The Pay and Grading Review

Posted By: William Hobhouse
Date Posted: 09/11/2008

The Pay and Grading Review affects Council employees (except senior management) in every local authority in the country. Councils have to grade each employee correctly, reflecting the skills, scope and qualification of their job. After the grading comes the pay, which means that now every employee on a particular grade gets paid within the same grade range. The result of this review will be that some salaries go up, some stay the same and some will go down. The level of pay for each grade is entirely a Council decision.

If you’re thinking that these changes are small scale and technical, they are not! The salary rates within Rochdale Council at the moment differ markedly from the salaries anticipated by the Pay and Grading Review.

So how will the decisions about the level of pay impact on Rochdale Council?

By far the biggest expense of any Council is the wage bill and you the tax payer is paying for it. If the cost of the wage bill goes up, government doesn’t send over a few extra millions to pay for them. That leaves two options: either the Council Tax goes up or Council services get cut.

However there is another long term consequence: we already have a marked difference in some Council services between the level of pay in the private and public sector. Contrary to perception there are services in which employees get much better paid, if they work for the Council. Quite apart from better pensions and better job security, some Council employees, if they left the Council to go to work in the private sector, would be paid substantially less.

There are some worrying suggestions that this gap will widen for some Council staff as a result of the Pay and Grading Review. It will make these services poor Value for Money. Value for Money is one of the guiding principles to ensure that Council tax payers’ money is not wasted.

The implication of this stares us in the face: privatisation, externalisation, commissioning, whatever you want to call it. Do we want it? I don’t, but shouldn’t we expect the public sector to be as good as the private sector for the same money?

It is time to have a public debate about this rather than leaving the issue to be discussed privately inside the Council.