‘The revolving-door arguments of pay us the swag or you’ll only have scum toffs as councillors’

• WITH reference to the letters in response to my very basic question (What about councillors’ hours worked?, May 5), do councillors over and above other citizen volunteers deserve the allowances they are paid or the bicycle claims that four of them make?

There have been two responses claiming that if we didn’t give councillors this money we would restrict the pool of candidates to monied toffs; and the unevidenced claim councillors do loads of hours, presumably a massive contribution to the council over and above that done by the hard-working staff.

The first proposal has already been rejected, noting that Camden Council’s policy is clearly to give allowances so that “people are able to undertake the role of being councillor without being subject to financial loss for doing so”. That is, it’s open to all to volunteer their services unimpeded of financial lost.

As to the second proposal about huge amounts of “donated” hours, what evidence is there of this and of its value? Perhaps there should be a Sue Gray investigation.

In this era of cost of living crisis, in this week of celebrating the volunteer, can we not question what councillors do in the light of some reports in your pages?

Instead we have the revolving-door arguments of pay us the swag or you’ll only have scum toffs as councillors (trustafarians have feelings and can make a contribution too) and councillors do unimaginable hours (and unrecorded too).

Joy to volunteers!

DAVID A WILLIAMS, NW2