I’m not always complimentary about councillors, so I’m going to have to take a deep breath and be nice about some of them now.
The Evening Star’s excellent piece of investigative reporting that dug up councillor’s expenses across Suffolk shows a couple of interesting things about Ipswich. I’ve done some further number crunching (you can see the spreadheet here) and it shows that at least with expenses Ipswich is the second cheapest council per councillor and although a 4% increase is above inflation but is still far lower than the average increase in the county and lower than any proposed increase in MP’s expenses.
So for once, we can say well done to Ipswich Borough Council. To be honest this can’t show the benefits of a Tory administration (many other Suffolk councils are Tory) but it does show that a closely competitive set of elections can keep councillors honest. With losing by 13 votes, I’m glad to be contributing to that fear.
If Chris Mole started to think of Ipswich as being marginal would he be so cavalier in using taxpayer money to pay salaries for the Ipswich Labour Party?
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