Reality is that councillors put in a lot of time and effort

ALTHOUGH your report ‘Three Charnwood Borough councillors each get £2,800 increase’ (Echo, June 14) is accurate it does unfortunately give the wrong impression about what has happened and this has led to a plethora of abusive Facebook comments.

Apparently we are “disgusting”, “fat parasites”, “immoral”, “selfjustifying bigots”, “close to corruption” and the “biggest criminals walking”.

All councillors receive an allowance in recognition of the time, work and costs involved. The scheme is based on rules set out in national legislation and the levels are set by an independent panel. We have no control over this process.

Charnwood can have up to 10 Cabinet members but operates with nine.

In May 2015 it was agreed that six of these would be full Cabinet members with specific responsibilities and three of us would act as deputies for those with the largest portfolios. This system did not work in practice and in December 2016 the portfolios were reassigned but we temporarily retained our ‘Deputy Lead’ title even though we were doing exactly the same as other full members of the Cabinet.

All that this change does is reflect the fact that the Cabinet members all have specific responsibilities and all now receive the same allowance.

An alternative way of looking at this is that for seven months three of us were doing the same role as our colleagues but receiving half the allowance. The principle of equal pay for equal work cannot only be applied to women.

There are no party political differences over this issue although Labour councils tend to have higher allowances. For instance, a member of Labour-controlled Bolsover council receives more than twice the amount than a Charnwood councillor.

If you take into account tax and the amount of hours spent on Cabinet work the amount of money that I receive is about half the minimum wage: being a councillor is not an easy way of making money.

This allowance is, of course, not intended to be a form of income and alongside fellow Southfields councillor Ted Parton we endeavour to put all of the money that we receive from Charnwood back into the community through our regular newsletters, Freephone 24/7 contact line, mailbox, websites and so on.

What the Echo Facebook comments also failed to understand is that the work of a Cabinet member is rarely reported in the media and involves a significant amount of background work – both attending meetings and formulating policy. My own responsibility – private and strategic housing – currently involves six main areas:

• Implementing the Homelessness Reduction Act. If Charnwood get this right, and alongside the officers a lot of work is being done in ensuring that we are ready, it will not only result in a significant reduction in homelessness in the borough but also cut the number of people that we have to put into temporary accommodation.

• Fine-tuning our empty homes strategy. Charnwood adopts a hands-on approach towards empty properties and attempts to get them back onto the market either to buy or to rent. This is involve working closely with residents, the police, local groups and estate agents and is already making a significant difference.

• Revising Charnwood’s housing assistance policy. The aim is to ensure a fairer and more consistent treatment of residents within the Borough through its application when dealing with requests for grant assistance.

• Devising improvements to Charnwood’s choice-based lettings allocation policy.

• Introducing a system of landlord licensing to deal with the growing problem of HMOs and rented accommodation in Loughborough. This is closely associated with our work with the University and the Students Union on landlord accreditation.

• Jointly managing Charnwood’s sheltered housing project board which is improving the condition of sheltered units across the Borough.

As with any government, whether local or national, the detailed formulation of policy takes a considerable amount of time and effort and is rarely reported. Only when we have coherent policies are they presented to the council and undergo the appropriate scrutiny process before they are adopted.

Charnwood’s Cabinet is tasked with managing a £45 million operation and the total cost of these allowances is just 0.1 per cent of its annual expenditure. As well as ensuring that the rest of the 99.9 per cent of this money is spent responsibly, Cabinet members of all councils, whatever their political balance, can make a positive contribution to its management that delivers benefits that massively outweighs their cost.

It is very easy for these armchair critics to make ill-informed, abusive and inaccurate comments about councillors and suggest that we are somehow exploiting our position for personal gain. The reality is that we all – Conservative, Labour and even our sole Liberal Democrat – put a considerable amount of time and effort into doing as well as we possibly can on behalf of the residents of our respective wards and, in the case of the Cabinet, the borough as a whole.

Paul Mercer (councillor)