The search is on for a new boss of Barrow Borough Council after the incumbent announced his plans to retire in March.

Phil Huck, who revealed that he would be stepping down before the festive break, has spent 32 years at the authority, during which time he held seven roles.

He took the reigns as executive director seven years ago from former chief executive, Tom Campbell, having worked his way up the ladder after joining the authority as a planning assistant in 1986.

The Kendal-born father of three will bow out after a decade of bedlam in Local Government financing, which has seen the council lose £7million in funding – equivalent to 40 per cent of its income - and shedding around 20 per cent of its workforce. 

“It’s been tough,” admitted Mr Huck.

“We’ve been cutting now for getting on for a decade and local government has been massacred by cuts from central Government.

“If a business had to make the kind of cost reductions we have, I doubt very much, they would still be standing.”

He added: “I am going for personal reasons. It’s family reasons. I’ve done this job now for seven years and a new administration will be starting in May next year, a new four-year administration. 

“I think whoever replaces me will have four years to develop their own relationship with a new council leader, so the timing is right.”

Mr Huck – who worked in industry before switching to local government and returning to Cumbria – also said he had felt the “weight of history” in the top role at Barrow Borough Council.

“It’s been a real privilege to work here and I have said it to the councillors,” he said.

“I honestly, in every sense of the word, have been privileged to work for an authority like this.

"I have been able to do things that I have really enjoyed and I have worked with some fantastic people. 

"Councillors get a bad press but they are doing their best to work for the community.”

Mr Huck said Barrow was “booming” and he had never seen it as “buoyant,” but it also suffered serious deprivation.

“We’re peripheral, a long way from the M6 and the national economy, with a group of people who are relatively disadvantaged,” he said.

“We have reduced it by about 10 per cent but there are still a group of people there who are relatively untouched by what’s going on in the local economy – that’s the big challenge for the future, and it transcends local government structures and all the rest of it.”