I spent this morning at County Hall at a meeting of the county council's cabinet scrutiny committee which despite having very little on the agenda lasted nearly three hours. I know, I really should get out more...

As is often the way, I had to wait until right near the end before the most interesting part of the meeting.

Following the publication of report earlier in the week by the Taxpayers' Alliance on the pay of council chief executives and senior officers in which yet again, KCC featured rather highly, the committee agreed that there should be an urgent item on the matter.

Liberal Democrat leader Trudy Dean brought the matter to the committee's attention by querying an apparent discrepancy between the figures provided to the Taxpayers' Alliance for the remuneration of chief executive Peter Gilroy and the figure that appears in the authority's annual statement of accounts, which provides salary details in bands for its most senior officers.

According to Cllr Dean, KCC's Statement of Accounts for 2008, which you can read here indicated that Mr Gilroy's gross pay package was between £240,000 and £249,000.

However, the figure that appeared in the Taxpayers' Alliance survey and widely quoted in the media this week was £255,000.

Mrs Dean said the discrepancy of £6,000 raised questions about which figure was right and also mentioned that the lower figure was the one that had been provided to the Taxpayers' Alliance and the Information Commissioner, Freedom of Information watchdog which is investigating a separate but related complaint about KCC's refusal to provide it with specific details about the remuneration of staff earning more than £100,000.

However, these questions and those of other members of the committee went unanswered. The committee decided to defer their questioning until their next meeting when Amanda Beer, the authority's personnel and development director, is expected to appear to offer some explanation.

It will be interesting to see if we're allowed access to the meeting or whether the council deems the matter to be exempt and therefore closes it to the Press and public.

IT's not often you get a political consensus at County Hall. But the three parties all seem to agree that the introduction of the Freedom Pass has been, on the whole, a good thing.

Conservative councillors delight in prefacing any observations they have about the Freedom Pass by first remarking about how wonderful/successful or superb the scheme is. There was plenty of that at today's meeting - and even a grudging acceptance from the opposition parties that it is increasingly popular.

One interesting statistic that did emerge among all this rather wearisome pre-election political joshing was that the greatest take up of the Freedom Pass has been among the more affluent. KCC says that its analysis shows 62 per cent of those applying for the pass are from what was rather inelegantly described as "the best-off strata of society."

There are different ways of reading this. KCC says that these are the youngsters who before might have been most likely to be taken to school in what some pejoratively describe as Chelsea tractors. So it is not necessarily a bad thing because taking them off the road helps ease congestion. The other side of the coin is that maybe the £50 "administration fee" is rather steep for those who are less well off.