Medway Council Vince Maple discusses why the council decided to reject an independent pay review recommending councillors be paid more money.
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00:00 So every four years every council including Medway has to take something
00:03 called an independent remuneration panel report. So it's not us looking at it as a
00:08 council, it's independent people looking at the number of hours taken by
00:13 councillors, the roles and responsibilities particularly for those
00:16 of us who receive something called an SRA, a special responsibility allowance.
00:20 I was really proud to see actually in the report it states that myself
00:25 personally I am effectively underpaid as a councillor which was interesting to
00:29 see from an independent panel. In their report they made a couple of
00:33 recommendations about putting up allowances both for cabinet members but
00:37 also for chairs of overview and scrutiny. Now as is well documented we are having
00:41 huge financial challenges in Medway so my council group put forward the
00:48 opportunity to not take forward those recommendations in particular. I was
00:52 pleased to see cross-party support on that. There were some issues raised
00:55 specifically around caring responsibilities and I've asked one of
00:59 our committees to look at that next year after a year of the current proposals
01:03 being in place.