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Labour council leader demonstrates party’s poor grasp of arithmetic

In all the furore over the increases in allowances paid to Conservative councillors in Barnet and Croydon, the media seems to have glossed over the doubling of the pay of the new Labour leader of Liverpool, Joe Anderson.

Cllr Anderson decided to celebrate taking control of the city in May by charging council taxpayers twice as much as the previous leader. After ratification at a council meeting on Wednesday, the council leader will now receive a total of £52,100 a year.

Liverpool council have justified the increase in salary on the basis that previously the job was only part time, but was now full time. Most council leaders and indeed councillors that I know work far longer than the hours they are deemed to work, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that previous leaders Warren Bradley and Mike Storey, did exactly that. Still, the council have made their decision to increase the number of paid hours to the council leader and the Labour group voted it through.

The surprise was in Cllr Anderson’s calculation of his financial situation.  After his election as leader of the council, Cllr Anderson resigned from his job as a social worker at a school in Crosby.  He told the Liverpool Daily Post that had he kept his job, he would have been able to keep his £40,000 salary, also collecting  £21,000 as council leader, and a basic councillor’s allowance of £10,000, making a total income of £71,000. Cllr Anderson told the paper, “I am taking a £19,000 pay cut to work for the city of Liverpool, as far as I am concerned that is an honourable thing to do”.

But surely that’s not right. Both Cllr Anderson’s new and previous roles need to be performed mainly during the normal working week. So on taking up the post as council leader, even part time, he would have needed to go part time in his social work role, otherwise he would not have been able to justice to either role. Thus his income would have been £20,000 from Sefton Council and £31,000 from Liverpool City Council, a total of £51,000. That’s almost exactly the same as the £52,100 he will now receive from the city council, or the total of £50,000 he would have received from being a backbench councillor and a full time social worker. So I’m not sure where the £19,000 pay cut comes.

Of course Cllr Anderson may be working on the fact that last year he received an allowance of £12,000 as leader of the Labour opposition. But that role was rated at more than 25% of a week’s work. So in taking a reduction in income from the total of £62,000 (£40,000+£10,000+£12,000) to £52,000 he has been his hours cut by more than 25%, with just a 16% reduction in income. In other words, his hourly rate has increased.

I don’t know whether the leader of Liverpool City Council should be paid a full time wage. But for Cllr Anderson to claim that he has taken a pay cut is simply false.

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