Merseyside councillors' allowances revealed
MERSEYSIDE councillors' pay has been revealed in a survey by lobby group the Taxpayers' Alliance.
Liverpool councillors are the highest paid with basic allowances of £10,077, followed by the Wirral with pay at £9,171.
Knowsley is third with £8,825, but Sefton fell in the pay league after councillors took a 5% cut to £8,520.
Halton councillors are paid an allowance of £8,004, while St Helens is lowest with £7,386.
All councils other than Sefton frooze councillors' allowances this year, and all compare favourably with Manchester and Birmingham where basic levels stand at more than £16,000.
It's fashionable to knock the pay of elected representatives, but if you look at the amount of case work that many councillors deal with I think you'd find most are not over paid at all.
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David Bartlett
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Knowsley wards are only half the size of Liverpool's too!
Revealed? It is hardly a secret. The Daily Post and Echo carries stories every year at budget time about councillors' allowances.
They have stayed the same in Liverpool for several years running, so it is not new information. In fact I think I have had the same basic allowance, give or take a few hundred pounds for 6 years so it is even less newsworthy.
What would be a more interesting article though, that I would love to read, and probably it would attract attention nationally, would be if you did some digging into the membership of the Tax Payers Alliance.
They sound very much like a group dedicated to the poor old tax payer but generally are thought to be a right-wing lobby group front for the Tory Party. Now if you could "reveal" that connection in some detail, it would be a real coup!
The fact that Cllr Baldock can say, "give or take a few hundred pounds" [of taxpayers' money] is also revealing.
This isn't really news, councillors allowances are publicly available for all to see.
Although excessive councillors allowances should be scrutinised carefully, I would be wary of moving too far in the other direction.
Having councillors allowances set at a very low level might satisfy the taxpayers alliance and be ok to live on for people who have private income but for those who don't it would start to become less financially viable.
City Centre Resident - that is per annum, not per month. I think it was about £9800 when I became a councillor in 2006 and now it might be £10100. I confess that I don't precisely know either of the figures. I am not quite sure why you should think it noteworthy that I don't know the precise figure?