IF RHUN ap Iorwerth’s new government is as vigorous and sensitive as people achingly want it to be, an urgent focus must be on the increasingly disturbing issue of wildly inflated council chief executive pay.

It’s a scandal that can no longer be ignored - as it has been - by Senedd politicians operating beyond the semi-autonomous public sector world of local government.

This tends to be an enclosed, fusty place in which councillors - theoretically the first line of defence of grassroots interests - tend instead to give chief executives free rein, too often to the public detriment. Too often there is capitulation to executive preferences, with no more than token resistance in disagreements over decision-making. As a result, top officials can amass near total power over elected people through a mixture of browbeating and, where necessary, inputs of personal charm.

The end result is that the public will wait till the end of time before any but a witheringly small number of elected members, and especially those in cabinets, dare to step out of line. A mixture of weakness, self-interest and laziness leaves them cowed. Fearful of what they have witnessed when, on rare occasions, one of their number has spoken out of turn. They have seen the cutting glances, the dismissive words of rebuke or challenge, meted out by chief executives or sidekick council leaders and have decided on the quiet life, freely translated as total submission. Linked with the prospect of seeing their bank accounts credited by £21,000-odd a year for a couple of days’ work a week.

We can be sure that councillors who have allowed themselves to be disempowered, to be seduced by the quiet life, will never in a month of Sundays raise a voice in opposition to ludicrously inflated executive pay.

Rhun ap Iorwerth must shine a light into this murk. The mounting indignation and anger that CEO and other top brass pay is generating is deeply damaging to public morale. And therefore to general well-being. This perhaps more than any other local government issue excites frustrated fury.

It’s an anger that relates to the sheer repeated wrongness of, year after year, vast salary increases being ladled out to already richly rewarded senior officials.

Part of the problem is that annual hikes of £5,000-plus for chief executives are percentage rises, low single figure percentages equating to multiple thousands extra on pay-chits. Thus the chief executive of Rhondda Cynon Taf council takes home nearly £200,000 a year, while Cardiff City Council’s top pen-pusher laps up more than the first minister or prime minister.

In a setting where everything comes from the public purse, the ragingly unfair fact is that percentages mean the already rich get vastly richer, while the poor - such as school support staff and clerical assistants - stay outrageously, and debilitatingly, poor. Even when the lowest paid are awarded higher percentage rises, a marked and unacceptable imbalance persists.

Public restiveness over chief executive pay is especially pronounced in Ceredigion, where county council CEO Eifion Evans is currently in line for a rise of nearly £5,000, lifting his salary this financial year to £151,529. Since 2021, his pay has leapt by nearly £35,000. Wales first ministers get £174,000.

The Association of Local Authority Chief Executives (Alace), which represents all council chief executives, has for this year negotiated a 3.3 per cent increase. How modest that sounds, and in reality how excessive. A £5,000 rise, to £151,529, in a county where average pay is about £36,000, and many people get far less than that. Where nearly a third of households, and about 28 per cent of children, are assessed as living in poverty.

Where, since 2022, the average band D council tax has risen by £550 a year – a 40 per cent-plus increase in four years.

Gwynedd council’s chief executive, Dafydd Gibbard, is similarly favoured, getting a rise of £4,244.55, hoisting his salary to just under £133,000.

Journalists, on the whole, don’t get much feedback, which is like an actor playing to empty auditoriums. Chief executive pay, on the other hand, opens floodgates. “This is quite obscene”, one Cambrian News reader says of Eifion Evans’s pay.

Another, perhaps more tellingly: “The council should be ashamed. The poor families are poor. Not a care in the world. It’s the car park on the prom that’s paying his increase. It’s ok for them to have their lavish life with no worry of anything.”

THERE’S something very wrong with our scale of values when doctors and nurses have to get militant over pay while council executives are handed wildly excessive rises on a plate.

Part of this injustice - but only part - seemed to be recognised by Rhun ap Iorwerth when he told TUC Cymru’s annual congress in Llandudno last week that his government would fight to reverse Wales’s status as a low-pay nation.

Ironing out extremes in public sector pay must be made part of that drive, meaning that some salaries would fall or be frozen while others would rise.

Current public pay demands in Wales are largely from underpaid NHS staff, including doctors and nurses, and the government is already in charge of salary reviews for some of the services it controls, such as education and health.

Public and political disquiet over senior council officials’ wages must spur the new government to extend such powers, enabling it to act to halt stratospheric town hall pay.

ABERYSTWYTH conservation area is mainly a happy mishmash of the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian and Gothic Revival.

It’s full of buildings very different from each other but which don’t compete for attention - Georgian Laura Place, and the nearby 1860s extravagantly unusual Old College, for instance, are worlds apart in appearance but neighbourly nonetheless.

Ceredigion council’s planning department have always tried to stick up for the conservation area, keen to safeguard its many listed buildings while weeding out the destructive and the inappropriate in planning applications.

The department is currently holding out against what it, and Cadw (Welsh Historic Monuments), say are proposals for the former, and increasingly decrepit, Belle Vue Royal Hotel, on the seafront, that clash with the building’s grade-two listed status. They are absolutely right to do so. For an example of what happens when conservation is set aside, you have only to look, as an example, at the chilling stretch of 1960s shops redevelopment along the middle of one side of Great Darkgate Street.