New TaxPayers' Alliance survey reveals big differences in size of councillor allowances

By Tim Montgomerie
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A new survey by the TaxPayers' Alliance reveals big differences between the level of basic allowance received by different councillors. Councillors representing the Scottish Borders, for example, receive £16,932 per year while those in Tory South Ribble receive just £1,500.

According to this morning's Today programme 80% of allowances have been cut or frozen since they were last set but the TPA reveals five inflation-busting councils that top the league for not recognising the age of austerity:

• Boston Borough Council: £2,378 to £3,052 – allowances up 28%
• Mid Devon District Council: £3,654 to £4,500 – allowances up 23%
• Slough Borough Council: £5,973 to £7,100 – allowances up 19%
• North Hertfordshire District Council: £3,798 to £4,500 – allowances up 18%
• Tunbridge Wells Borough Council: £4,730 to £5,279 – allowances up 12%

Councils spent at least £1.2 million on award ceremonies last year

Judging by some of the comments my piece yesterday about Freedom of Information came across as more negative than I intended it too. This morning comes news of another magnificent use of FOI requests by the Taxpayers Alliance. They asked councils how much they spent hosting and attending award ceremonies last year. From those that replied the total came to £1.2 million - the true figure will certainly be much higher.

After the jollity of wining and dining at the Council Taxpayers expense at orgies of self congratulation comes the hangover of a FOI request from the TPA. Combined with spending transparency for items over £500 these enquiries will have an impact. Councils that splash out on this spending are held to account. I am sure this has prompted greater restraint. Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to receive a Freedom of Information request from the Taxpayers Alliance in a fortnight it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Among the ceremonies attended were the Everything Happens Somewhere Awards 2010; Loo of the Year; the Sports Turf and Landscaping Awards; the British Parking Awards; the Magic Of Motown and the Structural Steelwork Awards.

Northamptonshire County Council is the latest authority to embrace transparency on salaries and spending

It was the Conservative-controlled Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead which blazed the trail on transparency in local government when it voted last year to publish all expenditure over £500.

Now, with the Government leading the way on opening up data about spending and salaries, Tory-controlled Northamptonshire County Council is the latest authority to herald the new era of transparency in advance of the Government enforcing such measures next year.

Today, the council has published on its website details of the salaries and expenses of its senior management team and the salaries of all heads of service and started publishing the details of all items of expenditure over £500.

Council Leader Jim Harker explains:

“For some time now we have been strong supporters of the transparency agenda and have been working hard to make sure that what we do, what our managers are paid, and what value they add to our communities is better understood by the people we serve.

“With an organisation as vast and complex as this, offering the huge array of services that we do, it is certainly a challenge to go that step further and start printing details of all expenditure over £500. However following our discussions with interested parties some months ago this is what we started working towards and it is tremendous that we are now in a position to start rolling this out.

“I am delighted that the government shares the ambition and drive to increase transparency and I am pleased that here in Northamptonshire we are already able to put into place a lot of the aspirations outlined in their agenda.”

The Taxpayers' Aliance were among those who participated in the round table discussions organised by the council earlier this year, and good on the council for listening to them in their quest for openess as a way of saving taxpayers' money in the long run.

Jonathan Isaby

Good twin or bad twin?

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance believes that town twinning may once have been a justified cause for municipal spending - but no longer.

It’s become such a cliché for every possible town to be twinned with numerous obscure places around the world that it has become a joke, from The Simpsons to comedy club stand-up acts. But is there really a point to it?

Twinning originally kicked off in the aftermath of the Second World War, as a way of forging links between countries that had been mortal enemies. Against that background, there may have been a justification for introducing people from Germany to British cities and vice versa – (on the ground, rather than from the air, this time, though). It is certainly true that if you see people as humans rather than unimaginable aliens, it is harder to make war against them.

60 years later, though, what does twinning bring Britain’s towns and cities in the 21st century? Many places are twinned with half a dozen or more municipalities around the globe, but the activity seems to have become self-perpetuating, something that is just done, without questioning why that should be the case.

More often that not, it does involve costs to councils and therefore to taxpayers. Councillors and council officers travel back and forth to the twin destinations. In the case of some towns, British taxpayers even fund trips by foreign representatives to visit the UK.

Newcastle Council arts project £2.7 million over budget

Mark Wallace of The Taxpayers Alliance says the lack of proper budgeting for an arts project in Newcastle has cauased the EU to pull out - leaving local Council Taxpayers to pick up the bill.

I first brought up Newcastle City Council’s misguided arts ventures in this column back in April. Five months and at least one more scandal later, now seems a good time to return to the topic.

It seems that following on from the hideous proposed makeover for the historic Grey’s Monument, another part of Newcastle’s arts empire has come to some grief, at vast expense for taxpayers. The Waygood Gallery project, which is a major redevelopment of a Grade II listed building and a six storey warehouse in the City’s beautiful Grainger Town heart, is apparently running millions of pounds over budget.

The council have this week revealed that the project is running a gobsmacking £2.7 million over budget so far, an overspend which is going to be made up by Newcastle City Council (£1.9 million) and the Arts Council (£800,000).

Mark Wallace: Birmingham should cut council tax by the £193m it has allocated to a new and unnecessary library

Mark Wallace of The TaxPayers' Alliance doesn't like Birmingham's Central Library but he's even less keen on the city council's plans to spend £193m demolishing and replacing it.

Like their national counterparts, local politicians are often susceptible to the lure of building expensive vanity projects or white elephants. Sometimes this is down to a desire to show that they are doing something – a big building is more eye-catching than a behind the scenes improvement in council management. Sometimes it is an attempt to win votes, taking the Gordon Brown approach that the more you spend, the better you are serving the public. Occasionally it is even just an attempt to institute a personal legacy, physically moulding an area in such a way that the council leader responsible will always be remembered.

In the current economic conditions, none of these are sufficient justifications to spend large amounts of money on capital building projects. In fact, wherever possible councils should look to maintain or renovate existing buildings instead. At the best of times, spending hundreds of millions of pounds on new council buildings must always be closely scrutinised and only done in exceptional circumstances, backed up by solid, responsible funding plans. Unfortunately, all too often councils throw caution to the wind and taxpayers end up with a huge bill to replace somewhere that might not be shiny and new but was capable of doing the job.

I don’t know which of the motives listed above has taken hold of Birmingham City Council, but reports this week seem to indicate that they, too, have fallen foul of the temptation to commission vastly expensive new facilities when the existing ones can do the job.

BCC have been pushing a proposal to spend a staggering  £193 million demolishing the existing Birmingham Central Library and replace it with an all-singing, all-dancing new structure. Granted, the Central Library is a remarkably ugly building, which Prince Charles memorably described as looking like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”, but any plan to spend so much money replacing it must have a good justification, particularly in the current recession.

That justification was supposedly that the place was structurally unsound, which the council sexed up by describing it as suffering from  “concrete cancer”. It is worrying, then, that an expert report released under Freedom of Information this week says that is not the case.

Mark Wallace: The Local Government Association's efforts to keep council allowances secret show that some have learnt nothing from Michael Martin's demise

By Mark Wallace of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

As Harry reported on this blog on Thursday, it is the time of year when the Local Government Association publish their annual survey of the scale of the allowances dished out to councillors at every local authority in England. And lo, it came to pass – with one notable difference from the information released in previous years. There was no detail at all.

Whereas previously the LGA had published the detailed information for almost every council, allowing taxpayers to compare what their Councillors, Leaders, or Committee Chairmen gets paid or to contrast the number of special allowances handed out between in different areas, this year there were simply the bare, national averages and totals, with no sign of the source data they were drawn from.

Now, I know what the LGA would say if we at the TaxPayers’ Alliance were to do this – they would bitterly complain that it was shoddy research, or even that we were making the numbers up. Of course, the TPA doesn’t do this, as it would not just be poor research practice, it would make the data effectively useless for ordinary taxpayers around the country. The great thing about our Council Spending Uncovered reports is that they feature that full, official detail for every council in the country so everyone can see what kind of deal they get.

In this case, the LGA’s aim seems to have been precisely to obscure the facts, prevent proper scrutiny and stop ordinary taxpayers around the country being able to make comparison to judge what kind of deal they get.

It is very revealing that even the LGA, which regularly professes to be proud of all local councils, and which is charged with standing up for local government, is apparently too ashamed of the above inflation growth in councillors’ allowances that they have attempted to keep it secret.

I say “attempted”, because happily several sources have leaked us copies of the full data table, which can now be read by one and all on the TPA website, here (NB Excel File). As you will see, it is a very useful searchable spreadsheet, which allows you to easily assess your council’s standing by a variety of different measures. Just the kind of thing that is of interest to ConservativeHome’s readers and the taxpaying public in general, which makes it all the more unfortunate that the LGA tried to suppress it.

Mark Wallace: David Cameron will force Town Hall Fat Cats to declare their pay

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance welcomes the Conservative leader's pledge to bring transparency to public sector pay.  He sees it as a sign of a changing public mood on remuneration in local and national government.

The controversial issue of public sector – and particularly town hall – pay has hit the headlines again this week, although for once some of the news is encouraging. Whilst some council bosses continue to rake in surprisingly large amounts of money, it seems that politicians in Westminster are increasingly ready to make the remuneration of senior staff entirely transparent.

The council officer in the headlines was once again Kent County Council’s Chief Executive, Peter Gilroy, who was reported in several newspapers to have sold back holiday time to the council for a cool £12,000. Mr Gilroy, who our Town Hall Rich List revealed as enjoying a remuneration of £255,000 in 2007-08, has long fought against the principle of having his pay and perks published for taxpayers to scrutinise, but it seems that the details are coming out bit by bit.

Naturally, when such large sums of taxpayers’ money are involved – and when the people receiving them have tried to stop taxpayers finding out about it – there is a lot of public interest. Certainly in Kent there is also a lot of anger from taxpayers who do not feel they get a level of service that justifies such generous rewards for Mr Gilroy.

Unfortunately, this debate has long been deliberately blurred by a culture of convenient secrecy on the part of councils. Before the TPA started using Freedom of Information requests to do comprehensive national surveys of Town Hall remuneration, councils dismissed suggestions that they were handing out excessive amounts as unfair and untrue.

As soon as we started compiling our first Town Hall Rich List, some councils began deliberately abusing the terms of the Freedom of Information Act to reveal as little as possible in order to try to scupper the project. Whilst many have since accepted that taxpayers have a right to see where their money is spent, others continue to obfuscate or even pretend that they have received none of our letters and emails demanding they release the information.

In Kent, for example, taxpayers still do not know exactly what Mr Gilroy is paid because the council will only publish broad bands of £10,000, meaning that the figure of £255,000 is a fair estimate derived from the KCC figure of “£250,000-£260,000”. Despite being the people who fund councils and the people whom councils are meant to serve, many taxpayers are still treated with disdain when it comes to transparency and accountability in local government.

Mark Wallace: A lack of “joined up government” in Newcastle

Mark Wallace is Campaign Director of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

Local government can be a complex place. Not only are there over 400 different councils, in a variety of shapes, formats and sizes, there are the regional and local development quangos established by central government. On top of all that, there are the quangos that councils themselves have set up, and the quangos established by other quangos. In can be a confusing picture, so much so that it seems some councils can become confused by their own activities.

One example of that arose last week in Newcastle upon Tyne. Back in 2000, Newcastle City Council set up a quango called the NewcastleGateshead Initiative, a body intended to encourage tourism to the local area through artistic and cultural activities.

As with so many publicly funded arts bodies, many of NGI’s activities have been somewhat dubious, but recently they reached the apex of foolishness with a blunder that raises questions not just about the competence of this unaccountable body, but also about the degree to which the City Council are in any way on top of their game.

The proposal in question concerned Grey’s Monument, which is for many the central historic feature of Newcastle Upon Tyne. I had the good fortune to grow up on Tyneside, but for those of you who don’t know the city I’ll give a quick explanation of what the Monument is.

Mark Wallace: More than 1,000 Town Hall employees are now earning in excess of £100,000 - and some councils still don't want you to know about it

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance explains how the latest TPA research unveils a marked increase in the number of Town Hall employees earning over £100,000 - and names and shames the councils still resisting publishing such information.

It’s that time of year again – the Town Hall Rich List, in which the TaxPayers’ Alliance publishes the full remuneration details, job titles and names for everyone in local government whose pay and perks totalled £100,000 or more in 2007-08, is out today. You can read the full report, and find out the details for the senior staff of your own council, here.

There will certainly be numerous local controversies about the pay and perks of senior officials at various councils around the country – not least, of course, because 2007-08 was the year when so many local authorities were making their disastrous investments in doomed Icelandic banks – but the national picture is pretty shocking, too.

In 07/08, pay in the wider economy was still on the rise, so some increase might be expected. However, Town Hall pay seems to have grown unusually fast. The total number of people on the list grew from 818 to 1,022, so either a lot of executive jobs were created, or the second tier of town hall management saw their remuneration grow at an alarming rate.

The purpose of publishing the list, of course, is to give people the information they need to properly hold their council to account. So, are these Town Hall executives worth the money? The question is best answered locally, council by council by taxpayers themselves who know the details of their tax bill and can see whether the services they get are worth the money. In fact, please let us know in the comments below how your council’s performance compares to the pay packets being handed out in its offices.