STAHRS

The Greater London Provincial Council (GLPC) scheme is used as part of the national requirement under the Pay and Workforce Strategy. The scheme has been in operation in the public sector for over 40 years and has been tried and tested in local authorities and central government agencies. Recently the scheme has been used at Ribble Valley, Hyndburn, West Lancs and across Northern Ireland as well as applied across all of London and many surrounding councils.

The scheme was developed to support local authorities in carrying out their obligations under the national agreement on single status. The job evaluation scheme has been subject to consultation and approval with the Equal Opportunities Commission.

The scheme is jointly agreed by the employers and unions in London local government. It was originally developed by a working party of experienced evaluators and tested jointly at regional and local authority levels. The scheme is accompanied by a code of good practice and a framework procedure to inform local arrangements.

The process will also involve extensive moderation and data checks to ensure that all the results are as fair, accurate and reliable as they possibly can be. Employees across the council will carry out the evaluations and moderation and use local knowledge as well as the guidance notes from the scheme to determine the scores for each post. It is the posts that will be evaluated and not the people in the posts, this is a business exercise and not a personal one.

Once all the scores have been determined and ranked the council has set a new payline. The pay line still has all scale bands the council has used in the past. The pay line has been set to ensure that the minimum number of posts is reduced in salary because the management and members have made a commitment to have the minimum adverse impact across the council.

The pay line was set looking at the rank order from the JE scores and the existing pay scales. Distinct patterns emerged on the list for example, a group of 20 or 25 posts would be in order based on the JE score and their existing scale points were almost all scale band 3 with one or two exceptions. This range of scores according to the JE outcomes was therefore determined as scale band 3 because this had the least impact in terms of employees losing out. The points band by pay scales were then checked against other authorities and best practice.

This pay line though is the councils own pay line and set in accordance with the over riding criteria to ensure that the minimum number of people are negatively affected by the scheme.