up—sometimes as much as 4% a year, plus a flat £1,925 increase in 2023/24. Denise McGuckin’s salary started lower than Gill Alexander’s but quickly caught up. By 2023/24, her salary (£162,375) was nearly identical to Alexander’s annualised salary from 2020 (£162,910), meaning any savings from the restructure were quickly eaten up by these raises.
No Real Cost-Cutting: The Managing Director’s starting salary wasn’t low enough in the first place to make any meaningful difference. If the council wanted to save £56,000 a year, McGuckin’s total pay should have been around £127,000 (the Chief Executive’s £183,104 minus £56,000). But even in her first year, it was likely closer to £172,000—nowhere near low enough to hit the target.
Rising Costs Everywhere: The council has been vocal about its budget alleged struggles—think £13 million deficits and cuts to services. With costs for things like children’s social care skyrocketing, it’s no surprise they didn’t fight harder to keep the Managing Director’s pay down. But that’s exactly the problem: they made a promise they simply couldn’t keep.
What This Means for Hartlepool Residents
This isn’t just numbers—it’s about trust. The council told us they’d save around £280,000 over five years, money that could have gone toward fixing our streets or supporting our kids’ schools. Instead, they've delivered upon less than £13,000. Meanwhile, they’re still crying poor, talking about “unprecedented financial pressures” whilst senior staff pay keeps climbing. It’s frustrating to see promises like this fall flat on their face, especially when local's are the ones feeling the pinch with council tax hikes and service cuts.
And let’s not forget: this isn’t an isolated incident. Councils across the UK have a track record of overpromising and underdelivering when it comes to savings. Hartlepool Borough Council needs to be more realistic about what they can achieve—and more transparent when things don’t go to plan. If they’d told us in 2022 or 2023 that the savings weren’t materialising, maybe we could have had a proper conversation about what to do next, with perhaps the move to delete the Managing Directors role altogether ?
Instead, locals are now left digging through financial reports to figure out the truth.
What Can Be Done?
It’s not too late for the council to turn things around, but time is running out !
Freezing Senior Director Pay would be the first start. Many locals do get that inflation is a thing, but if the council is ever serious about saving money, they could freeze senior staff salaries for a year or two whilst they get their supposed budget pressures under control. The Focus on Real Savings needs to be more realistic. Instead of symbolic restructures that simply don’t deliver, the look for bigger efficiencies like shared services with other councils or cutting back on non-essential spending needs to be made.
Five years ago, Hartlepool Borough Council promised locals £56,000 a year in savings by restructuring their top management. Today, we know that promise was false. In realty, they saved just £12,523 over five years—barely enough to fix a few potholes, let alone make a dent in the budget woes they keep talking about.
The transparency & accountability from Teesside's publicly funded extremist group is woefully lacking & it seems HBC seemingly believed that locals would simply pass this one over as being forgotten about.... they were wrong.
Next time the council makes a big financial promise, HBC Exposed will be watching—but we hope locals will too as this once again looks to be promises made, but sadly, unfulfilled.
What do you think ?
Is it time for councillors to look again at Director Spending & delete the role of Managing Director ?
YES
NO
