Be under no illusion that, if challenged over their outrageous recent and imminent pay rises, most county councillors will portray themselves as helpless bystanders.

As one, they will raise their hands in a gesture of injured innocence.

“Don’t blame me, pal”, they will tell you in tones solemn and faintly hurt, accompanied by a corroborative shaking of the head, “Our pay rises are nothing to do with us. Oh, no. They’re set by an independent pay review body.” 

The “independent” bit they will utter with relaxed relish, before adding, just in case you hadn’t taken on board their virtuousness: “They decide what we get paid. We have no say in the matter.”

It’s a try-on well rehearsed over quite some years now. And it is absolute rubbish.

Certainly, it’s the case that the Independent Remuneration Panel for Wales ‘determines’ levels of payment for councillors. And that, as the panel puts it: “Councils have no powers to vary determinations, the levels of payment or to decide not to make payments.”

But that is only part of the story, because the panel also makes clear that councillors are perfectly free to forgo all or part of their salary, including, therefore, the freedom to decide not to accept pay rises. 

It says: “If an individual does not need payment, or does not wish to receive all or some of their entitlement, they can stop or reduce payment. This is a personal, individual decision…”

This being so, how likely is it that any members of, for example, Ceredigion, Gwynedd or Powys county councils should feel even remotely justified in accepting the panel’s authorised 4.67 per cent rise from next March, particularly taking into account last year’s enormous 17 per cent increase for all county councillors?

A 4.67 per cent hike - worth £800 a year - would take salaries for backbench councillors to £17,600, while pay for council leaders would rise, in Ceredigion, by £2,550 to £56,100, and to £59,400 in Gwynedd and Powys.

The reality is that most - not all - councillors just aren’t worth the money. A majority appear as ciphers who seem to believe they are there to do the bidding of senior officials and group leaders and essentially have no wills of their own. Now and again they will pipe up with a wan challenge to an otherwise prevailing course of action, but more often than not they will quickly cave in to whatever section of the council establishment is at that moment holding sway.

At meetings, many will sit mute, obviously fighting to stay awake, looking as lively as well-fed diners taking an elongated siesta beneath a warm Mediterranean sun. 

Become a county councillor and, if you choose to be, you’re aboard a gravy-train. There is no contractual obligation on numbers of hours to be worked, so you decide for yourself how much time you put in for your £17,600. The Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) - a kind of mouthpiece for councils - “estimates” that, “on average”, councillors spend the equivalent of three days a week on council business. There is no hard evidence for this and, having observed local government in Wales for quite some time, I’d say the WLGA’s guess is quite likely to be an over-estimate

The absence of verifiable information on numbers of hours worked by councillors is a serious deficiency, because it undermines the remuneration panel’s claim that it has set the basic salaries of councillors “to closer align with the average earnings in Wales.”

Latest figures show that average adult gross weekly earnings in Wales are a fraction over £598, or just over £31,000 a year. But that is for people working full time, which on average means just over 36 hours a week.

We consequently possess no valid comparison between councillor pay and Welsh average earnings, and the remuneration panel’s claim that it has aligned councillor salaries with average earnings is thus a worrying nonsense. Average salaries are joined at the hip with average hours worked, and no-one has any solid and reliable information on the number of hours put in by councillors.

But, while the pay panel’s “determinations” are without foundation, the repercussions for taxpayers could well be enormous.

In the entirely unproven event that the WLGA’s “estimate” is correct, and councillors work a three-day week equivalent, a £17,600 salary would equate to just over £29,000 a year full time, not so very different from the Wales £31,000 average. 

But if they actually put in the equivalent of only two days a week that £29,000 equates to a full-time salary of £44,000 a year, £13,000 above average earnings.

Huge amounts of taxpayer money are spent on councillor pay. In Ceredigion, Gwynedd and Powys alone, the yearly bill is more than £2m. Across Wales, the outgoing is about £18m.

Audit Wales, which has responsibility for ensuring that public money is being managed well, must intervene. It must ensure that a reliance on guesswork over hours worked in the determining of councillor pay must be halted as a matter of some urgency.

It is utterly shameful that nurses in Wales find themselves forced to strike in a desperate last-ditch act of defence over pay levels and worries about patient-safety.

After a year-long dispute with Welsh Government-funded employers centring on an insultingly low three per cent pay award, they’ve decided - entirely understandably - that they can take no more.

Helen Whyley, director of the Royal College of Nursing in Wales, spells out their predicament, explaining how, at hospitals throughout Wales, she has heard first-hand of nurses struggling to pay household bills, of the extra hours they have worked unpaid to subsidise the NHS, of the shifts when they have gone without any breaks. 

“They have told me of their constant worry and despair for the safety of their patients due to short staffing. There is currently no escape for staff – worry and guilt for their patients at work, worry and guilt for their families at home.”

We should besiege Assembly members and the Cardiff government with repeated demands for a swift end to this crying injustice.