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08
Oct 2024
North Yorkshire councillors set for another pay rise
North Yorkshire councillors look set to award themselves a pay rise, making them among the most highly remunerated in the country.
The increase, which councillors are expected to ratify next week, comes at a time when North Yorkshire Council is making £90 million cuts from 2024 to 2027.
The Conservative-controlled council has 90 elected councillors. They are not paid as employees but receive a basic allowance to reflect the time they give.
Each one currently receives a basic allowance of £17,000. But a five-person independent remuneration panel has recommended this goes up to £17,340 — a 2% uplift in 2025/26. You can read the panel's report here.
The increase would make North Yorkshire councillors the fourth highest paid of 18 local authorities listed in a comparator document (see below or click here to view) published by the council. Councillors in Birmingham, Leeds and Cornwall top the list.
The average basic allowance of the 18 local authorities is £14,406 — more than £2,500 less than North Yorkshire’s current £17,000.
The panel has also suggested increases in the sums awarded to those councillors who undertake additional responsibilities, such as vice-chairing the area constituency committees.
A report to the council’s ruling executive cites factors such as the reconfiguration of local government in North Yorkshire, which has seen an overall reduction in councillors from 319 to 90, and ‘the need to attract and retain high-quality candidates from a variety of backgrounds’ as factors for the proposed increase.
It says:
The basic allowance should not be a financial disincentive to those who might otherwise wish to serve as an elected member.
The proposed 2% inflationary increase in the basic allowance will cost an additional £30,600 a year, increasing the total cost from £1,530,000 to £1,560,600 a year
Changes to the special responsibility allowances would result in an additional £2,698 a year, increasing from £459,702 to £462,400 a year. The overall increase in cost in 2025-26 would, therefore, be £33,298.
If approved at the executive meeting on Tuesday next week (October 15), this would be the second councillor pay increase since North Yorkshire Council was formed in April last year, following the abolition of district and borough councils, including Harrogate.
The basic allowance for 2023/24 was set at £15,500, compared with £10,316 paid in the previous year to county councillors. It was then increased to £17,000 for the current year.
The independent panel’s report says:
Every councillor now has a wider brief and workload than they did as either just a district councillor or just a county councillor. Even if they were previously ‘twin-hatted’ as both district and county councillors there are now many fewer councillors overall, so it is possible that their workload has increased.
We were mindful of the need to encourage persons of all ages and backgrounds to become councillors, and that the level of the basic allowance should not be a disincentive, particularly at a time of significant inflation and cost-of-living pressures.
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