Vince Maple Allowances

Medway Council Vince Maple discusses why the council decided to reject an independent pay review recommending councillors be paid more money.

Transcript

00:00 So every four years every council including Medway has to take something

00:03 called an independent remuneration panel report. So it's not us looking at it as a

00:08 council, it's independent people looking at the number of hours taken by

00:13 councillors, the roles and responsibilities particularly for those

00:16 of us who receive something called an SRA, a special responsibility allowance.

00:20 I was really proud to see actually in the report it states that myself

00:25 personally I am effectively underpaid as a councillor which was interesting to

00:29 see from an independent panel. In their report they made a couple of

00:33 recommendations about putting up allowances both for cabinet members but

00:37 also for chairs of overview and scrutiny. Now as is well documented we are having

00:41 huge financial challenges in Medway so my council group put forward the

00:48 opportunity to not take forward those recommendations in particular. I was

00:52 pleased to see cross-party support on that. There were some issues raised

00:55 specifically around caring responsibilities and I've asked one of

00:59 our committees to look at that next year after a year of the current proposals

01:03 being in place.