DETAILS of the allowances and expenses paid to each Bournemouth councillor could soon be published online for everyone to see.

Following the recent controversy over massive increases in councillors' "pay", it is suggested that the council needs to be more proactive about what information it publishes.

Currently, Bournemouth council does the bare minimum by publishing basic details annually in the Daily Echo but, under new rules coming in next year, councils will be expected to be as open and transparent as possible.

With this in mind, councillors at next Wednesday's cabinet meeting will be asked to consider two options - continue publishing the minimum information but put it on the council's website, or publish detailed information on what every individual councillor has received, including travel expenses, car park permits and IT equipment.

Meanwhile, yesterday's story about the eight council officers in Dorset and the New Forest earning over £100,000 sparked plenty of reaction on the Echo website.

Ashley from Verwood said he thought £100,000 was a "reasonable" wage for the position.

"You compare these salaries with relevant positions in the public or private industries and it is pretty good value for money," he said.

And senior council officer Chris, from Wareham, said: "As public servants, we should rightly be challenged to deliver high standards and ever-improving performance, but please don't begrudge us a reasonably fair rate of pay.

"Most of us do this work because we want to make a difference for our communities - certainly not for the money, which many of us could boost substantially by working elsewhere."

But Fedupwithjobs-worths of Moordown said: "The CEO of a council has at best only 25 per cent of the responsibilities of a private sector counterpart - a wage of 40k should be more than adequate."

  • Further to yesterday's story about chief executives' pay, we would like to clarify that the salary for the post of chief executive at Bournemouth council did not go up by 11.7 per cent between 2005/06 to 2006/07.

Chief executive Pam Donnellan's salary rose by this amount because she was promoted to chief executive in October 2005.