I'm no Eric Bloodaxe, my job's to clean up the mess

IN AN expansive and modern office near London's bustling Victoria Station lies a little haven of Yorkshire.

On the walls hang David Hockney's Winter Road near Kilham and a painting of the Bront Parsonage.

On the sideboard sits a photograph of Margaret Thatcher surrounded by Bradford councillors about 20 years ago.

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And on the sofa sits former Bradford Council leader Eric Pickles, pictured alongside Lady Thatcher in the picture, and as Yorkshire as they come, even if he now represents a seat in Essex.

Tomorrow he will arrive at his 40th Conservative conference – having first attended in 1970 as an 18-year-old – but will, for the first time, take to the platform as a Minister, in charge of the Department for Communities and Local Government.

He admits there is room for a little celebration given that the Tories are back in power for the first time in 13 years, and although champagne will be off the agenda, karaoke is permitted.

He admits to being surprised how well the coalition has settled down – describing it as " remarkably cordial" – and having bedded into his department quickly has already agreed his spending settlement with the Treasury.

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While councils have already had major cuts inflicted to budgets this year and are braced for much tougher times ahead, Mr Pickles contests Labour's portrayal of him as a bloodthirsty axeman. In fact,

he says, he is merely repairing a financial mess left by

Labour.

"I think I would be very distressed if it was thought I was getting any sort of pleasure from this ," he says. "I think you could only see that through the narrow prism of prejudice.

"What I'm trying to do is protect front-line services. What I'm trying to do is avoid deeper cuts later on."

If anyone doubts him, he refers to his own experiences in Yorkshire and is fully aware of the region's greater reliance on the public sector.

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"It's not a novelty to see people who you actually know that have been unemployed or are unemployed, and to me those folks aren't statistics," he says. "I'm very conscious when you talk about reducing the size of administration here and in local authorities most of them have got mortgages, they've got kids going through school, they've got spouses, all these worries and you've got to try to do it in a civilised and as helpful way as you can."

In his conference speech tomorrow he will turn his attention to council chief executives. Salaries have got "completely out of kilter with reality" he says, and he wants the highest paid to take responsibility and cut their own pay. Seeking to influence councils is the new approach rather than issuing Whitehall diktats.

He even questions whether the role is necessary at all, given Labour's local government reforms which ditched the old committee system and created town halls run by a cabinet of executive councillors.

"They'll give you this complete nonsense about 'we represent a 1billion, a 1.5 billion authority'. Well, strip out education spending, strip out social services spending – of which I don't know many chief executives who take a particularly active interest in either of those two – and you ain't touching 1 billion, you're just talking a few million quid.

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"When Labour did the reorganisation and moved across to executive members – the cabinet system – they didn't seem to realise actually the chief executive's role was pretty redundant. In truth, you probably need a head of paid service but you don't need a chief executive."

Mr Pickles also wants councils across large areas to share a single chief executive and merge administrators to cut costs. It may already be happening on a small scale – with Hambleton and Richmondshire sharing a top manager – but he wants to go much further. "It would be clearly easy in West Yorkshire because there's a distinct West Riding kind of ethos, but whether it would ever be possible for Leeds and Bradford to share an officer that's a matter, I think, of deep ingrained years of rivalry," he says.

"But in truth, do they really need to have a lot of separate officers? Can't you get some of the economies of scale by sharing officers? Say they had a joint planning department, that planning department would be able to operate better."

Returning to chief executives, he adds: "I'm not expecting them to sack them all, but I do think when they're sat looking at replacements they should look at sharing chief executives or deciding not to bother having one."

Tomorrow he will deliver that message on the conference stage – in an unmistakable Yorkshire accent.