‘Secrecy’ row as Hull council official quits with £77,000 payoff

Susan De Val resigned from her £85,000-a-year post as Hull Council’s chief legal officer, making her the second person to quit the role in four years.

Public sector union Unison is now calling for a limit to the size of settlements at a time when the council is shedding jobs and facing huge cuts in resources from central Government.

The union’s lead negotiator at the council, Adrian Kennett, said: “We want a cap on payouts because the majority of our members don’t walk away with anything near that and we don’t think it’s fair in the current climate.

“Senior officers don’t really provide value for money anyway. Our position is we want a cap. In this case if you cap at £40,000 it means there is £37,000 left which could provide a frontline social worker, which is exactly what we need at the moment.

“We need more frontline staff and less senior managers.”

The leader of the Labour-controlled authority, Steve Brady, said he was angry Mrs De Val’s settlement had been made public but said any issues surrounding her departure had begun under the previous Liberal Democrat administration.

He said: “The problems have been rolling on since well before the election (in May).

“This was a confidential agreement between two parties. The chief executive (Nicola Yates) has given me an outline of what had happened. I spoke to her again and asked her to start an immediate inquiry to find out where the information came from.”

The council declined to comment on any of the details and said it had a duty to protect individual employees, adding in a statement: “We do not understand why any individual employee, out of hundreds of staff that have left the organisation over the past few months, has been singled out in this way. The circumstances around Mrs De Val’s departure are private and confidential.

“Hull City Council will therefore be undertaking an independent internal investigation as to how and why this confidential matter came to be in the public domain.”