Council Meeting - Wednesday 7th Dec 2011

Council meeting Wednesday December 7th 7pm - 10ish

What really occured......

As you will be aware we again attended the above. Our local councillor would have you think he makes his own decisions; the truth is he votes with his party; he has  done on every occasion since he was elected back in May; nor has he ever spoken a word in council. Value for money? You decide......  

I  spoke in council as a member of the Public, (of which more later) while we are still waiting for him to open his mouth. Only 3 or 4 Tory Councillors ever speak, I sat behind as others exchanged Christmas cards and read ‘In Touch’ which I think is a conservative news sheet, this is how they use Council time!.

Having put that straight; I’ll report back what I heard last night.

The main point was of course the item devoted to councillors ‘expenses’ they don’t of course call them ‘wages’

I’ll tell you the bits that are missing from our councillors report. He may have voted with his party to freeze the ‘expenses’ just a reminder that’s £7,162 with other advantages I have listed below.
Basic Allowance £7,162

Telephone £569 (+ new iphone)

Travel £227 (+ free car parking)


Councillors are also awarded ‘Special Responsibility payments’, a highly contentious one is the payment to chairs of Neighbourhood Councils of around £7k for chairing a meeting x4 times a year. (You couldn’t make this stuff up)!

We have 38 Tory members, 25 of those receive a Special Responsibility payment.

Cabinet members are paid c£14k extra for their ‘special responsibility’ the council rejected a call to reduce the number of cabinet members.

However, when presented with an opportunity to decrease the allowance and or to reduce the number of cabinet members - our local councillor and  his party declined both.

Things got very heated when Cllr Swift pointed out that Councillors received no payments in his time. Cllr Fitzgerald suggested as they were ‘monitoring’ the contracted out services such as Enterprise Peterborough this entitled them to SRP’s.


No doubt this will trigger another round of character assassination and allegations etc etc by certain councillors who really should be better employed, it is very tiresome but I am reporting what I heard and what I saw. I will write later about the rest of meeting. I fully believe you have a right to hear what actually took place and  not a rose tinted, 'I am wonderful' version.
 
 
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