Councillors' pay: a proposal

The question - how much should councillors be paid? - is prompted by the figures released by the Taxpayers’ Alliance showing the average councillor allowance is now £9,300. As always, this mean hides extremes. Putting to one side the Greater London Assembly, the most lucrative place to serve your community on the council is Croydon, where you would earn £22,142 a year. By contrast, a place on Corby council was rewarded with £2,964.

For the record, Oxford city council is placed 275th out of 386 councils, with an average councillor salary of £5,137. (Though I’ll have earned more in the last year by being a member of the city’s executive board.)

I find myself conflicted on this subject, though not out of personal interest (my city council allowance is not my main source of income). Local government desperately needs to attract top quality, committed citizens to become councillors - one obvious way to do so is to ensure it is reasonably well-rewarded.

However, there’s a paradox here.

If I were paid something approaching a full-time wage, I would not continue as a councillor - because I know I simply could not work a sufficient number of hours to justify such a salary. And, flexible and accommodating as my employers are, they might start to question my commitment to my day job if they knew I had a second job paying the national average salary. So, in my case - and maybe others’ - the effect of increasing the salary on offer is to make the job a less appealing prospect.

Equally, I recognise there are many councillors who throw themselves into their duties, and it would be churlish not to acknowledge their efforts. Though quantity of work does not always equate to effectiveness of performance, of course.

The real barrier to the further involvement of committed citizens in local government is, in any case, the democratic process itself. There is a general decline in voluntary activity, whether at political or community level, in British life. And few sane individuals will choose to spend a good chunk of their evenings and week-ends from March to May knocking on their neighbours’ doors, or posting leaflets through dog-infested letter-boxes.

I am, therefore, unconvinced that increasing councillors’ allowances will drive up the quality of those who seek out the role. In any case, what real accountability is there? Yes, we have elections - but they are a blunt appraisal system. Hard-working councillors can be chucked out by a fickle electorate rejecting their government, while indolent councillors may be protected by an opposition party’s national brand.

Here’s my proposal:

I reckon every councillor should be expected to devote at least a day a week to their job: they should, therefore, be paid an annual allowance of one-fifth of the average salary of those who work within their local authority area.

They should then register how many days a week they reckon they devote to the job of councillor. If they reckon they work a 5-day week, they should say so, and will be paid at the full average salary - provided they produce a weekly digest of how they have spent their time, which would be published on their council’s website. If they reckon they work two days a week, they will be paid two-fifths of the average salary, and so on.

This will give the public a clear steer as to the amount of work they can expect from their local councillor. They will be able to weigh up the cost of that councillor against their judgement of his or her performance. Clearly they will expect more ‘bang for their bucks’ from a full-time councillor than they would a part-timer. But they may prefer a productive and efficient councillor whose salary is not helping ratchet-up their Council Tax.

Those who free-load - claiming the full rate but demonstrably failing to do the job - will find themselves vulnerable to local newspaper 'naming and shaming', and to challenge from opponents at elections.

One final ingredient:

Each year, the Council draws up its performance plan and sets targets it should achieve. Pay increases to councillors should be linked to the council’s delivery in these areas. If they hit their targets, and the council achieves what it has promised, councillors will have earned their corn. If they miss them, they should suffer the consequences, as working folk do in every other walk of life. I suspect this would ensure councillors paid a little bit more attention to the setting and delivery of achievable targets for improvement.

Oxford city's unitary bid fails

Bad news here in Oxford, following the Government’s announcement today that the City Council has failed in its bid for unitary status, which would have seen it become responsible for all local government services.

Sixteen local authorities have been successful in being short-listed, including two cities: Norwich and Exeter. But not us.

There’s a tendency among politicians to get obsessed with structures and institutions - there’s a danger we forget the public doesn’t really care about who delivers the services, only that they are delivered well. However, there is no doubt that two-tier local government in Oxford hampers accountability.

My residents - quite understandably - do not see the distinction between the City and County. To them, we are simply ‘the Council’, and arguments about which local authority is responsible for which services is seen as buck-passing (which it sometimes is).

Oxford, with some 140,000 residents, is large but compact enough to have made a success of being a unitary authority (which can have populations as small as 30,000). It has a distinctive, vibrant culture. Only in a centralised state like the UK would this city be considered ‘unsustainable’. But local government is the victim of central government’s mantra that big is - if not beautiful - then at least economic.

It is becoming clear that Labour now wants district councils to wither on the vine. That is the thrust behind the Government’s jargon-heavy imperative in today’s press release:

In remaining two-tier areas Government expects all councils to pursue new working arrangements to achieve the same level of improvement and efficiency gains as we expect the new unitaries will be achieving.

‘New working arrangements’ is of course code for increasing absorption of the five Oxfordshire district councils into the super-fiefdom that is the County Council, dominated by Tories who are entirely without representation in the city.

And I am bound to say it says little for the lobbying skills of Oxford East’s Labour MP, Andrew Smith, that the city has not made it onto the Government’s little list. Local Labour activists had been increasingly confident in recent weeks that Mr Smith would go to Whitehall and deliver. Alas not.

Today, then, is a day of disappointment. Tomorrow, we must all pick ourselves up, and start working on making a success of the poor hand dealt to us by the Government.

Which is an experience those of us who’ve spent a few years on local councils are getting increasingly accustomed to.

If you're not doing anything else on May 3rd...

I’m all for making it easier to vote, and for piloting new and different systems. Sadly, New Labour’s typically authoritarian early experiments have included the abolition of the private ballot - or compulsory postal voting as it was better known.

This too often led to well-documented illegalities - among all parties - as well as countless undocumented abuses where the 'head of the household' cast votes on behalf of his entire family.

This Government’s typically cavalier approach to individual rights, with scant regard for the more vulnerable members of our society, has devalued positive proposals for flexible voting arrangements in the public’s eyes.

So it’s no surprise that such measures - including electronic voting - are met with some degree of scepticism, as evidenced by this e-mail I received today, sent on behalf of www.openrightsgroup.org:

Despite the well known problems with e-voting and e-counting the government is pressing ahead with pilots at the May 2007 local elections. To make sure we all get a true picture of how these pilots are run, the Open Rights Group calls for people on the ground in every local authority where pilots will be held to help with our fully accredited election observer programme. We'll provide full instructions on the activitie expected of you on the day and also supply a factsheet of what to look out for in each of the different pilots. We'll expect you to be travelling around the pilot area during the day, and to turnaround a quick report for us afterwards.

Please help us reach willing volunteers across the country by highlighting the issue and in particular our signup page on pledgebank at http://www.pledgebank.com/electionwatch07

If you or your colleagues want to learn or do more, please take a look at our e-voting mini-site's summaries, extensive briefing pack and suggestions for activism at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/

Electronic voting will be piloted in: Rushmoor, Sheffield, Shrewsbury & Atcham, South Bucks and Swindon. Electronic counting will be piloted in: Bedford, Breckland, Dover, South Bucks, Stratford-on-Avon District Council and Warwick District Council.

Thanks for your support on this crucial issue.

I imagine many readers may already have plans for election day (telling, knocking up, last minute leaflets, etc) - but, if not, there are worse ways of spending some of May 3rd.

It’s a sad reflection that New Labour has so undermined trust in our democracy that democracy itself has been brought into disrepute.

Petitions what I’ve signed

Credit where it’s due. Number 10’s e-petition website - Tony Blair’s new millennium answer to President Andrew Jackson’s ‘Big Block of Cheese Day’ - is a damn fine innovation.

No one really expects the Government to take any action as a result, but democracy is about letting off steam as well as changing things for the better.

Of course, one side-effect is that we can all expect to be petitioned by friends, colleagues (and random correspondents) to add our names to the petitions, and stake our positions publicly on a range of controversial issues.

Fortunately, the two I’ve so far been directly asked to sign I’ve been more than happy to support:

Jock Coats calls on the Prime Minister:

to Abolish the Department of Communities and Local Government and allow local people to decide in consultation with the local representatives they elect to do the job how best to run their localities.

No surprise I’m happy to lend my name to that one. If you’d like to as well then sign here.

Graham Marsden calls on the Prime Minister:

to abandon plans to make it a criminal offence to possess "violent pornography".

I hope those who believe in the liberal concept of free speech will agree that we should not legislate against ‘thought crime’ - about which I’ve written here and here.

If you agree, you know what to do.

New film: one way to revive local democracy

How do you make local government, and, specifically, reform of local government finance interesting? To be honest, I don’t know.

But saying it to camera might help liven it up a little, I guess. Decide for yourselves:



Text-only version here.