The TaxPayers’ Alliance released its Town Hall Rich List 2026 this week – the 20th annual catalogue of what local councils pay their most senior people, timed with characteristic relish to land just as residents open their new council tax bills. Nationally, a record 4,733 council employees received over £100,000 in total remuneration in 2024–25, up 21 per cent in a single year and roughly eight times the number when the list first appeared in 2007.
Ten posts are listed for Cannock Chase District Council, all of them shared with Stafford Borough Council under a joint management arrangement. And every single one of them appears under the same name.
Undisclosed.
Here’s the thing about that. The TaxPayers’ Alliance compiles its data directly from each council’s published annual accounts. If a name doesn’t appear in the Rich List, it’s because the council chose not to include names in their published accounts. Cannock Chase District Council made exactly that choice, while simultaneously publishing a publicly available officer structure document, with full names, salary bands and email addresses, on their own website.
So allow us to fill in the blanks.
Across all 78 entries for West Midlands district councils in the 2026 Rich List, just two people are named. Nationally, 21 per cent of entries carry names. In the West Midlands district tier: 2.6 per cent. Cannock Chase accounts for zero of those named entries, alongside 16 other West Midlands districts that have made the same choice. Lichfield District Council, with admirable consistency, at least names its chief executive. We’ll come back to Lichfield.
The Team
The ten posts, as published in the Town Hall Rich List 2026, with total remuneration figures sourced from CCDC’s 2024–25 accounts, and names supplied from the council’s own published officer structure:
Tim Clegg: Joint Chief Executive
Salary: £149,068 | Pension: £32,795 | Total: £181,863
Chris Forrester: Deputy Chief Executive (Resources) / Section 151 Officer
Salary: £111,801 | Pension: £25,043 | Total: £136,844
Note: salary above the £98,686–£109,074 band published in the April 2024 officer structure
Gregg Stott: Deputy Chief Executive (Place)
Salary: £104,702 | Pension: £23,034 | Total: £127,736
Dean Piper: Head of Economic Development and Planning
Salary: £92,241 | Pension: £19,911 | Total: £112,152
Note: salary above the £77,910–£88,298 band published in the April 2024 officer structure
Nirmal Samrai: Head of Housing (HRA) and Corporate Assets
Salary: £90,505 | Pension: £20,273 | Total: £110,832
Joss Presland: Head of Operations
Salary: £90,506 | Pension: £19,911 | Total: £110,443
Judith Aupers: Head of Transformation and Assurance
Salary: £90,506 | Pension: £19,911 | Total: £110,417
Ian Curran: Head of Law and Governance / Monitoring Officer
Salary: £90,506 | Pension: £19,911 | Total: £110,417
Gabrielle Whitehouse: Head of Regulatory Services
Salary: £85,868 | Pension: £19,234 | Total: £105,102
Anna Nevin: Head of Wellbeing
Salary: £85,566 | Pension: £18,683 | Total: £104,249
Combined salary bill: £991,269.
Combined pension contributions: £218,706.
Grand total: £1,210,055.
Because these posts are shared, Cannock Chase’s approximate share sits around £605,000*. That is one number. Here is another: as of October last year, Cannock Chase District Council had 45 unfilled vacancies across the organisation – roughly 30 per cent of its entire workforce. We’ll come back to that too.
Above the Published Bands
Two of the ten salaries sit above the bands CCDC published in April 2024.
Chris Forrester’s post of Deputy Chief Executive (Resources) and Section 151 Officer was listed on a band of £98,686–£109,074. His 2024–25 salary was £111,801: £2,727 above the published top.
Dean Piper’s Head of Economic Development and Planning post was listed on a band of £77,910–£88,298. His 2024–25 salary was £92,241: £3,943 above the published top.
Salary bands can move for entirely legitimate reasons – regrading, market supplements, revised pay structures. CCDC may have perfectly sound explanations for both figures. The problem is that those explanations are not visible anywhere in the public domain, because the names were not published in the annual accounts. The discrepancy is only visible because the org chart exists to cross-reference against.
This is precisely what the Town Hall Rich List was designed to surface.
How Cannock Chase Compares
The full dataset allows us to put these figures in context across peer authorities.
For the joint chief executive role, Tim Clegg’s salary of £149,068 sits in the middle of the pack for shared CEO arrangements across the country. Among West Midlands and nearby authorities with comparable joint or shared arrangements:
- Staffordshire Moorlands / High Peak: £187,297
- Bromsgrove / Redditch: £179,456
- Wychavon / Malvern Hills: £151,851
- Cannock Chase / Stafford (Tim Clegg): £149,068
- East Staffordshire: £141,732
- Warwick: £140,400
Tim Clegg’s package is not out of range for a shared CEO arrangement. It is, however, worth noting that at the bottom of this list, Warwick’s standalone chief executive earns £140,400 – a smaller gap than one might expect given that Warwick is managing a single authority rather than two.
Then there is Lichfield.
Lichfield District Council’s chief executive, Simon Fletcher, is one of the very few West Midlands district officers named in the Rich List. His salary for 2024–25 was £164,295 – a full £15,227 more than Tim Clegg, for running a single district council rather than two. This matters because Lichfield appears by name in Cannock Chase District Council’s own scrutiny committee minutes from December 2025, cited by officers as a council that “always looks to culture their officers” and consistently outcompetes CCDC on salary when recruiting frontline professional staff.
The implication, as presented to scrutiny, was that CCDC loses frontline talent to better-paying councils like Lichfield. What the Rich List now reveals is that Lichfield also pays its chief executive more than Cannock Chase pays its joint CEO; and Lichfield does it for one authority rather than two.
The Two-Speed Council
At the December 2025 Responsible Council Scrutiny Committee, officers presented a detailed picture of CCDC’s workforce challenges. Forty-five vacancies. Thirty per cent of the workforce. A principal building control surveyor post that had been empty for thirty-two months and still hadn’t been filled. Persistent gaps across building control, corporate finance, planning, and environmental health.
The stated reason was money. CCDC can’t compete with the private sector on salary. Market supplements, a tool in the council’s own HR toolkit, have been applied “sparingly,” partly out of budget concern and partly to avoid the knock-on effect on surrounding pay grades. When posts remain unfilled, the council relies on expensive agency cover, which costs more than a permanent appointment but requires no commitment.
Some of those posts had been advertised four times. Some had been vacant since 2022. The council’s Strategic Risk Register flags workforce capacity as a live and unresolved risk.
Set that against the senior team’s pay figures, and a structural tension emerges. CCDC tells frontline professional staff it cannot match what they could earn elsewhere. It tells scrutiny committees it has limited room to use market supplements. It uses expensive agency staff as a default because permanent recruitment keeps failing. Meanwhile, at least two officers in the top ten have salaries that have moved above their published band tops, one by nearly £4,000, without any public explanation for the change.
None of this is a personal criticism of the officers involved. They are doing demanding jobs in a difficult environment, and if their pay has moved above band it may well reflect decisions that were perfectly reasonable at the time. The issue is structural: the council presents its financial position as a constraint on what it can pay frontline workers while senior pay quietly grows above its own published limits, and no one is required to explain why in public because the names were never put in the annual accounts.
The Shared Services Defence
To be direct about it: the shared management arrangement with Stafford Borough Council is a genuine efficiency. Two small district councils sharing a single senior team costs less than each running their own. The model has merit and the councils are not wrong to operate it.
That said, “cheaper than the alternative” is a floor, not a verdict. The question of what value residents receive from the management team they actually have, as opposed to a hypothetical more expensive one, is entirely separate, and considerably less settled.
A Note on the List Itself
The TaxPayers’ Alliance is a campaigning organisation with a clear political perspective, and readers are entitled to know that. The Town Hall Rich List arrives wrapped in language about “bloated public sectors” and councils “feathering their nests” that not everyone will find appropriate. Running a local authority is genuinely complex, demanding work, and pay that reflects that is not inherently unreasonable.
What the Rich List does well is put numbers into the public domain that would otherwise require dedicated effort to find. It performs a transparency function that councils should, in principle, be doing themselves. When Cannock Chase District Council’s accounts list ten officers as “Undisclosed,” they are declining to perform that function. The TaxPayers’ Alliance fills the gap. We fill the remaining gap.
What Happens Next
Project Daylight will be submitting a Freedom of Information request to Cannock Chase District Council asking for:
- The full apportionment of shared management costs between Cannock Chase and Stafford for 2024–25;
- The current salary bands for all ten posts listed in the Rich List;
- Details of any market supplements applied to those posts.
We will publish the response in full, or, if previous patterns hold, whatever comes back instead of a response.
In the meantime, Cannock Chase District Council’s most senior officers are no longer undisclosed. They are listed above, with their salaries, their pension contributions, and their total packages. They work in your name, with your money, and it seems reasonable that you should know who they are.
Data sources: TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List 2026 (2024–25 financial year). Officer names: CCDC/Stafford BC published officer structure, April 2024. Above-band flags based on April 2024 published salary bands – bands may have been formally revised since. West Midlands and peer comparison data extracted from full TPA 2026 dataset. Staffing vacancy and scrutiny data: CCDC Responsible Council Scrutiny Committee, December 2025 and January 2026. *Shared post costs shown as approximate 50/50 splits – actual apportionment may differ.
If you spot any errors in our reporting, please let us know at hello@projectdaylight.co.uk
Project Daylight is an independent local government accountability journalism initiative covering Cannock Chase District Council.
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