22 May (Part 1) - Rogues Gallery
The list of councillors
has been extensively revised though it is not yet
complete. Allowances have proved to be a problem as the source material could be clearer.
The amount of money involved is listed in one document and the jobs and names in
another; one shows seven Labour councillors may be awarded £2,661 a year for
Scrutiny Committee work but only four Scrutiny Committees are listed with a
paid Labour spokesman. This may be due them being so few in number they have to
take on two roles in which case only one allowance is payable. The corresponding
Conservative chairmen get £8,802 - all these sums being in
addition to the standard councillor rate of £9,418. Several committees are
listed in one document but not the other and it is not possible to deduce if
their Chairmen are paid or not.
The documentation says the basic £9,418 is to allow councillors “to cover
incidental costs arising from such things as postage, telephone calls and travel
and subsistence within the borough”. As I have said before, BT (other communications
companies are available) will sell you an inclusive call tariff for not much over
£200 a year and as councillors are unlikely not to already have had a phone
before election, the additional telephone costs should be zero. Travel
around the borough cannot cost more than £712 a year, the price of an annual
bus Oyster Card. Why does a councillor need more than £1,000 a year allowance?
There are a few rules about collecting allowances one being that
councillors are at liberty not to take the money and the other is that only one
extra allowance may be claimed. As you might imagine, no one declines to take
these enormous sums and the Conservatives have distributed their jobs such that none
of them foregoes an allowance. No cabinet member for example works in a paid capacity on any
Committee, that might deprive someone else of £8,802.
I am surprised to see
councillor Chris Taylor
appointed to chair the Adults’ Services Committee, in fact it its deeply ironic, he is
still wet behind the ears himself. He took nearly a year to pluck up courage to
make his maiden speech
and a right old mess he made of that. So Bexley
council appoint an inexperienced boy to be chairman of one of their Overview and
Scrutiny Committees and he is a Political Adviser to the Greater London
Authority too; it explains a lot.
Provision has been made to list councillors’ addresses although there is a
potential problem of their making. As the council has been dragging its feet with
Freedom of Information requests
I am not sure which of their addresses is ‘home’ and many councillors have more
than one address in the borough, one as many as four. I shall have to list them all!