Cardiff council defends wage rises for highest-paid bosses
ALL STAFF working for Cardiff council will receive a pay rise this year, including those paid the highest salaries.
Pending negotiations with trade unions, the council could award a 2.75% pay increase for its staff.
Pay for council workers is decided on a national level by a negotiating body called the National Joint Council. Bosses, however, have a separate body, the Joint Negotiating Committee, to decide their pay.
Councillors voted to award the pay rises at a meeting of the full council on Thursday.
But questions were raised whether increasing the pay of the highest-paid council bosses was appropriate, given the threat of redundancies later in the year due to the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis.
Conservative councillors called to freeze pay for the highest-paid council bosses, and use the money instead to safeguard jobs and protect against redundancies.
Council leader Huw Thomas said he was “frustrated and disappointed” with the calls to freeze pay for bosses.
He said: “I have seen first-hand how chief officers have lived and breathed this crisis. Their efforts have been extraordinary.
“I think to single them out to not have a pay increase – a nationally agreed pay increase – speaks volumes for the real respect that certain members of the Conservative group are choosing to show to our senior officers.
“It sends absolutely the wrong signal about what we are and who we are. We believe in paying a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”
At Cardiff council, 20 senior council officers earn a salary of between £86,000-£180,000, not including pension contributions.
Cllr Joel Williams, who called for the pay freeze, said: “It would be inappropriate at this time to award a pay increase to the 20 most senior and highly paid officers in this council.
“Look at where we are. We have got 36,000 private sector members of staff on furlough working in the city centre alone, where businesses are telling us we are going to have to make significant redundancies.
“Even in our own council, redundancies cannot be ruled out.
“It would be inappropriate to increase pay while then, in a couple of weeks’ or months’ time, make our officers redundant.”
Councillors, however, voted against the pay freeze, and pointed to the Conservative Government in Westminster cutting funding for local government.
Cllr Rhys Taylor, Liberal Democrat leader, said: “If they were interested and concerned about the workforce and frontline workers, then they would speak to colleagues in Westminster about protecting workers and funding public services and local government.”
Cllr Chris Weaver, cabinet member for finance, said: “The scale of this crisis is huge.
“Without the UK Government stepping in to support public services, haggling over these contracts in the council – in a very mean-spirited way given the examples of public service those staff have shown – is just bizarre.”