PAUL Doherty is resigning from his post as Swindon Council's most senior officer.

The chief executive has accepted voluntary severance of his £100,000-plus contract following pressure from council leader Sue Bates.

His departure date is uncertain, although he is taking three weeks' holiday from tomorrow and may not return.

Negotiations will now take place on his severance package, in which he will receive somewhere between 12 and 43 weeks worth of pay equivalent to between £23,000 and £83,000.

He is leaving in the wake of two damning external reports on his two biggest departments, education and social services.

Government inspectors on both occasions condemned the leadership by senior officers and councillors as poor, saying the council lacked direction and vision.

Education director, Mike Lusty, took early retirement following his department's slating in September.

Social services director, Marie Seaton, would have also found herself under pressure, after her department was one of just 10 in the country to be zero-star rated last month.

Mr Doherty, 49, has agreed to leave the top job in the council voluntarily.

The Evening Advertiser has learned that Labour council leader Sue Bates wrote to him asking him to consider leaving by mutual agreement.

He accepted his fate late on Wednesday, but no formal council announcement has yet been made.

The father-of-three started the job in October 1996 on a salary package of around £70,000 and has since seen above-inflation pay rises push the package beyond the £100,000 mark.

But almost six years on, the education and social services departments taken over from Wiltshire County Council in 1997 have struggled to deliver, while there have also been high-profile problems with benefits and revenues contractor WS Atkins.

The double dose of embarrassing public dressing downs for the council over the last 12 months have led to question marks being raised over council leadership.

The timing of his exit could not be worse for the council, as officials from the Audit Commission were today completing another two-week inspection of the way the council runs all its services.

The Comprehensive Perfor-mance Assessment is intended to give the council, along with all others in the country, an overall rating for quality and efficiency of its services. It will place it into one of four categories: high performing, striving, coasting or poor. Those judged to be failing could face intervention from the state.

The Government's Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the Department of Health are already keeping a close eye on the way the council recovers from its poor inspections, and Mr Doherty's departure could focus their attention even more on Swindon.

Another difficulty is that under the council's contract with Tribal Group plc the firm that took over the running of the education department in May Mr Doherty is written in as the chief education officer to whom Tribal reports.

The council's new education director, whose identity is yet to be revealed, will not start work until September.

The DfES is understood to have requested an urgent meeting in light of the negotiations about Mr Doherty's job to ensure the stability of the new partnership with Tribal is not jeopardised.