Your council tax will skyrocket this week so I guarantee you won’t be happy with how many councillors earn over £100k

SO how much is your council tax going up this week?

Do you live in one of the 293 council boroughs which are increasing bills by the highest rise allowed?

The average bill is set to rise by £109, or five per cent.

Some have been given permission to smash the so-called cap with rises of up to ten per cent.

Do you think you are getting value for your hard-earned cash?

Are your bin collections less frequent than they used to be?

Do potholes scar your local roads?

Or maybe everything is hunky dory on your doorstep?

Whatever the outlook, the top brass in your area are doing well.

In 2023-24 our latest town hall rich list reveals that a record 3,906 council bosses received more than £100,000 in remuneration — salary, pension contributions and other payments.

A whopping 1,092 received over £150,000, 238 even had a higher salary than the prime minister.

The highest paid council boss for the year was Annemarie O’Donnell, the then chief executive of Glasgow City Council, who received just shy of £570,000. She has since left her post.

If the public sector was dotted with small, extremely high-performing teams delivering modern, efficient world-class services, then the telephone number salaries would be warranted.

In places like Singapore, after all, the prime minister makes about £1.3 million a year.

But Singapore also has the highest GDP per capita in the world.

In layman’s terms that means that Singaporeans are a whole lot better off than Brits, with world-class standards in education, infrastructure and law enforcement.

High public-sector salaries seem to yield results. But that’s not the system we have, unfortunately.

Before laying all of the blame at the door of our councils, it is only fair to note that they are shouldering the extraordinary cost of adult social care, which stood at £23billion in 2023-24.

£23bn cost of adult care

Councils are responsible for supporting the elderly and adults with disabilities by maintaining both residential and home-care services as well as support for carers.

In some cases, these costs are making up more than 70 per cent of a council’s budget and are only going to get more expensive as we have more elderly people looked after by fewer taxpayers.

So balancing the books with those pressures isn’t easy.

There are also a load more statutory requirements placed on local authorities — essentially, rules handed down from central government on how councils spend money and on what.

This reduces a council’s ability to manage its budget effectively and flexibly, according to the changing needs of its residents.

But these extra pressures make council waste look even more astounding.

As the TPA has previously uncovered, councils spent more than £2million on adult bike riding lessons, £5million on converting car parks into tiny parklets (green social areas) and hundreds of thousands of pounds on dozens of events for Pride month.

Kent County Council maintains an office in Brussels. Arun District Council spent £400,000 on 14 unisex toilets.

In one of the worst examples of squandered cash, councils employed 717 people in ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ roles between 2020 and 2023. This cost taxpayers £52million.

Given the number of eye-wateringly high salaries, you’d think that councils were delivering cost-effective services to a high standard.

The reality for Brits is under-performing councils prioritise wasting money on woke hobby horses over delivering on the basics.

A quick search of cuts to services makes for grim reading.

Ealing Council has announced plans to close children’s centres.

They have 21 members of staff receiving over £100,000.

Colchester Council has slashed funding for park maintenance and grave digging. They have three staff receiving over £100,000.

Hampshire Council has decided to keep the street lights off for longer at night. They have 50 staff receiving over £100,000.

Possibly because they have so many staff, many councils also seem to make everything needlessly complicated.

We at the TPA found that the average council had four different categories of bin; 56 councils had six different bins; three councils had ten different types of bins available, making residents sort rubbish into absurd categories.

Astronomically high salaries

How can council bosses with such astronomically high salaries get the basics so wrong?

And while local government is a land of milk and honey for its head honchos, the same cannot be said for the private sector.

Costs for business are soaring, with a increases in employer National Insurance Contributions, plus new employment legislation that will make hiring a nightmare.

Throw in the hike in inheritance tax targeting family-owned businesses, and you’ve got a toxic cocktail of measures that will guarantee strife in the private sector.

Taxpayers will rightly question why public sector top dogs are once again immune to pressures felt by the rest of us.

• John O’Connell is chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance