Category: Cllr Jeff Green

Labour councillors argue for increase in range of Wirral Council’s Chief Executives’ salary to between £155,000 and £175,000

Labour councillors argue for increase in range of Wirral Council’s Chief Executives’ salary to between £155,000 and £175,000

Labour councillors argue for increase in range of Wirral Council’s Chief Executives’ salary to between £155,000 and £175,000

                                                                               

Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) Committee Room 3, Wallasey Town Hall, 24th November 2014 L to R Martin Denny (LGA), David Slatter (Penna PLC), Cllr Jeff Green (Conservative), Cllr Lesley Rennie (Conservative) and Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Lib Dem)
Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) Committee Room 3, Wallasey Town Hall, 24th November 2014 L to R Martin Denny (LGA), David Slatter (Penna PLC), Cllr Jeff Green (Conservative), Cllr Lesley Rennie (Conservative) and Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Lib Dem)

Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) Committee Room 3, Wallasey Town Hall, 24th November 2014 L to R Martin Denny (LGA), David Slatter (Penna PLC), Cllr Jeff Green (Conservative councillor), Cllr Lesley Rennie (Conservative councillor) and Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Lib Dem councillor)

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Video above is from the Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) public meeting held on the 24th November 2014 in Committee Room 3, Wallasey Town Hall, Seacombe . This write-up of the public meeting starts at 12:05 in the video above.

Wirral Council’s Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) met in Committee Room 3, Wallasey Town Hall, Seacombe on Monday afternoon at around 2.30pm. The councillors on the Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) which had previously been decided by the Employment and Appointments Committee on the 27th October 2014 are:

Cllr Phil Davies (Labour) Chair
Cllr Ann McLachlan (Labour)
Cllr George Davies (Labour)
Cllr Adrian Jones (Labour)
Cllr Jeff Green (Conservative)
Cllr Lesley Rennie (Conservative)
Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Lib Dem)

Continues from Cllr Jeff Green asks if Wirral Council are looking to spend £1,000,000 on their new Chief Executive (over 5 years)?. This is continuing the write-up of a public meeting of the Employment and Appointments Panel (Chief Executive) held on the afternoon of 24th November 2014.

3. Appointment of Chief Executive, Head of Paid Service (including Returning Officer and Electoral Registration Officer)

There was a report and thirteen appendices for this item.

The Chair, Cllr Phil Davies invited Cllr Ann McLachlan to speak. She said, “I think it’s important to recognise where we are in the local government family and what we want to attract here. We want to attract the best in England, so we’ve got to be somewhere in the parameters of being able to say ‘Oh we’re pitching our salary at such an appropriate level, to get the best field of candidates that we possibly can to attract the best in the business’.

I think also it would be fair to say and I’m sure we’ll be doing this, we will be setting, you will Phil within because consultation with the new Chief Executive, you’ll be setting some parameters for them to look at, you know senior management savings across err you know the period of their, their tenure here at Wirral. So and part of the role will also be about saving money, so sometimes you have to invest to save in the longer term and I think also that it’s worth saying that we need to look at comparisons with the rest of the public sector.

It was reported last week that a primary headteacher within an academy was on a salary equivalent to £200,000. The first 150 secondary academies have got heads on over £150,000. You’re talking about a primary head managing a school of two hundred and fifty pupils max, probably about forty staff. There’s no comparison between managing you know a multi-million pound organisation like Wirral!

So I think for those reasons for me, I’ll be saying we need to get this salary in the right range for you know the kind of calibre of the people that we want to work with us.”

Cllr Phil Gilchrist referred to the salary grades. He asked about the salaries of people on the next tier down from Chief Executive and that if they attracted someone who was currently a strategic director in another authority, how much of a salary increase it would be?

Cllr Phil Davies (Chair) replied that they’d have to wait and see what level of candidate they got, but he hoped that they would be attracting not just deputies and strategic directors but actually serving chief executives elsewhere with an “excellent track record” so they could “hit the ground running”. Cllr Phil Gilchrist said he understood.

Cllr Jeff Green said that his parents had told him that “two wrongs don’t make a right”. The other point he wanted to make was that unless they’re going to ask a primary head to run the authority, and there might be one paid £200,000 somewhere around the country, that it wasn’t really a reason for making decisions on the chief executive’s salary. Then again he said, “a primary head might be just what is required!”

Cllr Green continued that his understanding was that a set of proposals were being worked on that were going to save £1.5 million by the current Chief Executive. He said that [Cllr] Ann [McLachlan] had promised that would be delivered in December in terms of Council unless she’d changed her mind and then he revealed “Those savings were already in the works are due to be published in December”. So in terms of some of the points that councillors had been making Cllr Green felt were “extraneous”. He asked them to focus on what would be required, he referred to a saving of £730,000 and referred to a number of issues about the current Chief Executive. He didn’t understand why they’d have to increase it [the Chief Executive’s salary] to £175,000.

Referring to other salaries for Chief Executives in the North West, he said that “to increase to that much seems to be excessive”. He referred to the documents prepared for full Council, how £1.5 million of senior management savings had been identified and how all those things had been delivered off a salary of £130,000. He proposed they seek a Chief Executive on the current salary range of the current Chief Executive of £130,000.

Cllr Phil Davies asked councillors to look at the salaries in appendix 4. He referred to Liverpool City Council’s Chief Executive being paid £197,500, Cheshire West’s £180,000, Cheshire East’s £187,000, Knowsley a “much smaller authority than Wirral” £160,000, St Helens £140,000 and Sefton £152,000. He said “even councils on our doorstep are paying a substantially higher salary than Wirral does.

I think my kind of comments or my reflection on the discussion is, we need to be able to attract the best, but also retain them as well, what we don’t want to do is get somebody here and then because Cheshire West are paying you know a much larger salary, they’ll disappear to Cheshire West in a few years time. So I think we need to just have that in our forefront of our minds as well.”

Cllr Ann McLachlan said, “Completely disingenuous [Cllr] Jeff [Green], because what I was doing was giving a comparison with the public sector that wasn’t a local government chief executive, just to demonstrate that out there the salaries in the public sector in general at that level, you know to get the expertise you want at that level are much more higher than Wirral.

I’m going to ask Chris [Hyams] if she would give us a little bit of background on that £131 or £130 or whatever it is Graham [Burgess]’s in, because how long, what was the previous Chief Executive on? Coz Graham [Burgess] came to us and took his pension, I think he took his pension, .. or has pension arrangements in place or didn’t need to be paid the on costs that we would have to pay.

Well previous chief executives, what kind of salary was he on and how long ago was that? I mean in a sense I think we need to get a bit of a reality check here and get in the real world about what the real costs of salaries at this level are.

So, errm, yeah, I think it’s you know, our salary range here is at the bottom of the tree really. So what’s the history of that and also you know it’s not that two wrongs don’t make a right, it’s not anything like that but what we’re trying to do is demonstrate that here in this Authority we want to get somebody who is going to you know help us in the obviously very clear difficult financial circumstances we’re in, with the financial challenges we’ve got going forward as well and in remodelling and changing this Council. You know, so errm, I’m absolutely of the view that we will have to pay the appropriate level. Thanks Chris.”

Chris Hyams, Head of HR responded by saying, “OK, thank you. The current Chief Executive is paid top of the salary range. As the Deputy Leader’s just intonated, it is in the public domain that he left his last council with a pension which is why we didn’t incur the on costs. So in terms of remuneration, there was an additional salary arrangement through his last job through gaining his pension.

Before that, the salary range that was in place for a previous Chief Executive had his spot salary within that range of £130,000. The range has not been reviewed for a number of years and certainly not reviewed as such or changed previously to this in the time that I’ve been here in the last five years.”

Continues at 4 Labour councillors agree salary for new Wirral Council Chief Executive at between £155,000 and £175,000.

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Wirral Council in numbers: 3 senior managers leaving, 2 buildings fall down and 2 public meetings cancelled

Wirral Council in numbers: 3 senior managers leaving, 2 buildings fall down and 2 public meetings cancelled

Wirral Council in numbers: 3 senior managers leaving, 2 buildings fall down and 2 public meetings cancelled

                                                    

Employment and Appointments Committee 27th October 2014 Committee Room 2 L to R Cllr Gilchrist Lib Dem, Chris Hyams Head of HR, Cllr Adrian Jones Labour Chair, Andrew Mossop Committee Services and Graham Burgess outgoing Chief Executive
Employment and Appointments Committee 27th October 2014 Committee Room 2 L to R Cllr Gilchrist Lib Dem, Chris Hyams Head of HR, Cllr Adrian Jones Labour Chair, Andrew Mossop Committee Services and Graham Burgess outgoing Chief Executive

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You can watch the meeting of the Employment and Appointments Committee of 27th October 2014 above at which the Employment and Appointment Panels referred to below were created.

As there is so much happening at Wirral Council now, I thought it was best to write a general piece about a few different topics at Wirral Council.

The public meeting of the Coordinating Committee last week which met to decide a call in of the decision to consult on closure of Children’s Centres was unexpectedly brought to a halt and adjourned (without yet reaching a decision or hearing all witnesses) as the Wallasey Town Hall was evacuated due to the collapse of two Council-owned buildings in nearby King Street.

This story has been widely covered by the media. The main road outside where the building collapsed was closed that evening (but has since been reopened). As I was nearby that evening, I can say that there was a large emergency services response (Merseyside Police, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service and North West Ambulance Service) and also organisations such as National Grid responded to cut off the gas supply.

As Wirral Council owned the properties that fell down, questions were asked by politicians and the press as to why the buildings fell down. However I will leave that story for now and move to other matters.

Two public meetings that should have happened in the next week at Wirral Council have been cancelled. These are:

19th November 2014 5.30pm Licensing Act 2003 Committee, Committee Room 1, Wallasey Town Hall (contact: Anne Beauchamp | Chair: Cllr Bill Davies (Labour)
24th November 2014 6.00pm Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee, Committee Room 1, Wallasey Town Hall (contact: Shirley Hudspeth | Chair: Cllr Bill Davies (Labour))

Presumably standards are now so high at Wirral Council that there can be a budget saving achieved from councillors travel expenses, employee costs and the room hire for the cancelled Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee not meeting. The Licensing Act 2003 Committee’s remit is not unsurprisingly to do with the Licensing Act 2003 c.17. As everyone on Wirral knows, there are no problems whatsoever with pubs, clubs, off licences, late night refreshment or other related activities on the Wirral. Wait a sec, news just in. Seems there is a problem (according to residents). Here’s a question submitted by one of the Oxton residents to the Birkenhead Constituency Committee meeting of 30th October 2014:

“Name: Alfred Lennon (Oxton Village People)
Date Received: 23rd October 2014
Query: Wirral has a problem with alcohol as detailed it its Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and requiring the recent police crackdown. Yet the Authority persists in licensing ever more premises with ever longer drinking hours. Why cannot the Authority be brave, reduce the number of licensed premises AND reduce their opening hours?

Response from Wirral Council Licensing Section:

The Licensing Application Process

When a Licensing Authority received an application for a new premises licence or an application to vary an existing premises licence, it must determine whether the application has been made in accordance with section 17 of the Licensing Act 2003 (the Act), and in accordance with regulations made under sections 17(3) to (6), 34, 42, 65 and 55 of the Act. This means that the Licensing Authority must consider among other things whether the application has been properly advertised. These requirements are different to those connected to the Planning process.

Under the licensing regime an applicant is required to display a blue notice on the premises and publish a notice in a local newspaper providing details of the application. The applicant must also serve the application on the Responsible Authorities which are: the Police, the Fire Authority, Trading Standards, Environmental Health, Planning, the Area Child Protection Board, the Licensing Authority and Public Health who are all entitled to make representations. In addition to this, the Council published details of all application on the Council’s website and circulates these details to all Councillors. Representations can also be made by any person, which can include residents and businesses whom may be affected by a premises.

The Licensing Authority may only accept relevant representations. A representation is “relevant” if it relates to the likely effect of the grant of the licence on the promotion of at least one of the four licensing objectives. In other words, representations should relate to how the licensable activities carried on from premises impact on the objectives. For representations in relations to variations to be relevant, they should be confined to the subject matter of the variation.

Four Licensing Objectives:

  • The Protection of Children from Harm
  • The Prevention of Crime and Disorder
  • The Prevention of Public Nuisance
  • Public Safety

”

Wirral Council’s question then goes on for a further A4 side on Cumulative Impact. Just commenting on their answer for a moment to this point from what I remember of current policy (I may be a little rusty so don’t rely on this), as a general rule (*which depends on the circumstances of the application) if there are objections to a new premises licence or application to vary a premises licence it gets decided at a public meeting of the Licensing Act 2003 subcommittee by 3 councillors.

A certain amount of other applications don’t get this scrutiny and are either decided by officers (based on a policy agreed by councillors). What’s left out of the answer is that anyone can request a licence review (if you have the time, paper and postage to do this) which results in an existing licence being reviewed.

This doesn’t happen very often (rarely is what I’d say) as either most people don’t know they can do this, or don’t want to or they don’t know how. I doubt it would be in Wirral Council’s financial interests to tell people how as it would lead to more public meetings of the Licensing Act 2003 subcommittee and then they’d have to put up the fees charged to those running premises as it costs Wirral Council £thousands (room hire, councillors travel expenses, employee time, website running costs, printing of agenda/reports, postage et cetera) each time they hold a public meeting.

However moving on from employee time to an employee leaving. On 31st December 2014 Graham Burgess (the Chief Executive leaves). There isn’t time to appoint a new Chief Executive to start on 1st January 2015 as the post hasn’t even been advertised yet.

The Chief Executive is also Wirral Council’s Head of Paid Service, Returning Officer and Electoral Registration Officer.

So before a new Chief Executive is appointed who will fill these important roles (the latter two especially important because there is an election for Wirral’s 4 MPs and 22 councillors in May 2015). The Head of Paid Service, Returning Officer and Electoral Registration Officer role are all ones Wirral Council is under a legal obligation to have someone in post for. However the decisions have to be made by Council (a meeting of Wirral Council’s councillors) before 31st December 2014.

In addition to Graham Burgess leaving on the 31st December 2014, so is Vivienne Quayle (currently Director of Resources and s.151 officer).

So these are the interim management arrangements currently down to be discussed which will then (assuming the Employment and Appointments Panel approve them) be a recommendation to Council which meets on the 8th December 2014 (this report has a typographical error and states 8th December 2015 by mistake) to decide on an Acting Chief Executive and Acting Head of Paid Service.

Also Council on the 8th December 2015 will need to appoint a Returning Officer and Electoral Registration Officer.

These are the following recommendations (subject to Employment and Appointments Panel agreement and Council agreement on the 8th December 2014):

Returning Officer: Surjit Tour (Head of Legal and Member Services)
Deputy Returning Officer: Joe Blott (Strategic Director of Transformation and Resources)
Acting Electoral Registration Officer: Surjit Tour (Head of Legal and Member Services)
Acting Deputy Electoral Registration Officer: Joe Blott (Strategic Director of Transformation and Resources)
Acting Chief Executive and Head of Paid Service: recommendation to be made by appointment panel on 24th November 2014 to Council meeting on the 8th December 2014

Due to Vivienne Quayle leaving, these are the proposed interim management arrangements recommended to the Employment and Appointments Panel who then have a choice whether to recommend these to Council regarding Ms Quayle leaving:

Acting Section 151 Officer: Tom Sault (Head of Financial Services) regraded from HS2 (now not the proposed railway but a salary grade at Wirral Council) to HS1 for interim period
Acting Deputy Section 151 Officer: Jenny Spick (Finance Manager)
Acting Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) (recommendation to Council): Mike Zammit (Chief Information Officer)
Audit function and Procurement function (functional responsibility in Resources division): Tom Sault

There is also a third member of the senior management team leaving too, but arrangements won’t be decided on that until a meeting on the 10th December 2014. That person leaving is Emma Taylor (Head of Specialist Services) in the Families and Wellbeing Directorate. Emma Taylor leaves in December 2014 and the responsibilities of the Head of Specialist Services post are children’s social work, fostering, adoption and children in care.

Helping Wirral Council with the above are Penna PLC (for which they are being paid £15,000 for each post so £45,000 in total) and the Local Government Association.

The seven councillors who will be making the above recommendations to Council in the near future are the seven on the Employment and Appointments Panel who are:

Cllr Phil Davies (Labour)
Cllr Ann McLachlan (Labour)
Cllr George Davies (Labour)
Cllr Adrian Jones (Labour)
Cllr Jeff Green (Conservative)
Cllr Lesley Rennie (Conservative)
Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Lib Dem)

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Which 7 councillors will recommend Wirral Council’s new Chief Executive?

Which 7 councillors will recommend Wirral Council’s new Chief Executive?

Who will choose Wirral Council’s new Chief Executive?

                                                         

One of the bigger stories on this blog recently has been the news that the current Chief Executive for Wirral Council Graham Burgess has handed in his notice and will retire at the end of the year.

So as Wirral Council has the Chief Executive’s three-month notice period (30th September 2014 to 31st December 2014) to find his replacement, what’s happened so far?

Well because the Chief Executive is a political appointment of councillors, the politicians have to decide. So a meeting of the Employment and Appointments Committee has been set up for the 27th October 2014. Graham Burgess is also currently Returning Officer (many people reading this may also know what a Returning Officer is but in simple terms it’s the head person at Wirral Council for elections), Electoral Registration Officer (another role to do with elections) and Head of Paid Service.

So what’s the timetable for picking a new Chief Executive and will one be in post by 1st January 2014? According to the draft timetable it won’t so temporary appointments will have to be made! The proposed timetable means the job advertisement will be advertised around the start of December 2014, which will give people until nearly a week after Graham Burgess leaves to apply for his job.

It is proposed that Penna PLC be paid about £15,000 for helping find a new Chief Executive and a further about £15,000 for finding a new Head of Specialist Services (who is also leaving in December 2014).

However paying out about £15k to Penna PLC to aid Wirral Council’s Human Resources department is not enough! No a “professional adviser” from the Local Government Association will also be advising the Appointments Panel.

This in fact has always struck me as a bit of an anomaly. Penna PLC and the LGA aren’t officers or councillors at Wirral Council. In the past though, they’ve remained in the meeting room after the press and public were excluded from the public meeting.

So who is the Appointments Panel going to be and what will it do? It will consist of seven councillors who will make a recommendation for the post of Chief Executive to the sixty-six councillors. It will probably be four Labour councillors, two Conservative councillors and one Lib Dem councillor. I have some guesses now below about who will make up this appointment panel for the Chief Executive. It hasn’t yet been decided yet which councillors will be on it, but below are my names along with my reasons:

Labour (4 councillors)
Cllr Adrian Jones * reason is already Chair of Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Phil Davies * reason is already Vice-Chair of Employment and Appointments Committee & Leader of the Council
Cllr George Davies * reason is Deputy Leader of Wirral Council, Cabinet Member and Labour councillor on Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Ann McLachlan * reason is Deputy Leader of Wirral Council, Cabinet Member and Labour councillor on Employment and Appointments Committee

* Note although Cllr Moira McLaughlin is a possibility, she’s unlikely for the reasons listed above

Conservative (2 councillors)
Cllr Jeff Green * reason there are only 2 Conservative councillors (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Lesley Rennie * reason there are only 2 Conservative councillors (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee

Lib Dem (1 councillor)
Cllr Phil Gilchrist * reason only Lib Dem (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee

The seven councillors on the Appointments Panel will all be from the Employment and Appointments Committee and due to the high-profile nature of the appointment unlikely to be deputies. The Employment and Appointments Committee has eight councillors on it (plus twenty-one deputies). So the seven will come from those twenty-nine.

The Appointments Panel doesn’t actually choose the Chief Executive though. They just recommend who the Chief Executive should be to a meeting of all sixty-six councillors at Wirral Council.

From a practical perspective though, as Labour have a majority of councillors on the Appointments Panel and Wirral Council it will be down to the Labour councillors to decide who the next Chief Executive/Returning Officer/Electoral Registration Officer/Head of Paid Service is. As the process will probably be going on after Graham Burgess leaves and it’s a legal requirement to have somebody appointed to some of these roles, temporary people will have to be found before a permanent appointment is made.

Looking back to July 2012 when Graham Burgess was appointed as Chief Executive by Council, he then had to serve his period of notice before starting in post in September 2012.

If the new Chief Executive has to also serve out a period of notice, it could be as late as May 2015 before he or she starts (which if it is after General Election and local elections it will make the election side of their job easier).

So here’s the proposed job description & person specification for the Chief Executive/Head of Paid Service/Returning Officer/Electoral Registration Officer.

Certainly it will be interesting to see who the politicians eventually recommend for this key post at Wirral Council! If anyone wishes to leave a comment comparing the appointment of Wirral Council’s Chief Executive to the complicated process of appointing a Doge of Venice, feel free.

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Wirral Council launches Future Council consultation on 17 budget options for £2.5 million savings

Wirral Council launches Future Council consultation on 17 budget options for £2.5 million savings

Wirral Council launches Future Council consultation on 17 budget options for £2.5 million savings

                                                       

Future Council Wirral logo
Future Council Wirral logo

Ed – Update 14:55 9/9/14 to fix 6 incorrect links to the budget options that was helpfully pointed out by a reader.

Yes, it’s another annual consultation on savings from Wirral Council that began yesterday and runs from yesterday to the 31st October 2014. What’s this one on? This is on £2.5 million of cuts that Wirral Council need to make in 2015/16.

Although the documentation refers to £4 million of budget options this seems rounded to the nearest million (the options total £3.75 million). Out of these options about £2.5 million will be chosen (two-thirds by total value).

Here are the documents and links:

Final Full Consultation Pack (this is a 21 page document which covers all options).

The options are then in various “themes” and are below by theme (I’ve also included the amount in pounds next to each option for financial year 2015/16 if that option is chosen).

This means some of the larger savings options are almost certain to go ahead which are those involving community libraries, the all age disability service, youth and play, preventative maintenance (highways and parks), Council Tax Over 70s discount and Girtrell Court.

These six options total £2.566 million of the £2.5 million savings required.

The other eleven options seem less likely to meet with public approval as they will be opposed by (in some cases) large sections of Wirral’s society. Some of them have already been rejected in earlier years following consultation such as charging for car parks at the country parks, school crossing patrols etc.

With the options below I’ve briefly included a sentence or two explaining what it’s about.

Customer Contact

Reduce library opening hours to four hours (10am to 2pm) with these libraries opened either two or three days a week. This option does not seem to apply to the four central libraries or combined libraries/One Stop Shops whose opening hours remain the same.

Delivering Differently Theme

Close four satellite youth centres & end funding Play Scheme.

Managing Demand

Remove 41 school crossing patrols.

Income and Efficiency

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The incredible £754,783.18 that Wirral Council councillors cost (plus amounts for the Mayor & Deputy Mayor)

The incredible £754,783.18 that Wirral Council councillors cost (plus amounts for the Mayor & Deputy Mayor)

The incredible £754,783.18 that Wirral Council councillors cost (plus amounts for the Mayor & Deputy Mayor)

                      

To very little fanfare (compared to the local newspaper coverage that used to go with the annual publication of MP’s expenses), Wirral Council has published on its website what it paid each of its councillors for 2013-14 with a breakdown by basic allowance, responsibility allowance, telephone rental (although this is a £NIL amount for everyone on that list), expenses, subsistence, travel expenses and car mileage. Despite replying to a FOI request and stating this was part of Wirral Council’s “openness and transparency” it is in fact a legal requirement that they publish this information annually (if you’d like to leave a comment referring to the specific Act of Parliament or regulations that require them to do this feel free).

This list includes three people who aren’t councillors but are “independent persons” and are appointed by Wirral Council councillors. These three have a role set down in law in dealing with complaints about councillors. They are also co-opted on Wirral Council’s Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee (whose next scheduled meeting has been cancelled).

Unlike the councillors none of these three get a basic amount, but receive £25 for each meeting they attend of the Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee. In addition to this they are able to claim car mileage for meetings associated with their role. The annual amounts for these three are the smallest on the list being £90.80 (Dr. Burgess-Joyce), £122.40 (Brian Cummings) and £208.10 (RS Jones).

For the politicians, the lowest annual amount paid was to Cllr Matthew Patrick of £3,794.14. This is because he was only elected part way through that year in October 2013 in the Upton by-election. The by-election in Upton happened because of the death of Cllr Sylvia Hodrien, who also appears in the list receiving a part year amount of £4,373.84. Former Councillor Darren Dodd is the only other name to receive a part year amount of £6,019.11 as he resigned part way through the year and moved to Leeds.

The rest received the basic allowance of £8,712.48. In addition to this amount roughly half receive an extra responsibility allowance which for this financial year applied to thirty-three out of the sixty-seven councillors. An extra responsibility allowance is paid to the ten members of the Cabinet (generally an extra £9,171 although the Leader receives £22,927), chair of a committee, leader or deputy leader of a political group etc. The largest responsibility allowance paid was to Cllr Phil Davies of £22,926.96 (this is in addition to the basic allowance of £8,712.48). The smallest amount (that wasn’t £NIL) paid as a responsibility allowance was to Cllr Lesley Rennie of £203.38.

In total (the councillors and independent persons) claimed a total of £5,171.75 in car mileage payments, £490.99 in subsistence payments (this a meals allowance when they’re away from home for over four hours) and £1,684.64 in “expenses”.

The total cost (from this list) to the taxpayer for 2013-14 for the councillors and three independent persons was £754,783.18.

For some obscure reason I’m not really sure of, in earlier years the amount that the Mayor and Deputy Mayor are paid is published separately. This doesn’t seem to have been done yet this year (at the time of writing), but in 2012-13 came to a total of an extra £12,228.80. I would guess that the amount for the mayoralty in 2013-14 would be a similar amount to this.

A number of councillors also represent Wirral Council on outside bodies. There are two councillors who represent Wirral Council on the Merseyside Recycling and Waste Authority are paid an extra £1,834 each. These amounts are paid directly by Wirral Council to these councillors.

There are other outside bodies such as Merseytravel (four councillors from Wirral Council) and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority (four councillors from Wirral Council). These two pay these councillors directly extra amounts for these extra responsibilities. A list similar to the one Wirral Council produces is published on their organisation’s website annually. These amounts are not included in this list from Wirral Council as such payments are made directly to councillors by those bodies rather than through Wirral Council.

A resolution to Council in previous years required Wirral Council to publish these extra amounts received too from bodies funded through the council tax such as Merseytravel, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority and until it was abolished and replaced with the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside & Police and Crime Panel, the Merseyside Police Authority.

As with the complicated scheme in place at Wirral Council, these amounts can vary quite considerably from a basic allowance that all receive to large amounts for the Chair.

Taking one public body, the figures for Merseytravel (which is now part of the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority) haven’t been published on Wirral Council’s website for 2013-14, but the 2012-13 figures show that Wirral Council councillors received a basic allowance each of £5,202.13 (with part year payments to Cllr Blakeley and Cllr Foulkes), an extra special responsibility allowance for three councillors ranging from £1,095.38 to £4,063.29 as well as travel & subsistence payments ranging from nothing claimed to £997.99.

So, although the “cost of democracy” at Wirral Council is at least £754,783.18, in addition to this amount is the cost of the Mayor & Deputy Mayor and the currently difficult to find amounts councillors receive for representing Wirral Council on outside bodies (which Wirral Council should following a resolution agreed by Wirral Council publish on its website but in recent years hasn’t).

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