Oxfordshire County Council spends record £4.2m on redundancy payments
Almost £2.5m of the total sum spent by the council went towards pensions for staff who took early retirement.Another £711,000 came from ex gratia payments - which are made to staff out of generosity from the employer rather than as a legal requirement.Councillor Liam Walker, leader of the Oxfordshire Alliance council opposition group, said the "eye-watering figure" raised "serious questions" about how the council "manages its finances and whether this is truly the best use of taxpayers' money"."Residents expect their money to go towards delivering services, not handing out massive golden goodbyes," he said.Councillor Liz Brighouse, who leads the opposition Labour group, said "every time" a council restructures, "people lose their jobs"."Restructures are dreadful for the people who go through them, and very often for people at the end of their working lives," she added.A spokesperson for the county council said: "Our overall aim is that we are run as efficiently and cost effectively as possible, so that we can pay for the crucial services we need to deliver for the Oxfordshire public, and for the benefit of future generations."Redundancy costs are one-off. Staffing savings accrued are savings for each year setting a firm foundation for the future," the spokesperson said."We continue to aim to be a leaner and fitter organisation for the future. These statistics are a snapshot of a moving picture."
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BBC News
18 minutes ago
- BBC News
'Totally torn apart' - how Morecambe decline threatens a whole community
In its post-war heyday, the town of Morecambe was one of the UK's foremost seaside holiday destinations, with a thriving local economy and prestigious the decline of the domestic tourism industry which underpinned Morecambe's boon, its 105-year-old football club has filled the gap - providing jobs, powering local businesses, and offering a sense of community, identity, and now, Morecambe FC faces the imminent prospect of shutting down due to a deepening financial crisis, with owner Jason Whittingham's failure to sell the club leading to suspension from the National proud local people, the impact is enormous."It's absolutely horrible", says Alison Williamson, a Morecambe resident who began supporting the club in 1974. "The football club gives so much to the town. It's just so sad that Whittingham is down in Essex and allowed to take it all away from us."It's kind of a grieving process. It's like losing a member of your family that has always been there. Even if you don't see them all the time, when they're not there anymore, you suffer and you feel the loss."The club's players were sent home a week ago and are unable to train because of a lack of insurance cover. The academy has now also stopped functioning,For some, the slow, painful deterioration of their football club threatens the cohesion of the community and mimics the previous era's erosion of the local economy. "Morecambe used to be fantastic in its heyday," says Les Dewhirst, the club's kit man for the past 30 years. "It had everything from small zoos to fairgrounds to theatres and piers. We've not got much of that now, but it's still a cracking place and football is such a big part of it."I met my wife at the football. We were second-timers and our kids have grown up coming to this ground together. Strangers stop me in the street and say 'hiya Les' and it feels good."I don't know all the names of the people who come here, but I know all the faces. We all come here for the same reason - because we care."That level of care means supporters, led by fans group The Shrimps' Trust, have been protesting against Whittingham's ownership of the club and demanding he sell up for deals have been agreed in the past but nothing has come to fruition and fans face the prospect of having no club to support in the upcoming season."This place is half of my life", says Kate Barker, a fan and former chief steward for 20 years who was subsequently made honorary life vice-president. "All my good friends are here. It's a cliche, but we are a family and we look after each other."We always look forward to seeing each other on a Tuesday and a Saturday, and going to see a match. We might win, lose, or draw - the result doesn't really matter. We've never let football get in the way of a good day out." "We'll still gather together and talk about the old times, what we've done and where we've been. But we should still be able to do it here, every week," adds Barker."Inside I'm being absolutely torn apart."Where once on the town's seafront there were multiple fairgrounds, theatres, piers and miniature zoos, there are now a smattering of bars and restaurants, many of which are funded by matchday income and travelling away club's peril means local businesses are now at risk."The winter months are the hardest here, because it's the seaside," says Chris Donaldson, owner the The Royal Hotel on the seafront. "The football season sees us through that."I've got 19 bedrooms here and away fans are coming from all over fully booking them weeks in advance. The whole town can be full."It'll cost us tens of thousands, easily. It's crazy what it'll do to the town to lose that kind of money. Everyone will feel the effect of it."For staff at the fans' matchday pub, the difference in demeanour is already stark."We get around 400, 500 people on a matchday," says Michael Woolworth, manager of the Hurley Flyer opposite the stadium. "It feels like everyone in Morecambe is in here."It's a ritual every weekend. In here we see that football really brings people together. "But in the last few months we've seen the happiness taken away from them. We have regulars who have come in visibly upset."Morecambe FC has been one of the area's biggest employers in recent times. But the club's financial issues mean that salaries paid to staff and players have been delayed or not paid at all in some months. Dewhirst was last paid in May."I'm eating into my savings now," he says. "Some people aren't lucky enough to have savings - some are going to food banks because they can't afford to buy their shopping."It's been hard watching players leave. There was another one gone yesterday. I've known lots of them for years."I feel broken. Numbness has set in." The club offers far more than football to local residents. Its facilities host a variety of events, fun days and fundraisers for the community and causes close to people's hearts."The club does major work in the community, including sessions here for the elderly people and sessions in care homes," says former co-chairman Rod Taylor, who has removed from the board earlier this summer in a video call hastily arranged by Whittingham."We've got a pre- and post-cancer group that meet regularly, we go into schools to deliver sessions. You can't put a price on that. A high percentage of the population of this town is touched by more than football in some way."That idea of connection across the community, and across generations, is something which typifies the essence of Morecambe's supporter base."Football is that release from normality," Taylor says. "It's a generational thing. My granddad took me to our old stadium Christie Park when I was about five or six years of age. It stays with you. It's ingrained. It's in your DNA."I feel Whittingham probably has to raise more money to settle some of his some of his personal debts. I think he's trying to squeeze more money."The BBC has repeatedly attempted to contact Whittingham, but received no response. Chair of The Shrimps' Trust, Pat Stoyles, has dedicated swathes of his spare time to trying to protect the club's status and long-term future in recent years."The lack of communication from Jason Whittingham has been the biggest problem," he says. "The turmoil has been going on for weeks and weeks on end."The start of the EFL season last weekend was difficult. Normally we'd be glued to that sort of thing, but seeing live football again shows to people what we're going to be missing."The social part of football is the biggest part. What goes on the pitch - that's fine. It's about the people you travel with, you drink with, you stand with, the community that you feel apart of. For a lot of people, losing that is going to have a big impact on their whole wellbeing, their mental health."Some people are already asking if, should the worst come to the worst, we can still go to places together."The National League will meet again on 20 August and, unless convinced Morecambe have the financial means to complete the season, will formally expel them from the fans, staff, and players wait anxiously to see if Whittingham will finally sell the club before it is too late.
The Guardian
18 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Dame Stella Rimington obituary
Stella Rimington, who has died aged 90, was the first head of the Security Service, commonly known as MI5, to be officially identified. She was also the first woman to head the agency, one that had been deeply infused with male culture. Asked what attracted her to MI5, she told me: 'Even though there were all of these tweedy guys with pipes, I still thought the essence of the cold war and spies and stuff was fun. You know, going around listening to people's telephones and opening their mail and stuff.' Rising to the top of MI5 after heading the agency's counter-subversion, counter-espionage, and counter-terrorism divisions was an achievement consolidating her reputation as a formidable Whitehall streetfighter, manifested not least by her success in wrenching from the police Special Branch its historical lead role countering Irish Republican terrorism in mainland Britain. Soon after she retired, she was embroiled in a furious row with her former Whitehall colleagues over her decision to write her memoirs. 'It was quite upsetting,' she said, 'because suddenly you go from being an insider to being an outsider and that's quite a shock.' But, she added: 'I've never been one to retreat at the first whiff of gunshot.' Her most controversial role as she rose up the ranks of MI5 was responsibility for countering 'subversion'. She was active during the miners' strike during the mid-1980s, and justified spying on the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) on the grounds that Margaret Thatcher regarded it as 'the enemy within'. She said: 'If the strike is led by people who say they are trying to bring down the government, our role [is] to assess [them].' She chose her words carefully in an interview with the Guardian, denying that MI5 itself ran agents in the NUM, adding: 'That's not to say the police or police Special Branch … might have been doing some of those things …' The Special Branch reported to MI5 while GCHQ was providing MI5 and the police with technical help for bugging operations. Rimington also justified targeting and keeping files on civil liberty campaigners, protest groups and MPs, on the grounds that while not all their members were regarded as subversives, some of their contacts, colleagues, and friends were. Targets included the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – one of its organisers had been a member of the Communist party – the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and two of its senior officials, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, and Jack Straw, former president of the National Union of Students. All became Labour cabinet ministers. Rimington admitted MI5 checked files on prospective MPs to see if 'there is anything in there of importance ... so the prime minister can take it into account when he forms his government'. She insisted that individuals on whom MI5 had files should not be allowed to see them. She later acknowledged that during the cold war MI5 was 'overenthusiastic', opening files on people who were not 'actively threatening the state'. She also went as far as to accuse successive governments of wanting to 'live in a police state', introducing more and more anti-terrorism laws, including plans to hold terror suspects for 42 hours without charge. Such laws, she said, combined with 'war on terror' rhetoric, played into the hands of those they intended to deter. She described the response to the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 as a 'huge overreaction'. Looking back, she said: 'I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one.' Asked what impact the 2003 invasion of Iraq had on the terrorist threat, she replied: 'Well, I think all one can do is look at what those people who've been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take.' She was born Stella Whitehouse in south London; her father was a draughtsman, her mother a midwife and nurse. Her father had fought at Passchendaele in the first world war. 'He was never able to relax after that, a very uneasy soul, difficult to get close to,' she recalled. He worked in the steel industry in Barrow and then in the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire borders. 'Unfortunately, when we moved out of London, we always seemed to move to places that were priorities for German bombing,' she said, describing her childhood as 'disturbed and frightening … I was four when we left London as the second world war broke out … as the Barrow blitz commenced: hiding under the stairs, windows were blown out and ceilings fell down … Claustrophobia plagued me into adulthood. I struggled to sit in the middle of rows and always stood by the door on the underground. At all times I needed an exit route.' Educated at Nottingham high school, Stella studied English at Edinburgh University, then archive administration at Liverpool University. Her first job was as an assistant archivist in Worcestershire county council's record office. In 1963 she married John Rimington, her childhood boyfriend, who became a high-flying civil servant, and was posted to the British high commission in Delhi responsible for economic and trade relations with India. It was there that, in 1965, she 'fell into intelligence', as she later put it. She was approached by the resident MI5 officer who offered her a job as a typist. 'I was holding coffee mornings and the like … I was grateful for an end to the boredom,' she said. She joined the staff of MI5 in 1969 after the couple returned to Britain. In a colourful passage in her autobiography, to which she gave the provocative title Open Secret, she recounts how she came up against what she described as a 'strict sex-discrimination policy' in MI5. She wrote: 'It did not matter that I had a degree, that I had already worked for several years in the public service, at a higher grade than it was offering, or that I was 34 years old. The policy was that men were recruited as what were called 'officers' and women had their own career structure, a second-class career, as 'assistant officers'. 'They did all sorts of support work, but not the sharp-end intelligence gathering operations.' She vigorously challenged MI5's prevailing culture so successfully that John Major, the then prime minister, approved her appointment as director general – head of the agency – in 1992. After she retired in 1996, she became the target of bitter attacks by Whitehall mandarins and the SAS for daring to write her autobiography. In a ferocious diatribe, David Lyon, colonel commandant of the SAS, wrote in a letter to the Times: 'All members of the country's security forces should keep silent about their work, for life. When there is a requirement to publish, it is the government alone who should do so.' Rimington, he added, could expect 'a long period of being persona non grata, both to many she has worked with and many she has yet to meet among the general public'. She said she received a 'bollocking' from the cabinet secretary, Richard Wilson, and was told to remove any reference to the SAS despite widespread media coverage of their operations, including the well-documented killing of three unarmed members of the IRA in Gibraltar. In an attempt to sabotage her memoir, a copy of the manuscript was leaked to the Sun newspaper. The woman who had spent years deploying the secret state described the process of vetting her memoir as 'Kafkaesque', an experience that, she said, led her to understand 'how persecuted you can feel when things are going on that you don't actually have any control over'. Rimington said she decided to write her memoir to explain to her daughters, Sophie and Harriet, why she was never around as a mother. She separated from her husband when the children were young, but divorce 'seemed a faff' as she put it. They became friendly in old age and lived together during lockdown. 'It's a good recipe for marriage,' she said looking back. 'Split up, live separately, and return to it later.' After completing her memoir she turned to fiction, writing thrillers starring Liz Carlyle, a female agent sometimes referred to as her alter ego, and later Manon Tyler, a CIA agent. In 2011 she chaired the Booker prize panel, when she provoked a controversy by saying 'readability' and an ability to 'zip along' were important criteria for judging books. Literary critics suggested other things such as quality might be taken into account, adding that the shortlist was the worst in decades. Rimington responded by comparing the publishing world with the KGB and its use of 'black propaganda, destabilisation operations, plots and double agents'. Rimington was made Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1996. After she retired she held a number of corporate posts including a directorship of Marks & Spencer, and was chair of the Institute of Cancer Research. She was widely credited as the inspiration for Dame Judi Dench's M in the James Bond films. She is survived by her husband and two daughters. Stella Rimington, intelligence officer, born 13 May 1935; died 3 August 2025
BBC News
18 minutes ago
- BBC News
Farage calls on police to share immigration status of charged suspects
Nigel Farage has called on the police to release the immigration status of suspects charged with crimes following the arrest of two men in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Reform UK party leader said he "absolutely" thinks such details should be released when asked about the matter at a news conference on has been reported that the two men charged in connection with the alleged rape in Nuneaton last month are Afghan nationals but the police have not confirmed this. Warwickshire Police said once someone is charged with an offence, the force follows national guidance that does not include sharing ethnicity or immigration status. The authorised professional practice followed by forces across the country, and cited by the College of Policing, says the told the BBC there was some concern among police that disclosing the immigration status could lead to disorder in the area but that officers "went by the book" when releasing by a reporter at the news conference in Westminster whether police should release the names, addresses and immigration statuses of suspects after they have been charged with a crime, Farage said: "What caused unrest on our streets after Southport last year was us not being told the status of the attacker."That led to crazy conspiracy theories spreading online."Last year's deadly attack in Southport, in which three young girls were murdered, led to the spreading of a false claim online that the attacker was a Muslim asylum a perceived lack of information from police about Nuneaton to what happened in Southport last July, Farage continued: "To have masses of speculation as to what might have happened makes things I think far worse than they otherwise would be".Asked to clarify his thoughts further on whether he thought police forces should be obliged to publish such details, he said: "Yes, I absolutely think that they should."Later in the news conference, Farage called the police's decision not to release details about the alleged Nuneaton attackers a "cover-up that in many ways is reminiscent of what happened after the Southport killings last year.""It is not... in any way at all a contempt of court for the British public to know the identity of those who allegedly have committed serious crimes," he added."I felt that in the wake of the Southport attacks, and I feel that ever more strongly today." Ahmad Mulakhil has been charged with two counts of rape, while Mohammad Kabir has been accused of kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting the rape of a girl aged under Mulakhil, 23, appeared before magistrates in Coventry on 28 July, while Mr Kabir, also 23, appeared in court on were remanded in of Warwickshire County Council George Finch told the same news conference on Monday morning that he was "begging" for information to be released following the who at 19 became the youngest council leader in the UK and represents Reform UK, said he had contacted the chief executive of the council, Monica Fogarty, saying he wished to speak to Warwickshire Police "to urge" them to release the immigration status about the first man charged."I was begging for this to be released, screaming, phoning, asking [for the information] to be released", he the charging of the second suspect, Finch said he wrote a letter addressed to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Warwickshire Police's Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith calling for the immediate release of the two suspects' published the letter on his social media accounts on Sunday, in which he said Ms Fogarty had told him that Mr Kabir was an asylum seeker living in a house of multiple occupancy (HMO). Speaking on Monday, Finch said he would be working to "fight against" houses of multiple occupancy that "have been put up to house illegal immigrants".He also claimed Reform UK needed to "change things" and are "the last line of defence against the blob, the cover-ups of the councils".When asked if police should release the ethnicity of people charged with offences, the prime minister's official spokesman said the police and courts were operationally independent but the principle was to be "as transparent as possible"."We've always said and continue to say that transparency is important," he said."That is our position. For police up to central government, we should always be as transparent as possible when it comes to cases."He added: "This is clearly a deeply upsetting and distressing case which the public are right to feel shocked and angry about."In relation to this case, the individuals have been charged and we are now in a live investigation."In a statement, Warwickshire Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Seccombe said: "It is essential to state that policing decisions - such as whether to release details about a suspect - must follow national guidance and legal requirements."He added that he would not speculate on the personal circumstances of those involved while court proceedings were BBC has contacted Warwickshire County Council for comment.
