Council 'Fat Cats' (17/12/14)



I was intrigued by the comments from North Lanarkshire Council in response to this article in The Motherwell Times which criticised council bosses over their big bonus payments.

Now I've studied North Lanarkshire's 'Performance Management Scheme' under which the bonus payments for 'good' performance have been paid to its senior officials since 2002/03 and as a former Secretary to the Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) for Chief Officials in Scotland, I have to say I find a number of things very troubling.

First of all, the North Lanarkshire scheme for 'other' chief officials (30 or so) is built around a big pay rise for the Council's chief executive, whose salary increased from £105,777 to £119,480 on 1 April 2002,  as a result of a Scotland-wide review of chief executives' salaries.

So North Lanarkshire's chief executive received a pay rise of £13,703 - a 13% increase on his old salary, ironically on the original date (1 April 2002) when Scotland's 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement should have been implemented in full, thereby ending years of blatant pay discrimination against thousands of low paid women's jobs. 

Soon afterwards (30 May 2002), a report from the chief executive was submitted to the Council's Policy and Resources (Personnel) Sub-Committee which recommended new pay arrangements for the 'other' chief officers in North Lanarkshire Council.

The report recommended that other chief officers within the Council should be linked directly to the chief executive's new salary. For example, Council directors were to receive 80% of their CEO's pay taking their salaries from £86,973 to £95,394 (+ £8,421) on 1 April 2002.  

The report also contained a further uprating of salaries from 1 April 2003 (for reasons that are not immediately obvious) which further raised the CEO's salary from £119, 480 to £128,173 (+ £8,963) and directors' salaries from £95,394 to £103,008 (+ £7,614). 

So in the space of one year and a day North Lanarkshire's chief executive saw his salary increase from £105,777 to £128,173 - a pay rise of £22,396 or an eye watering 21.2%.

Council directors also benefited hugely from being tied to the financial coat tails of their CEO and during the same period their pay rose dramatically from ££86,973 to £103,008 - another whopping increase of £16,035 or 18.44% 

Yet, incredibly, the duties and responsibilities of the 'other' chief officers were never independently reviewed or assessed and of course these new, improved salaries were subject to further uprating as a result of annual 'cost of living' pay awards.

Meanwhile half of the combined 2002/03 pay increase for chief officers was subject to performance pay and in the case of Council directors, for example, 50% of £16,035 or £8,018 was subject to a performance review in April/May 2003 - with a performance bonus paid as a lump sum in June 2003.

The CEO's report to Policy and Resources set out total estimated costs of the exercise at £390,000 over two years, but as regular readers know the practice continued for 12 years and was finally abandoned in 2013/14 at a cost to the public purse of £2 million, although I suspect that figure does not include 'overheads' including higher pension payments which are normally set at 20% - so the final bill may be nearer £2.4 million.

A further point about NLC's Performance Management Scheme that troubles me is that I've never come across a scheme where performance pay is restricted to only a small part of someone's salary. That sounds contrived and highly artificial, if you ask me.    

The latest salary for North Lanarkshire's chief executive shows a figure of £136,578.03 plus performance-related pay of £11,395.26 = £147,973.29 - compared to the First Minister's salary of £140,847 for running the Scottish Government.

Clearly North Lanarkshire Council's chief officials did extremely well for themselves  throughout this long 12 year period.

But the evidence from the ongoing Employment Tribunal and the responses to my recent FoI requests suggests that while the Council's highest paid looked after their own interests really well, they failed miserably to protect the interests of thousands of low paid women - which is why so many of them are still fighting for equal pay today. 

Popular posts from this blog

SNP - Conspiracy of Silence

LGB Rights - Hijacked By Intolerant Zealots!