the sandals are off

Stephen Tall wrote an interesting post on Councillor’s pay. He informs us that Croydon councillors can look forward to £22,000 per year for his trouble, while their counterparts in Corby gets less than £3,000. I remember running for Bucks County Council a couple of years ago and being sent a helpful guide to the County Councillors’ typical week. This ran to a seven day week for an allowance of about £10,000. This possibly explains why so many of our councillors are retired! I could not possibly keep my family on £10,000 per year – so would have to continue with my day job – thus making the seven day week suggested impossible. Wycombe District Council, for which I’m currently running, would pay me about £4,300 if I were elected – but only want me to put in about 20 hours per week – which is do-able – but I’ll hardly be doing it for the money! In our area, a recent opinion poll showed a majority in favour of moving to a Unitary council – although the District Tories and County Tories disagree with each other on this! But it seems to me that moving to a Unitary might allow more realistic allowances for councillors. Only one party ever manages to fight all of the seats on our District council, and this is largely due to a lack of suitable candidates. A large percentage of councillors are retired (nothing wrong with that in itself – I am not being ‘ageist’), but there are many people who would make fine councillors who feel that they couldn’t effectively split their time between work and council duties. A more realist allowance might allow these people to negotiate shorter hours with their employers because the resultant pay cut would be offset by their councillor’s allowance.

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