In an article here and in our leaflets for the council elections, Conservatives made the point that there was a councillor’s gravy train in Sandwell which needed derailment. In addition to the not very basic allowance of £ 10,619 received by every Sandwell councillor, the vast majority of councillors enjoyed additional “special responsibility” payments which can double their money. In the figures published for last year, only 9 out of the 72 councillors were not being rewarded with these payments.
Since roughly one in three Labour councillors is either married or related to another Labour councillor this means council membership is a nice little earner for the few Sandwell families who make up the Labour council oligarchs. It’s better than working and for a substantial number of Labour councillors despite their pretended championship of the “workers” their own encounters with the world of work have been fragmentary or temporary.
Tonight, in a piece planted by Sandwell council in its semi-official newspaper, the Express and Star, under a dramatic but totally misleading headline “Councillors vote to lose £100,000 pay”, we are told that the deputy mayor will lose his/her allowance (£5k+) and that the six town improvement committees have been scrapped resulting in a saving of £8,751 for each chairman and £2,628 for each deputy chairman.
We applaud a move in the right direction, because it was never clear what function these town improvement panels had other than to provide an opportunity for patronage and to deliver bribes to ensure the robotic compliance of Labour councillors to the dictat of the party machine. But we question that the savings will amount to as much as £100,000 immediately (Express and Star reporters should not routinely accept figures spoon fed to them by Sandwell council press office) and we say they do not go far enough. Nor have councillors yet voted for this as the article itself states “the decision is set to be rubber stamped by the council later this month” Hence, a misleading headline and the poor E&S reporter can’t even get simple facts right, mistakenly under stating a Sandwell councillor’s basic allowance to be £9,500, more than £1,000 less than the actual basic amount.
So far, the decisions, on trimming special allowances, have been made by Labour council leader Cllr Cooper. Cllr Cooper, according to the gullible E&S hack, did not want to announce his intentions before the recent elections as it could be perceived as a ploy to win votes. If Cllr. Cooper said this we hope he blushed becomingly, because this would be the first time he has hesitated to make announcements before an election as ploys to win votes. Is it cynical to think perhaps, that the announcement was easier to make after an election when Labour’s lads and lasses on the council are more compliant and line up respectfully to receive their special responsibility tips?
The truth is that “special responsibility” allowances have been under attack for some time not least by Sandwell Conservatives. What has been announced is not even a half measure. Town leads and deputies still coin an extra £8,751 and £5,256 respectively and there are plenty of other sinecure special responsibility allowances.
Conservatives would go further. We would examine every special responsibility payment against the work delivered for it. More radically, we would reduce the number of councillors by a third. To do so would produce a yearly saving of £254,000 in basic allowances, probably another £120.000 in additional allowances and saving the council £25,000 in contributions to councillors’ pensions. Currently, it is easy to identify many wards with “spare wheel” Labour councillors who do nothing but the minimum. With one councillor for every three thousand electors, Sandwell is over stuffed with councillors, 48 could easily do the work of the current 72.