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Call to end City Council committee chairmen allowances
Peterborough City Council news from The Peterborough Evening Telegraph. www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news
A suggestion that Peterborough City Council could save tens of thousands of pounds by scrapping allowances paid to committee chairmen has been met with an indignant response.
Independent councillor John Fox has called into question the number of hours put in by the chairmen of council committees in return for the £7,165.95 special responsibility allowance they receive on top of the £7,962.08 basic allowance.
The majority of council committees, which includes scrutiny, licensing and planning committees, meet six times per financial year.
And Cllr Fox thinks that some chairmen will work for about four hours on each meeting, which includes preparation time and the meeting itself, meaning their special responsibility allowance translates to pay of £295-per-hour.
But this has prompted an angry response from two chairmen, who say their work goes beyond just preparing for and attending meetings.
Cllr Sue Day, who chairs the Creative Opportunities and Tackling Inequalities Scrutiny Committee, said: “You have to attend pre-meetings as well as go through all the paperwork and documents.
“We also set up and attend sub-groups, such as the Task and Finish Group we set up through our committee dealing with the safeguarding issues in children’s services, which meets regularly.”
Cllr Marion Todd, who chairs the Strong and Supportive Communites Scrutiny Commitee, said: “I refute the claim that we only work 24 hours a year, I certainly put in many more hours than that.
“Being a committee chair is a very demanding job and my conscience is clear over the allowance.”
But as well as pointing out that other councillors who are not chairmen are involved in sub-groups and read documents, Cllr Fox said the amount of cost incurred by being a chairman could easily be met within a councillor’s basic allowance.
He said: “We have councillors on committees who work just as much and as hard as the chairs but get half the remuneration. This is the sort of thing that could be covered by the basic allowance.
“The only committee chair that may justify a payment is planning as they do have a lot more to do than the rest of the committees.”
Councillor allowances - the figures
• The city council pays a special responsibility allowance of £7,165.95 to nine committee chairmen.
• This means the council’s total spending on their chairmen is £64,493.55 each year.
• The chairman of its Employment Committee gets an extra £1,791.48 allowance; while the Standards Committee chair gets an extra £1,569.
• The council spends more than £700,000 each year on councillor allowances.
• The largest special responsibiliyty allowance is for the leader of the council Marco Cereste, who pockets an extra £21,497.85.
What do you think?
Contact our news team by email eteditor@peterboroughtoday.co.uk, telephone 01733 588719, on Twitter - @peterboroughet or use our Have Your Say form
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Comments
There are 13 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
Reader22
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 05:19 PMI wrote to the chair of our Neighbourhood committee three times before the good lady found time to reply. I tend to agree we should scarp them, the trees debate shows just how interested the councillors are in what people think. Please lets throw some of these idiots out in May.
aressee
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 11:47 AMAll Councillors should be doing their job as City Councillors as a 'Civic duty' without any pay and only expenses being paid. Will someone PLEASE explain what good Neighbourhood Committees offer the community? They are staffed by, attended by, and any decisions made are only by City Councillors, who, if they were doing their job properly would be in tune with the voices of their electorate and wouldn't need a 'public forum' anyway. Additionally these Neighbourhood Committees are increasingly doing the work of Parish Councils who have been in place for generations and already a tax cost to many areas like Bretton to the tune of £100k p.a. to the Bretton taxpayer.
NicLab1
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 11:04 AMI think people should go to the full council meeting on wednesday 22nd Feb. to see which councillors are actually working for you. This is some peoples part time job salarys - in a time of austerity - you would think that the cabinet member for tackling inequalities would understand that. I am not against paying people money for work, but not, paying people money for nothing.
Dalek Sec
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 08:50 AMI think we could scrap some of these committees altogether! As for the poor "we do a lot of work" councillor chairmen of these committees - what happened to we're all in this together? Again, another example of the electorate taking all the pain and the politicians still raking it in!
swineshead
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 08:32 AMTo think I thought of public service as that, service, not lining your pocket.. But I do have a constructive suggestion, cut down a load of trees (Bridge Street, Embankment, Rowing Course etc) sell the timber and create a remunertaion pool that Marco can dole out as he sees fit. Darn it, he's thought of that already!
J J Carter
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 07:43 AMWhere's me trough? Oink! Oink,
rubygirl
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 07:22 AMThere was a time when councillors were elected because they wanted to perform a public service, not how much they could milk the system for. If the heads of committees don't feel able to devote the necessary time they should not take on this responsibiity. They certainly should not expect to be paid such an extravagant amount of money. Perhaps when these particular councillors are next up for election the voters will be able to show what they think of their greed in the only way open to them - by kicking them off the council
smith
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 06:46 AMWell said Brian.
Brian Gascoyne
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 12:31 AMWell said Councillor Fox!! For example, I cannot see one iota of common sense in Neighbourhood Councils - sorry Committees or whatever they are called today. The only thing it does is cost the rate payers of this city a fortune for achieving nothing. There are usually more staff from the Council, police and other agencies than public and I would sooner those people concentrate on their jobs of actioning and enforcing rather than having to take time off for attending these utterly useless meetings. A Red herring to suggest that it is democracy at work and letting the people decide (not). We are a small Unitary Authority that already has a council that is creating a smoke screen to fend off angry residents and businesses. £333.33 an hour (or about £5.55 a minute!), and that's just for the chair! How long have we got to suffer all this political claptrap? If the main council actually did its job properly for the people of this city we would be far better off. We cannot afford this gross waste of public funds and should have the courage to say that enough is enough. Stop throwing money at councillors for nothing and reduce the redundancies instead. Community Management Teams already exist and don’t need another expensive tier of committees to make them work.
Sofedup
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:10 PMThese "Chairmen" are disingenuous to all those volunteers in Peterborough who spend hours every week running their organisations often at their own costs for no payment. These volunteers happen to be Chairmen, Secretaries and Treasurers often running organisations that have £100,000's turnover a year, so is no small job. The difference here is that it is hard to find volunteers, yet there are is a queue of people put themselves forward to be voted for as Councillors. It is time they got off the gravy train and started doing the job they chose to put themselves forward for because they 'apparently' wanted to represent the people of Peterborough. You shouldn't be paid for doing what is in effect a voluntary role!
Trigger
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 09:10 PMThere was a time when local councillors were councillors because they wanted to serve the community they lived in, my how times have changed, most it seems are just in it for the money, being a councillor appears to have become a career choice for many, with all the additional payments they seem to be able to claim since Marco Cereste became leader of the council. We have too many councillors and far too many additional committees and of course the neighbourhood councilcommittee thing in addition to paying for a useless parish council in my case. Cereste is taking the council down the same disastrous financial route he took the PCT down when he was in the PCT chair.
Local-Lad
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 08:47 PMI'ts become a parttime job, pity they are not very good at it and we can only sack them every four years.
pauperspatch
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 08:25 PMWell said John Fox,it's about time the gravy train hit the buffers, I'm fed up with these people who want more for less responsibilty to be subsidised by my council tax!
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