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Tory council votes to increase payments to its leadership

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Mike Fisher, the florid-faced leader of the Conservatives who have been running Croydon Council since 2006, is keen to see next Thursday’s election contested on his record in office. Unsurprisingly, the £1 billion debt that Croydon Council has built up on his watch is not something Fisher ever mentions.

Croydon’s Tory leader Mike Fisher: Has presided over record levels of council debt and record amounts of councillor allowances

Nor is the £140 million of our money that they have spent to build the luxury council head offices, also known as “Fisher’s Folly”.

Nor the record amounts which Fisher and his henchmen Dudley Mead and Steve O’Connell decided they should pay themselves in “allowances”.

When they were re-elected on to the Town Hall gravy train in May 2010 virtually the first thing they did was to increase councillors’ allowances. Mainly their own allowances.

Over the last four years of a Tory-run council, Croydon Council Tax-payers footed a total bill for councillors’ allowances of around

£5.8 million

The figure is an approximation, since the finalised amounts for 2013-2014 have not yet been made publicly available by… Croydon Council. These millions of pounds are distributed among all our 70 councillors – Labour as well as the Tories – although those on the Conservative side of the council chamber receive considerably more.

It is one of the highest bills for councillors’ allowances  in any local authority.

The individual payments for what is supposed to be a part-time role make for interesting reading:

And so it goes on…

Could it happen again if the Tories win the Town Hall elections next week?

News from across the county border, in Surrey, suggest that it might.

Vote to pay these three hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, and they’ll bribe you with the 25 quid they took off you last year: Mike Fisher (centre), Steve O’Connell and Dudley Mead (left)

It’s been trebles all-round at Surrey County Council lately, where they have to find savings of £72million from their services budget. But those tough decisions did not come before councillors there awarded themselves massive pay rises.

An independent remuneration committee recommended a generous 33 per cent increase in allowances for the council leader, David Hodge, and a 56 per cent hike for his deputy, Peter Martin. But Hodge and Martin ignored the committee’s advice and awarded themselves an inflation-busting 66 per cent increase in their allowances. Hodge and Martin now pocket nearly £100,000 a year between the two of them.

The Surrey councillors reckoned that 47 of the county’s 81 elected representatives were worthy of extra dosh in “special responsibility allowances”. According to this week’s Private Eye magazine, the remuneration panel wrote to the councillors in its recommendations to suggest that “the council should consider whether paying [SRA] to a majority of its members can be justified to the residents of Surrey”.

The council paid the increased SRA allowance, and opted to award it to 54 of the 81 councillors.

Total cost of the increases in councillor allowances is £216,600 – or more than the council has “saved” by cutting grants to some community projects.

Today, the remuneration committee in Surrey has resigned in disgust.

And in the case of any doubt, Surrey County Council is under the control of the Conservatives.

Inside Croydon’s recent coverage of the local elections:

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