Our client had identified that their current arrangements for pay and grading had not been reviewed since the Council went through Single Status in 2005.

Our client had identified that their current arrangements for pay and grading had not been reviewed since the Council went through Single Status in 2005. Over time differing arrangements had been adopted from TUPE transfers, changes to operational models and practices in services, the development of individual and unique grades and market supplements and other additional payments made to specific groups and individual employees.

This flagged a concern of challenge on the grounds of equal pay, with heightened awareness of employers of the risk associated with variations away from the first principles enshrined in the Single Status agreement, and principles of good governance on pay and grading.

In preparing to review the Council wide approach to pay and grading the Council needed an independent, data driven review of the current situation to make sure that any proposals for change addressed anomalies and risks in the pay and grading structure, without causing other problems elsewhere. WME developed a bespoke solution for the client, by using a data driven analysis of the workforce.

We needed to consider:

• Who would be in scope of the review?
• How would casuals, temps and other peripheral workers be treated?
• What protected characteristic could be included in the review? – i.e. what data did the client collect, where were the data gaps.
• What elements of pay and other terms and conditions would be included?

Once we had agreed the scope of the data with the client, and the data point, we set about analysing the dataset to understand the scale of the issue and what the possible approaches could be.