Get rid of most councillors. Pay the rest.
THE local elections are less than a week away yet they’re not something that’s gripping the nation.
Ask your average punter who their local council leader is and they almost certainly won’t know. Ask them which party’s in control and most will shrug their shoulders and think no more about it.
A local councillor recently called for him and his colleagues to be paid a salary so they could do the job full time. That caught our eye at Channel M News, so I went into the streets of Manchester to see whether the idea had any support. I expected everyone to say no.
Instead, almost everyone I asked thought that councillors were paid already. They were unaware of what really happens.
Councillors are paid to some extent. An average one gets around £8,000 a year in allowances. But it’s hardly a living wage. Some councillors attend several daytime meetings in a week. The conscientious ones hold surgeries to meet the people they represent and try to tackle their problems. It means they spend a lot of time doing what, for many, is almost as onerous as a full-time job.
With my job, I wouldn’t have the time to be a councillor. Most working people wouldn’t. So that means that councils are full of the retired, the rich, the unemployed and the self-employed. They’re not very representative of most of us. And their powers have been snatched away by successive governments.
These days, the government or organisations such as the North West Development Agency make the real decisions and councils carry out their instructions.
Sometimes councils fill in forms to compete with other local authorities – for things such as the super casino – and the best form-filler-inners win. Manchester’s quite good at that. But the power’s still with Westminster, as the super casino affair showed.
Democracy and representation are way down the list of importance.
Even so, there are a lot of councillors. Manchester alone has 96. That’s for a city of 400,000 people. There are 10 councils in Greater Manchester. That’s a lot of councillors in total for a conurbation of 2.5 million.
Madrid, a city of three million, makes do with 55 councillors. They’re paid and they have more power than ours.
Local politics matters more there than it does here. I imagine it excites more discussion than it does here too.
Many of our councillors are pretty thick. Those without executive office don’t have to stand much scrutiny in the media. But they still get their allowances.
That money could be put to better use if we pooled it, had far fewer councillors but paid them proper salaries so they could do a better job.
They’d be better quality than the nodding donkeys that are elected. But they’d need to have more power – over planning, in education and tax setting (they do this but fear being capped) – to make them want to do it and to give local government have a real purpose again.
Perhaps then local politics would matter more, we would care more about what happened in our town halls – and we would know who led our local authorities.