THE GRIPPINGLY-named Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru must be favourite to win Welsh quango of the year award.

After all, it’s had only a year as the government offshoot in charge of deciding how much county councillors should - or shouldn’t - be paid, and already it’s distinguishing itself as the public body most successfully worsening cost of living pressures.

For reasons that for most people will be unfathomable, the commission seems to have a soft spot for the 1,230-odd elected members of Wales’s 22 main local authorities.

Why else would it call for a 6.4 per cent salary increase for people widely regarded as ciphers who too often think their job is to do the bidding of senior officials and group leaders and essentially have no wills of their own? A lavish pay award which just happens to be more than twice the current 3 per cent rate of inflation.

In a further apparent expression of admiration, the commission makes the extraordinary claim that such a rise is deserved.

From this month, elected members’ basic salaries will increase to £21,044, nearly £1,300 more than last year, and up by nearly £3,500 since 2023. Cabinet members, committee chairpeople, council deputy leaders and leaders will rake in loads more.

As an example, Plaid Cymru’s six-member Ceredigion cabinet will take delivery of £2,435 more (to £40,247 a year), together with a weighty £4,059 extra (to £67,079) for council leader Bryan Davies. It’s almost ingenious as a way of staying ahead of the 4.75 per cent council tax upward swerve this cabinet is ushering in for 2026 - 2027.

The DBCC’s unexplained backing for a seriously hyped-up inflation figure will leave the general and local taxpayer in Wales about £1m total worse off than if hikes had been limited to 3 per cent. Plus, selecting a random 6.4 per cent hardly goes down a treat when council tax across the country is taking off with the speed of a Ceredigion councillor making haste to their favourite Aberaeron chippie after a tedious morning propping open eyelids with matchsticks in Penmorfa’s optimistically named debating chamber.

Little sympathy there, you suspect, for people in the chill streets beyond with no power to arrange a financial buffer.

Councillors are ahead of the field on public sector pay. Senedd members get a 4.5 per cent rise later this year, after a 6 per cent increase in 2025. Last year, MPs took a 2.8 per cent increase.

Yet the commission wants the great unwashed to believe these increases are fully justified. Yes, really. They rattle off statistics to bolster their case. They fail in the attempt.

DBCC chief executive Shereen Williams says its “research” shows that councillors work an average of 28 hours a week, “with many of them doing this on top of another job.” And pigs might fly.

She adds: “We recognise however that council budgets are stretched and the cost of living has increased for everyone, and we’ll look at new ways of deciding councillor pay for future years over the coming months.”

They could have been doing that over the past year.

Huge amounts of taxpayer money are spent on councillor pay. In Ceredigion, Gwynedd and Powys alone, the yearly bill is about £2.5m. Across Wales, the outgoing is about £20m. Yet councillors are under no contractual obligation on numbers of hours to be worked. For anyone who wants it to be, the job’s a gravy train.

The Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru began advising on councillor pay in February last year, succeeding the equally nattily-named Independent Remuneration Panel for Wales, which had said it wanted to “align” councillor salaries with average Welsh earnings.

With average full-time - 36.6 hours - pay in Wales at slightly over £36,600, “alignment” would be close - if the 28-hours claim was plausible, which it isn’t.

The commission shoots itself in the foot on two counts: its heavily unjustified pay award at twice the rate of inflation, and, yes, doubts that councillors work on average anything like as much as 28 hours a week.

Plausibility founders because the commission’s evidence on hours is far from objective, being based solely on answers provided by elected members themselves as part of a survey by Swansea firm Opinion Research Services (ORS).

The subject of hours is crucial because it’s inextricably linked to the highly controversial issue of councillor pay, meaning that information beyond the merely subjective is essential if an accurate picture is to emerge.

ORS say all current county councillors in Wales were invited to take part in the survey. But, crucially, they admit the final sample was “self-selecting and cannot be said to be statistically representative of all elected members.” A point underlined by the fact that a mere 244 survey answers were received, out of a possible 1,230-odd.

This is a very unimpressive 20 per cent response rate, and one which threw up wildly divergent numbers, with answers on weekly hours worked ranging from a vanishingly small eight to a highly questionable 60.

Twenty-eight hours a week? Eight hours a week? Essentially, we’re in the realm of guesswork.

Inevitably, too, the accuracy of councillors’ responses will be questioned. How many keep written records of hours worked? If they don’t, how good are their memories? Perish the thought, but was anyone taking part in the survey tempted to err on the generous side?

The final piece of this jigsaw of potentially competing interests is councillors’ frequent, and spurious, claim that acceptance or rejection of annual pay rises is beyond their control, that an independent pay body decides what they get, and that’s that.

It’s in fact made clear to councils that members are perfectly free not to accept part, or all, of their salaries.

So councillors’ old cry: “Don’t blame us, pal, our pay rises are nothing to do with us, they’re set by an independent pay review body” falls flat.

Taking a highly inflationary pay rise damaging to constituents already struggling to make ends meet is a personal choice for which councillors must take personal responsibility.