Hasta La Ideas

If you recall back to the tail end of last year, when budget cuts were sweeping through the UK with an unmerciful vengeance, and sympathies were particularly heavy toward the Commission for Architecture and the Build Environment (Cabe) as they announced their government funding had been cut. Prince Charles even got a (now semi-routine) batch of flak for offering to help take over some of their architectural review duties with his Foundation for the Built Environment. However, according to a recent report by the Telegraph, perhaps the former employees, the ones who didn’t stick around when the organization merged with the UK’s more famous Design Council, did okay for themselves with some fairly generous severance packages. “Golden handshakes,” the paper calls the government-wide redundancy packages, which reportedly cost British taxpayers somewhere in the range of “almost £1 billion.” Cabe itself apparently did okay, with £2.7million spread across the 76 employees who were laid off. Building Design highlights that its former director of resources, Charlotte Cane, “received £224,000 when she left her post” and Matt Bell, director of campaigns and education, “was handed a £111,000 payout.” Whether you think it’s a good thing that the people in these creative professions weren’t thrown out on the street when the government decided to cut off their employers, or that they should have to pay back every Pound and live in shame, working in forced labor on a peat bog somewhere in the country for the rest of their lives is completely up to you. We just post about it.

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