Janet Archer is stepping down as chief executive of Creative Scotland with immediate effect, after massive screw-ups in the last funding round.
She apologised to Parliament and now she’s off to do other things with a six-months pay cheque in lieu of notice.
Why does this never happen at dear old Arts Council England?
Ever.
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In other news, Scotland has an arts scene.
As opposed to…?
yeah great isn’t it? Nice to see a government with a commitment to the arts at all levels.
Up until January Janet had done a solid job at Creative Scotland, pity this funding round went so badly wrong. I do recall also that former ACE CEO Peter Hewitt fled the scene after the equally disastrous 2007 funding round, so there may be precedent here
From what height?
Six months’ pay sounds staggeringly generous to me in the circumstances. I understand that there has to be some premium if you are trying to persuade an employee to resign (as opposed to making them redundant, or firing them for misconduct), but this payout is almost four times as generous as what she would have got under statutory redundancy pay, as explained at
https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay
(according to the Herald article, her salary is between £115k and £120k, which means that six months’ pay would be £57·5k–£60k; statutory redundancy pay for five years’ service is 2·5–7·5 weeks’ pay, depending on how old you were at the time of service; if we assume that Archer started the job aged 41 or over, that means she would have got 7·5 weeks’ pay, which equates to somewhere in the region of £16·5k–£17·5k, depending on the exact salary and how you calculate the /pro rata/; however, statutory redundancy pay is capped at £15240; therefore, assuming her six months’ pay was at the lower bound, £57·5k, that means her payout was circa 3·77 times what she would have got under statutory redundancy pay; to me, that sounds like a very generous premium, and, if I were on the board, I would have either pushed for a lower settlement or taken the gamble of possible litigation in response to firing her without a payout)
+1. Public figures are able to negotiate far more generous terms than mere mortals. This pay out should be stopped and money saved distributed to organisations who suffered under her regime. She will say and do nothing because her snout is still in the trough!