Ged Curran, the chief executive at Merton Council for nearly 17 years, is set to leave his £220,000 per year job.
Exit: Merton CEO Ged Curran
There has been no formal announcement from Merton of Curran’s departure, but the council is holding an appointments committee meeting at their Morden offices next week, with a vacancy for a chief executive on the agenda.
Curran’s exit from Merton comes less than four months after Stephen Alambritis, the long-standing Labour leader of the council, stood down from his role.
Curran has worked in local government for nearly 35 years, and is close to retirement age. He took up the Merton job, where he is in charge of 5,000 paid staff, in March 2004. He joined from Lambeth, where he had been an exec director for eight years, following a previous spell as the borough solicitor in Newham.
Curran receives a salary of £192,000, plus a 15 per cent employer pension contribution, as well as regular payments of thousands of pounds as the borough’s chief returning officer.
He is regarded as one of the capital’s most senior civic servants, and since last March has been on the panel of the London Strategic Co-ordination Group, which has planned the city’s response to the covid-19 emergency.
He enjoyed a fleeting amount of national notoriety in 2011 when, while his council was laying off one-third of its staff, it was reported that he was ordered to spend at least one day in 10 out of the office… so he can take time to think.
Curran’s exit was first noticed by local site merton.tv, who tweeted this morning, “He personally tried to remove Merton TV from our first ever chamber recording, without success.”
Merton Council has failed to respond to an invitation to offer comment on their chief executive’s impending exit.
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New job for Negreedy ? …definitely not.