Issue - meetings

That the Pay Policy Statement for 2015/16 be approved.

The Chief Executive presented the report to seek approval of the Council’s Pay Policy Statement in line with the legal requirement to publish this annually before the start of the financial year.  He said that this was a statement of Council adopted policy on national pay awards and was not a pay review.  Whilst there was a conflict of interest for Chief Officers due to a national pay award, there was none for the Chief Executive.

As a change to the policy for 2015-16, the Lead Business Partner referred to plans to implement a performance related pay arrangement across the organisation, which would enable a greater level of control on incremental pay increases.

Whilst raising a number of queries on the content of the Pay Policy Statement, Councillor Mike Peers said that he had been unable to locate the policy on Additional Payments on the Council’s website.  He suggested that the document could have been appended to the report or a clearer definition given of its location.  On section 6, he said that reference to progression based on performance should have included how performance would be measured and that the regulations indicated in relation to severance payments for Chief Officers and all employees could have been summarised to help the reader.

The Chief Executive said that the performance related pay increments were currently a proposal in waiting, with consultation on its introduction planned at a later stage.  He agreed that the Pay Policy Statement would be re-issued with hyperlinks to the additional information mentioned.

The Chief Executive referred to the findings of the recent national report by Wales Audit Office which had compared policy and practice of redundancy and found that this was undertaken in the most cost-effective way within Local Government across the public sector.  He reported that the Council met and exceeded the recommendations of the national report.

On being put to the vote, the recommendation was approved.

RESOLVED:

That the Pay Policy Statement for 2015/16 be approved.