Bronterre News

£15,000, 14pc, rise as care-workers, cleaners told: you’re worth 1.75pc

CEREDIGION council knows it has no defence against the indefensible. So it has decided it won’t even make a stab at finding one.

  It knows there is absolutely nothing convincing it can say that would let it off the hook over its stunningly unjustifiable decision to give the authority’s chief executive a 14 per cent pay rise, while offering a pauper’s 1.75 per cent to important frontline council staff, including care-workers, school cleaners, refuse-collectors and librarians.

  Other figures serve to underline the total unacceptability of this insensitive award. The £15,000 increase lined up for chief executive Eifion Evans from next April is alone considerably more than the kind of poverty pay significant numbers of workers and pensioners in Ceredigion get in a year. It will take his salary to £130,108.

  At the same time, 14 per cent is more than three times the current rate of inflation, thus inevitably helping to shore up the hoary old employer refrain that financial responsibility must rule out above-inflation pay awards. Well, we’re of course talking about rank and file employees, you understand… 

  How unsurprising then that Plaid Cymru council leader Ellen ap Gwyn did not reply to my invitation to say whether she was content that other staff, including care-workers, were being offered 1.75 per cent, and whether she agreed that, for lower paid workers, the size of the chief executive’s pay award would be demoralising.

  Ignoring this and other questions, she instead comes up with a 430-word rigmarole presumably intended to corral us into submission.

  But it won’t work. No amount of blather about the chief executive’s rocketing salary arising from “the third phase of the review of the council workforce and pay structure”, which has seen “heads of services being replaced by 12 corporate lead officers”, detracts from the inevitable conclusion that this surge in pay is nothing but exorbitant and totally unacceptable. 

  Unconscionable even, which probably explains why the council’s previous chief executive, Bronwen Morgan, is now revealed to have shown solidarity with lower paid staff by refusing pay increases. As Alison Boshier, Unison’s branch secretary, puts it: “The chief executive would do well to follow his predecessor’s example. She showed a unity with the workforce by turning down past increases because she didn’t want her pay to be so far above the pay levels of her staff.”

  Ms Boshier adds,  with complete justification: “A 14 per cent pay rise is so offensive when you consider care-workers, school support staff, refuse-collectors and many others who kept vital services going throughout the pandemic, have been offered a real-terms pay cut.”

  It is instructive, meanwhile, to note that, while Ms ap Gwynn is silent on the council’s derisory offer to large sections of the council workforce, she lets slip what must be taken as her view, telling me: “The council has a responsibility towards our staff to ensure they are appropriately remunerated in line with their responsibilities…” 

  This is echoed by the deputy leader, Independent Ray Quant. “We have a duty to our staff ,” he says, “to ensure that they are properly remunerated in line with their duties…”

  So, dear workers, now you know. The leadership holds you in such high esteem that it thinks you’re worth…1.75 per cent.

  Another aspect of this sorry affair involves clarity of communication with the public. Or, rather, the lack of it.

  Referring to Mr Evans’s 14 per cent, Ellen ap Gwynn tells this column: “A new pay structure for this post was proposed and approved by the Independent Remuneration Panel for Wales this year, and it recognises the statutory responsibilities of the role.” 

  Keith Evans, a Llandysul Independent and chairman of the council’s corporate resources, overview and scrutiny committee, says much the same: “The public should be assured that there is an independent body that looks at the remuneration and that is where this figure has come from.”

  These statements are, respectively, unclear and misleading.

  Many members of the public will think they are being told that the Independent Remuneration Panel for Wales took it upon themselves to look at the Ceredigion chief executive’s pay, decided it wasn’t high enough and proposed an increase. Anyone thinking that will be completely mistaken. That is not what happened.

  This pay hike was in fact proposed by the council, not by the remuneration panel, a five-member body operating under the umbrella of the Welsh government and chaired by John Bader, a former deputy chief executive of Tai Cymru.

  In an email on 18 June 2021, he tells Caroline Lewis, Ceredigion council’s

corporate director: “Having examined the submission from your authority it is the decision of the Panel to approve the proposal for the salary to the Chief Executive post as submitted by the Council.”

  Elsewhere, he makes clear: “It is important to note the Panel will not decide the amount an individual head of paid service will receive.”

  So this extraordinary pay rise begins and ends not, as people may be led to believe, with a remote and little-known body in Cardiff, but with the council itself. No-one but this authority can be blamed for this profligacy and injustice.