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Press Release

LGA response to Hutton review of fair pay

15 March 2011

Responding to the Hutton Review of Fair Pay, Local Government Employers Managing Director, Jan Parkinson, said:

“The report offers a considered and balanced analysis of public sector pay. The majority of its recommendations reinforce practices already common in local authorities. We absolutely endorse the emphasis on transparency and democratic accountability and support calls for fair and accurate comparisons to be made of the relative remuneration of different roles in the public sector.

“Senior council salaries are already public on local authority websites and decisions on how much to pay senior staff are made by politically proportionate committees within councils. In addition, workers in local government are subject to regular job evaluation to ensure they are fulfilling their duties and delivering value for money for residents.

“It is important to keep the level of senior council salaries in perspective. Senior staff pay makes up around 2.5 per cent of the total local authority pay bill, while the ratio of average top pay to average lowest pay in local government is 9 to 1. We believe that is a proportionate approach to pay increments in a sector where chief executives are responsible for huge organisations which deliver vital services to every family in Britain.

“In order to improve on their record as the most efficient part of the public sector local authorities need to attract and keep talented people capable of running organisations with budgets of up to £1bn per year. In deciding pay levels they need to balance that with the need for all salaries to be reasonable and transparent.

“We would want to avoid the introduction of a blanket approach to pay and incentives across the entire public sector. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and we believe democratically elected local authorities should retain the flexibility to set remuneration and performance incentives which are appropriate to them.

”We believe the introduction of a senior salary code of practice for the sector will help better explain the decision making process to tax-payers. The call on the Senior Salaries Review Body to make definitive comparisons between private and public sector pay will also help challenge the common misconception that senior council salaries are in the same hemisphere as those in private companies of a similar size.”



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