COUNCIL taxpayers in Bridgend are paying £298 a year on average towards the pensions of town hall staff.

Research by Welsh Conservatives has revealed that throughout Wales, band D council tax payers are seeing £273 of their annual bill go towards the massive pensions black hole facing local government.

And this bill excludes contributions made by council taxpayers to the pensions of teachers, police officers and fire fighters. Now, Conservative regional AM Alun Cairns has called for councils to get a grip on the escalating pensions bill. The figure paid out in Wales as a whole represents a quarter of the total bill although in Bridgend it is 27 per cent.

Mr Cairns said that the index-linked, gold plated pensions enjoyed by senior council staff, many of whom were on salaries of more than £100,000 a year, were no longer affordable.
"The gravy train has hit the buffers and it is time that local authorities got down to protecting core services like street cleaning, refuse collection and children's social services.

"They must cut back on the army of bureaucrats recruited over the past decade as diversity co-ordinators, equality managers, five a day supervisors and the rest at wages which most ordinary working people can only dream about. It's time that the empire building of council managers was stopped in its tracks.

"The burden of providing pensions for these staff is not sustainable now and will certainly not be in years to come as the number of pensioners increases while the number of people working to pay for these pensions is reduced."