Tories vote to delay publishing Councillors’ allowances

At Rugby Borough Council's Cabinet meeting today (Monday 8 June 2015) the ruling tory group voted to delay publishing details of the allowances paid to councillors last year.

Today's meeting of the cabinet received four reports written by members of the cabinet and took a quarter of an hour to make all the decisions required.

The cabinet meets ten times a year. Let us suppose that normally cabinet meetings take a bit longer - say half an hour and that each member of the cabinet reads all the reports being considered by the cabinet before it meets (this might take an hour). Let us further suppose that every other meeting the members of the cabinet have to write a report and this takes them a couple of hours. This means that the average time a member of the cabinet spends on cabinet meetings is two and a half hours per meeting.

Members of the cabinet receive upwards of £5,000 each in extra allowances for being on the cabinet. At the bottom end of the scale this is £500 per meeting and based on the calculations above that would be an hourly rate of £200 per hour.

Why do the conservatives not want to publish details of the allowances they receive?