A TEMPORARY finance boss employed by Somerset Council will earn more than Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the next 12 months, should he remain in No 10 during that time.

Part-time interim chief financial officer Clive Heaphy will also only have to work four days a week for the Somerset authority, compared to the hours the PM is likely to put in.

Mr Heaphy, who had left the authority but has been brought back for another year, will be paid a salary of just under £300,000 for his ‘section 151’ job, far in excess of Sir Keir’s current wage of about £167,000.

The startling contrast was highlighted at the council’s annual meeting by Conservative opposition group leader Cllr Diogo Rodrigues.

Cllr Rodrigues said: “The cost of the section 151 officer is £291,000 for the extension.

“That is an additional funding requirement of £89,000, just for one year.

“This will be funded through the council’s capitalisation directive, so, we are selling assets to pay for our section 151 officer.

“It is a very, very hefty sum, and I wonder what progress is being made into employing a permanent officer again.

“There is clearly no stability when we have an interim officer costing us twice as much as the Prime Minister.”

The capitalisation directive, which allows the sale of assets to fund day-to-day spending on services and salaries, was granted by the Government to help the authority out of a financial crisis it has been battling for the past three years.

Council chief executive Duncan Sharkey said: “We are working quite hard within the market, we were speaking to consultants just yesterday.

“It is a very tough market right now, there has been a lot of people locked up in their existing roles by the local government reorganisation process, which is running across a large part of the country.

“Everybody is struggling.

“The people who have been recruiting most recently seem to have been recruiting either from people directly in their locality or actually from within.

“We are keeping a very active view on the market.

“We will be looking to see what we can do.

“Obviously, at some point we would have to take a view on the timeliness of recruiting in proximity to the budget, because we have got to have the budget set fairly.”

Council leader Cllr Bill Revans said after the meeting: “There is a national shortage of suitably qualified chief financial officers, which means the recruitment market is challenging.

“Therefore, we need to pay the market rate to ensure we have an appropriately skilled and experienced interim in post.

“While we would prefer to have a permanent employee in this role, our priority is to have strong financial leadership in place.

“We have taken significant steps to stabilise our finances and continue to move away from a financial emergency into a recovery phase.”

Every UK authority by law has to have a finance chief, or ‘section 151 officer’, responsible for ensuring control of its spending and handling council taxpayers’ money responsibly.