Councillor John Woodward of Camborne complained that the newspapers had misleadingly presented his annual allowance as an hourly rate for attendance at official council meetings, that they had also inaccurately calculated this figure, and that they had not contacted him prior to publication.

In our article “Councillor’s ‘£700 per hour’ yearly wage” (08/10/08), we reported that Councillor John Woodward’s annual pay, when divided by the number of hours spent in council meetings, worked out as over £700 per hour. We would like to make it clear that this figure accounts only for time spent in official Council meetings and not for the other duties which the allowance covers. We would also like to acknowledge that our original calculation was based on a misreading of data – which led to an underestimation of Councillor Woodward’s levels of attendance at council meetings – and to apologise to Councillor Woodward for not contacting him prior to publication to confirm our figures.