THERE is never a good time for MPs or councillors to suggest big increases in their pay as Brighton and Hove Council will discover at a meeting tonight.

Having already increased allowances last year, the authority is now proposing another huge hike which is already proving to be remarkably unpopular.

Wage earners subjected to inflation level rises of around two per cent do not like to see councillors getting increases of 66 per cent or more in some cases.

For a long time MPs were not paid and it is only in the last decade or so that they have received reasonable salaries. Councillors remained unpaid until the Seventies and their rewards have never been anything like those of paid work.

In the old days, councillors were mainly the rich or retired. Typical members might be a wealthy male solicitor in his 50s who felt he ought to give something back to his town or a retired headmistress of independent means.

Now most councils aim to have members who are more representative of the general public and that means poorer.

You will not persuade most people of quality to undertake many hours of work unless they get some reward for it. The old cliche is true that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Under the new Brighton and Hove system, ordinary councillors will get a rise from £5,000 to £8,000 and senior councillors will get much more than that. I do not have a problems with these payments provided we can see these people doing a decent job.

The £8,000 is less than most people get for their labours. Even the £30,000 which may be paid to council leader Lynette Gwyn-Jones is far less than would be paid to the head of a major corporation with 7,000 employees, and for her it is more than a full-time job.

But if councillors are to be paid

reasonable money, then we should expect reasonable results. There is no reason why their pay should not be performance-related as it is in many of the other public services.

While it might sometimes be hard to judge how effective councillors were at dealing with obstreperous and plainly barmy constituents, it might be possible for independent assessors to look at how well they talk in public, the quality of written information they produce and the level of decision making.

This might be unpopular with councillors who feel they are there to serve the public in their own ways. But some of them are more or less full-time already and we should be able to judge them on how able they are as we happen to be their paymasters.

We won't be able to chuck them out except at election time, but it would be possible to deny payments to those plainly identified by independent officers as being incompetent, insufferable malingerers.

While most councillors are dedicated to a service which can be difficult, controversial and not exactly filled with thanks, there are always some who would make electors recoil in horror were they to see them in action, or more likely inaction.

There are also far too many councillors on all authorities. Cut the number to 26, or one rather than three to a ward, and they would all be kept busy.

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