Still Making Allowances at Brent Council

I remarked the other day that a supplementary had been added to Brent's last full Council meeting expanding the Executive to ten posts from the previous eight.  This seems to have been nodded through. 

Allowances has been a contentious issue in the past.  Essentially, since 2014, Brent has followed a policy of increasing the basic allowance considerably whilst seeking to justify this by cutting the number of Special Responsibility posts.  This has decoupled the levels of allowance received from the amount of work actually done, and has not always been pursued consistently.  Thus, new posts on Scrutiny were created and allowances given to them, which I thought rather peculiar.

The second argument made, certainly in 2014, was that the overall allowance bill would be unchanged as the number of SRAs cut would pay for the increase in the basic level.  In terms of the Executive in 2014, it was argued that cutting the size of the Executive justified a rise in the levels of SRAs for the surviving eight members.  Some people repeated the argument to me in 2018, when Brent Council has raised the basic allowance again to among the highest basic allowance in London.  Now, we seem to be in a position where the basic allowance has risen at a much faster rate than the general pay rate of people working in local government, and the numbers of SRAs are also increasing. 

Presumably the justification for this is that councillors are thought to be doing more work even as the budget and the functions of the Council are diminished.  I can't say that I find this line of argument all that convincing.