Year 3, Week 45, Day 2
Councillor salaries
Councillor salaries
Councillors’ basic salary, including mine, is going up on 1st April from £21,345 to £25,982 a year. This is an increase of 21.7% so there will, of course, be adverse comment.
So let me talk about how this has come about and why, and what my view is on it.
Let me begin by saying that in Scotland councillors do not decide their own remuneration. This avoids all the problems they have in England where I’ve seen councillors repeatedly decide not to increase theirs as “voters won’t like it” so end up significantly underpaying themselves. The most ridiculous example of this I saw was Cambridge City Council where, in a desperate attempt to escape this trap, they created an ad hoc group of residents to recommend increases. The group considered the evidence and recommended a big increase … and councillors then still refused to accept it.
Anyway, the way it works here is that the Scottish Government both decides and funds councillor remuneration, not us, and it uses a formula to decide the amount based on public sector salaries. The result of this is that our remuneration broadly rises in line with the salaries of council staff.
However every so often there’s an independent review undertaken by the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee (SLARC) to see if the formula still works. SLARC was reconvened in April 2023, having last reported in 2011.
SLARC’s report can be found here and they recommended to the Government in February 2024 that the salaries of councillors be set at “80% of the median salary for all employees in the public sector in Scotland [with] effect from 1 April 2024”.
Previously this percentage was rather lower, which is why we’re getting a big one off increase this year.
I’d recommend reading SLARC’s report if this interests you as it explains their thinking. It is a problem to which there is no right answer but I think they’ve come to a sensible conclusion.
The most fundamental issue is that in Scotland we have unitary authorities, unlike a lot of England where responsibilities are split, which means that if you take the task seriously it takes up a lot of your time (for example, as I write this I see it’s 22:41, and it’s not unusual for me to be working on council related business that late at night) and is a seven day a week job.
SLARC found that more than half of councillors report that they spend at least 26 hours per week on formal council duties, while almost half spend more than 16 hours on informal duties on top of that. 42% say their council role is full-time, while more than half (51.29%) are employed elsewhere in a full-time or part-time job. Nearly 60% of councillors are frequently approached by constituents for help whilst not engaged in council duties.
This all makes it very difficult for someone to take this on alongside another job and, if you do, you need an employer who will let you work part time with very flexible hours which need to change week by week, often at short notice. As a result at the last election, when I was looking for candidates to stand for the SNP, I had people who wanted to stand decide not to because they couldn’t make it work alongside their day job.
The consequence of all of this is that the typical councillor is not a typical Highlander: they are older, often retired, and better off than average. To me this seems like a bad thing for democracy - your representatives should be representative - so anything that can be done to make it easier for younger and less well off people to consider being councillors seems like a good thing to me.
With that in mind I think this rise is a step in the right direction, although we’ve still got a way to go.
In closing I should put the other side of the picture. Sadly it is perfectly possible to be a councillor and do very little. The legal requirement is that you attend one council meeting every six months. That’s it, and in these days of video conferencing you can do this from anywhere in the world. All I can tell you is that the vast majority of councillors on Highland Council are working very hard for you.