Town Hall reporter KEN LEE on an outbreak of militancy among local authority workers who are paid upwards of £180,000 per year
How much?: council chiefs like Croydon’s Katherine Kerswell have dismissed a 3.5% pay offer
Could cash-strapped Croydon Council be about to be hit by a strike over pay and conditions by its “head of paid service”, Katherine Kerswell.
And would anyone notice if Kerswell did down tools?
Local authority chief executives, potentially including Croydon’s £192,474 per year CEO Kerswell as well as Sutton’s £220,626 salaried Helen Bailey, have rejected a “full and final” pay offer tabled by employers.
The pay packages for senior local authority executives tend to be negotiated nationally, through a joint negotiating committee.
ALACE – the Association of Local Authority Chief Executives, the council bosses’ union – has rejected a 3.5per cent pay increase for the 2023-2024 financial year, and says it will not accept any pay offer until negotiations with council staff generally are finalised.
ALACE says that the pay offer for council CEOs is lower than the 3.88per cent increase offered to their highest-paid staff.
Council staff generally have been offered a pay rise of at least £1,925 for 2023-2024, which is worth between 3.88per cent and 9.42per cent, depending on pay grade.
But council worker unions GMB and Unite have rejected this offer and are set to move to ballots on industrial action.
In Croydon, where at least 400, mostly lower-paid positions have been “erased” since Kerswell arrived to head the bankrupted council in late 2020, there are also rumblings of discontent and threatened industrial action over the latest round of redundancies.
Some lower-paid staff have been told to expect pay cuts of as much as £3,000 per year.
Meanwhile, high-salaried council managers are getting stroppy because they feel insulted by being offers a pay rise of a “mere” £6,000, or so.
Top pay: Helen Bailey, Sutton Council’s CEO, is on £220,626 according to most recent figures
Yesterday, in a letter to the joint negotiating committee of the national employers, Ian Miller, the ALACE secretary, said it was “exceptionally disappointing to receive an offer which, for the third year in succession, seeks to treat chief executives less well than the colleagues that they work with”.
Miller added his concern that the national employers “should think this pettiness of difference is an appropriate stance to take”.
ALACE claimed the offer is “clear and direct evidence that the employers place a lower value on the contribution of [the most senior] officers than the generality of local government staff”.
A spokesperson for the national employers said: “We have noted the response from ALACE and reaffirm their 3.5per cent offer as full and final.”
Inside Croydon has previously reported that Kerswell may be seeking a special deal with her council employers. Kerswell’s pay package was due for a review this spring, and sources at Croydon Town Hall suggest that she has sought support from another chief execs’ lobby group, SOLACE, and from the Local Government Association to see her pay brought into line with other council CEOs undertaking similar work.
This as Mayor Jason Perry (£82,000 per year pay) has hit residents with a 15per cent Council Tax rise and seeks to impose another £30million-worth of service cuts.
Kerswell’s council refused to provide details of salary payments to top-level executives as part of The Tax-Payers’ Alliance annual Town Hall Rich List published in April. So it has not (yet) been possible to determine with any certainty whether there are more council execs employed on salaries of £100,000 and more than the 29 Croydon staff on six-figure salaries in 2020-2021 – the last financial year when Jo “Negreedy” Negrini was doing the job Kerswell is paid for today.
Read more: Kerrr-ching! Kerswell reckons £192,000 per year not enough
Read more: Kerswell’s council keeps payments to top earners secret
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