TORIES have blasted accusations they are “greedy and shamefaced” for giving colleagues a 50% pay increase.

Borough Cllr Justin Madders said a new scheme of allowances had been debated by the Shadow Authority running the new Cheshire West and Chester Council, which comes into being in April 2009, following a report from an Independent Commission.

And while its recommendations were mainly accepted, he claims Tory Cllrs decided to increase the allowances for chairs of committees by 50% above the Commission’s recommendations, from £2,000 to £3,000 on top of their basic allowance.

Cllr Madders, present Labour group leader and also a member of the Shadow Authority, said he attended the meeting in Winsford and spoke against the proposals.

He explained: “The whole point of asking an Independent body to recommend allowance rates is that they can look at the issues involved objectively and without political bias.

“In my view therefore there needs to be a very compelling reason for the Council to depart from those recommendations, particularly when we are talking about an increase of 50% above the recommendations.

“I asked for some kind of justification for this excessive increase at the Council meeting but no response was provided by the Tories.”

When the matter was put to the vote an amendment was suggested to accept the Commission’s recommendations in full, which was supported by both the Liberal Democrats and Labour, but this was defeated.

He said the Conservative Cllrs voted en masse against this proposal and supported the increase of 50% for their members.

Cllr Madders added: “In this difficult economic climate with the credit crunch and local government workers striking for a modest increase in their salary, it beggars belief that the Tories could be so shamefaced to award themselves a pay increase of 50% and not even try to justify it.

“We are all aware that the new authority faces a difficult first few years financially and for the Tories to ignore that and line their own pockets instead smacks of snouts in the trough and a strange dislocation from reality.”

Responding to these claims, Conservative borough Cllr and member of the Shadow Authority, Gareth Anderson, said: “As a point of fact, Cllr Madders is wrong.

“Only Policy Development Board Chairmen are having their allowances raised, not all Chairmen.

“This is because the cross-party Governance Committee agreed that they had a new role which demanded a huge amount of time which the Independent Panel could not have been aware of when it made its recommendations.

“The two opposition members of the Governance Committee raised no objections to this at all, and they are Ellesmere Port Labour Councillors Paul Donovan and Tony Sherlock.”

He added: “During the same meeting, Labour Councillor Sherlock proposed we scrap the suggested limit of one Special Responsibility Allowance (SRA) per Councillor as suggested by the Independent Panel.

“Only Labour councillors are likely to benefit from this to any extent as each Labour Spokesman on every Committee is entitled to £1,000 extra SRA.

“As there are only 13 Labour councillors out of 72 then most of them will be Spokesmen on more than one committee.

“So one change was proposed by the Conservatives and one by Labour.”

Accusing Cllr Madders of being “inflammatory and so wrong”, Cllr Anderson went on: “It is very sad he is choosing to play party politics over £9,000 which his party did not originally oppose, when these nine Chairmen are working incredibly hard to shape a new council with 15,000 staff and a budget of half a billion pounds, all thanks to the decision of his Labour Government to create unitary local government here in Cheshire.”