The pay of local councillors has caused a spat between Parliamentary Local Government Select Committee chairman Clive Betts and the Tory Party chairman Grant Shapps.

Mr Betts, a Labour MP, said councillors had a right to expect “an appropriate level of remuneration”, in part to popularise the idea of being a local councillor among the young.

Mr Shapps accused Labour of making a cynical and sleazy move because Labour councillors were obliged to donate some of their publicly-funded pay to the party.

But at a time of public spending cuts and price hikes for food, public transport, gas, electricity, water and communications, was it a good idea to raise the question of councillors’ remuneration in the first place?

Labour councillor Ralph Berry, who holds the portfolio for children and young people’s services, has been a member of Bradford Council for 21 years. In that time he has seen the whole structure of the local authority change with the old committee system scrapped in favour of what is called Cabinet government. Along with that, the system of payment to councillors has changed, too.

He says: “The old system rewarded people for just turning up. You got £25 to turn up for a meeting and you didn’t have to stay in it.”

Councillor Geoff Reid, a Methodist minister for 40 years until his retirement, was elected to represent Eccleshill for the Liberal Democrats in May 2010.

He says: “Anybody who does this for the money needs psychiatric examination. I came in at the worst time to get into paid work in local government. Politicians are held in such disregard, they are reviled. One of the reasons was the MPs’ expenses scandal.”

The old system outlined by Coun Berry fell apart after the scandal at Doncaster in the mid-1990s, known as Donnygate, which led to the arrest of 74 people and the conviction for fraud of 21 Labour councillors and the jailing of a property developer.

Now, remuneration for councillors has to be decided by independent external panels, and this payment varies from one district to another.

In Bradford, the basic allowance for all 90 councillors is £13,042.94. There are additional allowances for travel, subsistence, cars, hotels and special responsibilities.

Special Responsibility Allowances, allegedly the cause of in-party bickering, can be substantial. Councillor David Green, the current leader of the Council, got an extra £25,129.44 last year, giving him a total income for 2012 in excess of £38,000, not as much as his predecessor Ian Greenwood, who got more than £50,000.

The total bill for councillors’ payments in 2012 came to £1,803,348.38. This represented a rise of just over £251,000 on the bill for the year 2005. Seven years ago the basic allowance for members was £11,450.52.

The credit crunch and recession have put a stop to pay increases – for all but the best paid, that is. Upping allowances for councillors in Bradford, where the average pay, according to Council figures, is £20,280, is not thought to be a good idea.

Coun Reid said: “There’s no way we can increase members’ salaries until there are changes in the economy.” He thinks the overall bill should be reduced by cutting the number of councillors from 90 to 60 immediately and then to 30, paying for quality rather than quantity.

“I think politics is a noble vocation.” he said. He could have said career or job. Long ago, before cabinet-style government was introduced by the first Labour administration of Tony Blair, local politics was, arguably, more of a vocation.

In September, an Allerton reader wrote to the T&A saying: “Once upon a time Bradford councillors were businessmen who gave up their time to serve the community. They were engineers, architects, builders and accountants, who did not need to pay expensive consultants to show they how to do what our community needed.”

Before the structure of local government was changed by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1974, local authorities were largely unitary bodies with responsibility for many functions. Not any more, says Coun Berry.

“There is not enough localism. There is too much central control. Free schools and academies are a form of nationalisation because they are funded by central government,” he added.

For Coun Reid, the disenfranchisement of local government by Westminster has led to a political culture within City Hall he described as “not desperately inspiring”.

“There’s very little real debate. It’s not structured for serious conversation,” he added.