A COUNCIL has paid out more than £125,000 in one redundancy payment, it has been revealed.

Figures from the Taxpayer’s Alliance Town Hall Rich List, covering years 2013 to 2014, outline that Slough Borough Council paid out £100,000 or more in remuneration costs to 10 members of staff, £125,000 or more to two staff members and more than £200,000 to one member of staff.

The data shows Ruth Bagley, chief executive at the council was on £169,054 during that time frame but that an ‘unknown’ person was on £225,000.

A spokeswoman for the council said: “A long term senior member staff was made redundant quite late in the financial year after more than 30 years of service. The figure is their salary and redundancy payment.”

The spokeswoman confirmed the assistant director was on less than £100,000 salary, so which means the council do not need to name the job role, but that the remaining amount – approximately £126,000 – was redundancy pay.

From April this year, Slough council made changes to its redundancy payment policy, capping the figure at 30 weeks’ pay instead of the former 75 and that the multiplier used to calculate redundancy payments was reduced from 2.5 to 1.5.

Cllr Dexter Smith said: “I think we as Conservatives have been saying the practice of a golden handshake to go is not acceptable.

“Paying people more than a year’s salary is not acceptable. Very often these have been people who have been in charge of failing services.”

“Capping redundancy payments should have happened a lot earlier than this. “ A spokeswoman from Taxpayer’s Alliance said: “This figure was obtained through an FoI and it was made very clear that is was remuneration not salary that was being requested.”