Surge in Highland Council salaries is an absolute scandal
The last major revelation about salaries at Highland Council was in 2011 when it emerged that more than 1000 council employees were earning more than £40,000 a year.
Back then the average wage was much lower than that and this caused a public outcry. It led to embarrassed councillors talking of cutting back, downsizing and whittling down numbers, and it did appear in the following years that such work was in progress.
But things move on, and times change.
And now, following an astonishing revelation by The Inverness Courier under the Freedom of Information Act, it seems they have indeed changed - for the worse.
Almost 600 council employees - 594 to be exact - are earning more than £60,000 a year. That's an income in these hard times that very many people can only dream of.
And it gets even worse. Between 2019 and 2025 there was a 445 per cent surge in the number of high-ranking Highland Council officials paid over £60,000 a year. It takes your breath away.
This came at a time of senior councillors endlessly pleading poverty, of warnings of ever higher council taxes, cutbacks in public services, and voluntary organisations threatened with closure because the council said it couldn't afford any longer to give them a few thousand pounds a year.
The response from Highland Council was to spin this partly in the direction of teachers, presumably in the belief that the inclusion of employees generally admired and supported by the public would take the deeply penetrating sting out of these numbers.
A spokesperson said: "Please note that these figures have increased over recent years and include teaching and non-teaching staff."
But the vast majority of teachers don't earn over £60,000. Headteachers and depute headteachers do. But how many in that salary bracket are in the Highlands? There are nowhere near 600 and there may be only a fraction of those high earners in the teaching profession.
So it's mainly gold-plated council officials who are raking it in, and we now know there are so very many of them.
Unlike some people I've never criticised high salaries for council chief executives as they've come and gone over the years.
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The chief has a large workforce to oversee and has the responsibility for keeping a wide range of public services that affect us all functioning.
For such a demanding workload a large salary is fully justified.
But it now emerges there are layers upon layers of council officials who are doing 9-5 jobs in a working environment where £60,000 a year-plus salaries are commonplace.
I'm sure many do good work. But vast numbers of people do good work outside the council HQ as well and earn nowhere near £60,000.
If members of the public are infuriated by all this so too will those members of the public who work for the council as binmen, dinner ladies and grasscutters, and who do other essential jobs. The revelation that there are so many big-money earners in council offices will cause rancour and discontent among them. There's no getting away from the fact.
And councillors - who themselves enjoyed a recent 22 pay rise - are liable to find themselves at the sharp end of criticism over it.
The assumption up till now has been that our elected representatives are at least partly in charge of what's going on at council HQ.
If so, they must have been aware of these rampant salary increases as the council became awash with top-earners. And what did they do to try and prevent it, or bring it to the attention of the public? Nothing it seems, and their silence was deafening.
Nearly 600 council employees earning over £60,000 a year? It's not just a disgrace, it's an absolute scandal.
