Big Pay Rise for City Hall Greens?

After the local elections in May, Norwich City Council flipped from Labour to now being run by the Green Party. At the first major meeting of the council since they took power, Green councillors brought a proposal to award members (most of all those in the new cabinet) an enormous pay rise. The new Green leader of Norwich will see her pay go up 26%, for example.

While the proposal did also include some useful changes to simplify the allowances system, the Lib Dems at City Hall thought that such a large base increase in pay was simply inappropriate, and made clear we would not vote for it. After opposition at the meeting, the Greens pulled their proposal, citing a need to ‘build consensus’, suggesting they may try again later. 

We share in the disappointment expressed that the Green Party would seek to make their own pay packets such a high priority upon entering office.

See what our University & Earlham spokesperson James Hawketts had to say on the matter on social media:

Transcript

How would you like a 26% pay rise? Sounds good? Well, that's what the Green Party here in Norwich might be about to award themselves at the public's expense.

I'm here outside City Hall, and at the last full council meeting the administration (so the Green Party who were in charge), brought a proposal for the increase of councillors’ allowances. That's the money that is given to councillors, their pay, essentially, for the work that they do.

Now it's important to stress that this proposal had multiple elements, some were better than others.

One, for example, was to take the small pots of money for which councillors are paid for some of the committees that they sit on, and for the ones that all or nearly all of the councillors sit on, just roll it into their central pay packet. That saves on administration and bureaucracy; sounds like a good idea.

But there was also one element of that plan which did not seem like a good idea. They want to award the cabinet, that's the people who are actually in charge of Norwich City Council, which as a Green-majority council means they are all members of the Green Party, huge pay rises. 26% for the leader – most of the others in the cabinet are getting double digits as well. All of this funded by the taxpayer.

Now the argument was that we need to encourage more people to get into local politics, and I can understand that. But at the last local elections in May, we had a huge number of candidates put themselves forward for election, more than usual, much more than usual. And beyond that: they were the last elections! Norwich City Council is getting abolished soon as part of the local government reorganisation. There will be no more elections, so no more people to put themselves forward to this body.

The only people who will benefit from these pay rises are the Green Cabinet themselves – those Green councillors.

Now, at the meeting, we made clear that we couldn't support the proposal due to that element and they did a bit of U-turn. They pulled it citing the need to find more agreement with other parties; find more consensus.

If they do bring it back, we've got the same red line as before. No inappropriate double-digit pay rise to a small number of individuals at the taxpayers expense.