North Lanarkshire Council top brass handed pay rises

Department heads at North Lanarkshire Council will get a hefty pay increase after this was approved at a recent committee meeting, but a reduction in the number of posts means the authority will save money overall.
Des MurrayDes Murray
Des Murray

The changes were proposed in a report presented to the council’s Policy and Strategy Committee by chief executive Des Murray and mean heads of service now earn around £100,000 per year but three posts will be deleted.

Mr Murray told the committee: “During the investigation of parity of pay between current stakeholders and employees in the senior management team and peer employees a pay disparity has been identified. But it seeks to do that against a background of COVID and the need and expectation that the council must continue to identify savings  that will support and protect front line jobs across North Lanarkshire.”

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Despite the increased pay for service heads the restructure will save the council more than £200,000 per year overall due to the deletion of three senior posts.

Part of Mr Murray’s report states: “As Scotland’s fourth largest local authority, and with such clear and ambitious plans for regeneration, it is critical that the council can maintain, and sustain, high quality leaders and Community Champions across the organisation. Although many recent recruitment exercises to the Head of Service level have been internal, it is important to

consider whether the council is an attractive option for candidates who may be able to go to an alternative local authority and receive a significantly increased salary, or similar with a reduced portfolio of responsibilities and scale.

“In addition, uncompetitive salaries are likely to have a detrimental impact on the ability to recruit high calibre candidates for future roles and will impact on the longer-term ability of the council to retain experienced Heads of Service who may be attracted to work for alternative local authorities.”

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Councillor Jordan Linden, depute leader of the SNP group, asked if the proposed changes would indeed help the council with its stated objective of “delivering for communities”.

Mr Murray highlighted some of the recent successes  achieved by the authority such as establishing community boards but also said there was a lot of work still to do to ensure these boards were representative of their communities, with the council’s directors being the link point for many towns and areas across North Lanarkshire, and that heads of service would now be contractually obliged to take on the role of champion for a specific community board area, meaning those communities would for the first time be directly represented within the corporate management structure.

“By creating a leaner management team we take significant steps towards protecting potential pressures on front line services.” he added, before emphasising his belief that the leadership team had the ability to overcome the current and future challenges facing the authority.

Conservative group leader Councillor Meghan Gallacher proposed an amendment which would have prevented the pay increases for heads of service. She said: “The Conserative group agree with the restructuring in principle however we are really concerned by the terms of the pay increases for heads of service.”

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Councillor Gallacher expressed concern at the implications of a £30,000 pay gap and argued there was scope to accommodate the restructure within the existing payscale.

“Given the current climate with a pandemic where we are having to make frontline service cuts, I  don’t feel this is an appropriate time to be looking at this,” she added.

Mr Murray responded by saying pay grades are national and that the savings introduced by the restructure meant the council was paying out less to senior management than its peers.

Head of HR Fiona Whittaker agreed, emphasising that there was a discrepancy in payment to heads of service compared to equivalent organisations as only these staff were out of line with other councils as a result of having performance-related pay removed.

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SNP group leader Councillor Tom Johnston said his group would reject the Conservative amendment due to the overall savings while the heads of service would also be taking on additional duties.

The subsequent vote saw the amendment defeated by 18 votes to four.

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