Councillors back allowance freeze to make savings

COUNTY councillors will be facing a pay freeze this year after an independent review recommended there should be no increase in their allowances.

All parties on the council backed the freeze at a meeting last week (Thursday 23).

It means all 84 councillors who were elected on May 5 will continue to receive £12,805 by way of their basic allowance for the year.

Special responsibility allowances given to councillors in key roles, paid on top of their basic allowance, will also be frozen.

This means Conservative cabinet members will continue to be paid £27,370 each, plus their basic allowance.

The Conservative leader of the county council Paul Carter will be eligible for £42,109 for the job, in addition to the £12,805 basic allowance.

In a report, the independent remuneration panel says it considered changing coun- cillors’ pay but had concluded “neither an increase or decrease would be appropriate at the current time.”

However, the panel has told KCC to curb the number of members being paid special responsibility allowances, saying too many qualify for them.

It said extra payments made to the chairmen and vice chairman of the authority’s locality boards, which were set up two years ago, should be scrapped.

The inclusion of these in KCC’s scheme meant that nearly 70% of all councillors qualified for some kind of extra allowance.

Coincidentally, the county counci l has this week announced a suspension of locality boards, saying they are under review.

In other changes, Cllr Roger Latchford, the leader of the new 17-strong opposition UKIP group at County Hall, will be paid an allowance of £6,316 and be given £500 for each member to allocate to shadow cabinet members.

Both the Labour and Liberal Democrat group leaders will also receive £6,316 and a further £500 to give to anyone with extra responsibilities.

Altogether, this means that nearly £36,000 will be spent on opposition group payments.

In the latest available figures for 2011-12, allowances paid to the council’s 84 members amounted to £1.66m, with the basic allowance accounting for £1.07m of that.

A further £580,000 was spent on special responsibility allowances.

The overall bill was £1.8m including nearly £140,000 that was paid to members for travel expenses.

Under the new arrangements, the overall bill for allowances is expected to fall by about £84,000.