Pay reform process to continue next year

In 1997, local government employers and unions signed the 'Single Status Agreement', aiming to harmonise pay grades and conditions between former manual and non-manual workers and eliminate unfair salary gaps.

Further updates followed, and individual local authorities were left to implement the agreement voluntarily.

Telford & Wrekin Council's finance and human relations director Ken Clarke told a backbench committee the council has £8.9 million assigned and said it could afford to implement single status from April 2022 but “probably won’t”, partly because the officer in charge had been re-assigned to help with the coronavirus response.

He added that staff restructuring that had taken place over the years would probably reduce the authority’s implementation costs.

In a 2021-24 financial planning report presented to the borough’s cabinet on January 7, Mr Clarke wrote the £8.9 pot “may not all be required” in the long run and “certainly won’t be required in 2021-22”.

“The council is continuing its work to enable the implementation of a new job evaluation scheme to meet the requirements of the single status legislation,” he added.

“Phases one and two of this work have been completed and work on phase three, which covers council-based employees, is currently underway.

“This is an important process which takes time to complete accurately.”

Pandemic

Mr Clarke told the Business and Finance Scrutiny Committee this week that the team leader working on the complex process had been reassigned and is now “working on co-ordinating the council’s response to the pandemic”, affecting the timescale.

He said: “I can’t tell you exactly when it will be implemented.

“Financially we could afford to implement it from April 2022. It probably won’t be then, in all honesty, and the £8.9 million left in the one-off pot is shown there through until 2023-24 but, if we were to implement next year or the year after and we used some of that pot, we’d update the projections.”

Conservative councillor Eric Carter said the single status process seemed to “roll forward” every year without resolution, and asked for a detailed report on its progress and the number of employees affected.

Mr Clarke said an update would be provided at a future meeting.

Labour’s Kuldip Sahota said Mr Clarke was “the third or fourth financial officer” who has had to deal with single status, “and I’m just amazed the government hasn’t put a guillotine on it and said ‘sort this out’, or a union hasn’t taken us to court to make us sort it out”.

Rush

He added: “I’m just as guilty as anybody else, because I was leader for five years and I just, sort of, kicked the can further down the road.”

Cllr Sahota asked whether other councils were still going through the process.

Mr Clarke said he didn’t know exactly.

“There won’t be that many who haven’t implemented,” he said.

“I know some councils have had to do it twice, because they rushed and didn’t get it absolutely right.”