THE amount paid in allowances to members of Wycombe District Council will shoot up from £120,000 a year to £324,000, if proposals are agreed.

The council leader will get a total of £16,000, his deputy £12,000, and the cabinet members £10,000.

The new scheme will come in when the new system of council leader and cabinet is introduced in May.

Out will go the old way of paying councillors a basic allowance of £800 and an attendance allowance of £15 per meeting, and special responsibility allowances of between about £500 and £2,600 a year.

That will be replaced by a £4,000 basic allowance, plus extra allowances for the leader and cabinet, for chairmen and vice-chairmen of the new scrutiny committees, the chairmen of statutory committees and the leaders of the political groups.

Cllr Roger Colomb, who is set to lead the council and head the cabinet after May's annual meeting, said the allowances were based on a now largely accepted formula.

He added that the panel had also wanted to attract a wider range of people to stand to be councillors.

The independent panel was headed by local government consultant Don Latham, with Roy Darby, chief executive of South Bucks NHS Trust; Jackie Haynes, chief executive of Buckinghamshire Health Authority; Rod Paton, deputy director of Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College; Barbara Wallis, chairman of Wycombe and District Association of Local Councils, and Mike Redmond of Dun & Bradstreet.

They held two meetings and calculated the pay based on the median white collar annual wage of £26,700 and then deducted a sum for the amount of the job considered to be voluntary.

Back bench councillors were deemed to spend 48 days a year on council business, of which ten are voluntary.