Laughing Stock
I don't know about anyone else, but I pay my local council (Glasgow City Council) a pretty penny every year to deliver some basic services including:
- rubbish collection
- keeping the streets clean
- educating school age children
- providing care for elderly and other vulnerable citizens
Now councils do a great deal more besides, for example environmental health inspections, but I never thought I'd see the day when a Scottish council thought it was OK to tell local people how to vote in a referendum.
Yet that appears to be what Aberdeen City Council believes to be within its remit and duties to local taxpayers - which is completely bonkers, if you ask me.
All I can say is that if Glasgow City Council sends me such a letter, I will ask for details of the cost in a FoI request and deduct my share of that cost from my annual council tax bill.
Not that I would expect Glasgow City Council to be so stupid, of course, but the fact of the matter is that no Scottish council, whatever its political colour, should be behaving in this way.
Scottish independence: Council sending out 'No' vote letters
The Labour-led administration on Aberdeen City Council is to press ahead with sending out letters endorsing a "No" vote in September's independence referendum.
About 200,000 letters will be included in bills sent out to council tax payers.
The SNP called for the letters to be pulped but the coalition backed the move to send them.
Labour council leader Barney Crockett insisted it was the right decision.
He said: "We are completely confident that what we are doing is not political campaigning."
SNP and Lib Dem councillors walked out the meeting after it was decided to hold the discussion on the letters in private.
SNP group leader Callum McCaig said: "It's beyond pathetic, this is an out of control administration."
Aberdeen City Council is run by a coalition of Labour, the Conservatives and independents.
Persona Non Grata (6 March 2014)
Until recently I couldn't imagine any local council in the UK being foolish enough to try to ban the country's Prime Minister, David Cameron, from attending official events on council-run premises because that would be such bad form - an attack on democracy and free speech.
But that was before I read this article in The Scotsman which says that Aberdeen Council is calling for Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, to be declared persona non grata until after the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014.
Now this all seems like a rather ridiculous publicity stunt by a coalition of Labour and Tory councillors, egged on by a senior Labour councillor who is embarrassed by the fact that he voted against a new Government funding package which would have boosted public spending in Aberdeen by £7 million a year.
Just another sign that Scottish local government has lost its way and is fast becoming a bit of a laughing stock.
PS Since I wrote this post Aberdeen Council has decided to abandon this nonsense of banning the First Minister from council premises, wisely in my view, but exactly what did these people think they were playing at?
Alex Salmond facing Aberdeen Council ‘ban’
Alex Salmond. Picture: Getty
COUNCIL chiefs in Aberdeen are calling for Alex Salmond to be banned from all council-owned facilities until after the independence referendum.
The Evening Express are reporting that authority leaders want to bar Mr Salmond and his ministers from council-owned facilities, including schools, parks and sports centres, until after the vote on September 18th.
Councillor Willie Young said a motion would be put forward on Wednesday, warning the First Minister ‘would not be welcome’ to use council property for official government business.
The Scottish Government hit back at Cllr Young, claiming he was attempting to deflect attention from the fact he voted against plans that could have seen an increase in funding for the Granite City of over £7 million.
A spokesman for Minister for Local Government Derek MacKay told the Evening Express that Cllr Young’s actions were ‘bizarre’ as well as going against the interests of the city’s residents.
He added: “The Scottish Government has good relations with all of Scotland’s other 31 councils – despite those councils being of many different political colours. In that context it is the increasingly bizarre comments from the Labour Tory alliance at Aberdeen City Council which stand out.”
When Needs Must (1 March 2014)
I imagine there must be more than a few red faces at COSLA as this article from the Scotsman lifts the lid on a recent decision by Scotland's council leaders to back a "flat share" increase in funding rather than a "needs based" approach to local government funding.
Because to any normal, reasonable person allocating scarce resources on the basis of need sounds sensible and fair - whereas the flat share approach simply preserves the status quo which doesn't sound fair at all.
Yet, I can't say I'm surprised because Scotland's 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement was all about shaking up the status quo and giving a much better deal to the thousands of low paid women workers whose jobs were all stuck firmly at the bottom of the pay ladder.
The council employers (via COSLA) agreed to sweep away the old pay system and end years of pay discrimination against low paid women workers, but when push came to shove they got cold feet and reneged on that commitment - despite finding £800 million a year to fund a big pay increase for Scotland's teachers via the McCrone Agreement in the year 2000.
I hope they are all suitably ashamed of themselves now.
Cosla: Swinney accused of trying to punish councils
Those who quit Cosla claim Finance Minister is biased towards Central Belt. Picture: Neil Hanna
by SCOTT MACNAB
JOHN Swinney has been accused of a “politically motivated ploy” to divide Scotland’s councils after setting out plans for a raft of multi-million pound funding cuts to authorities yesterday.
The move has prompted fresh claims of “Central Belt bias” from Aberdeen after the figures showed the Granite City stands to lose out to the tune of £7.3 million under provisional budgets for 2015-16.
The Scottish Government says it is only accepting the funding formula backed by council leaders last year.
Three of the four councils quitting umbrella body the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) are poised to suffer multi-million pound cuts under the plans.
The split in Cosla’s ranks has developed over how Scottish Government funding is distributed. Some Labour councillors believe Cosla has failed to stand up for them.
Cosla leaders backed a “flat share” increase in funding last September instead of a “needs-based” settlement taking into account changes in population and deprivation.
Aberdeen, Inverclyde and Renfrewshire are among those which will lose out to the tune of £8.5m – weeks after they announced they would be quitting Cosla.
However, Swinney’s surprise decision to publish detailed figures on how each council would fare under either scenario has prompted a backlash among leaders who say it will heighten tensions.
Stephen McCabe, the Labour leader of Inverclyde Council, said yesterday: “It’s a deliberate political ploy by Mr Swinney to divide local government – there’s no doubt in my mind.”
Labour council leaders pushed through a motion last September backing a flat share increase to reflect the freeze in the council tax, as opposed to a needs-based uprating.
McCabe added: “When you take a decision in principle, some councils win, some lose.”
He said Swinney’s decision, after lobbying by other council leaders, showed the Finance Secretary “never respects the decision of Cosla leaders”.
Willie Young, Labour finance convener on Aberdeen City Council, said eyebrows will be raised that three councils leaving Cosla are losing out.
“John Swinney has said that Aberdeen is due an extra £7.3m and we welcome that. But he’s also saying we’re not going to get it because he’s hiding behind Cosla.
“This settlement covers the period when Aberdeen will have left Cosla, and this is why we’re leaving, so we can deal with him direct.”
Aberdeen’s funding payout would have been £323.3m, had the settlement been adjusted in line with local needs. The flat share settlement sees this fall by £7.3m to £316m.
Inverclyde’s settlement will fall by about £1m to £158.6m, while Renfrewshire’s drops £330,000 to £294m.
Glasgow and Edinburgh are due to enjoy a rise of £28m between them.
“We keep saying there’s Central Belt bias and it’s becoming more obvious,” Young added.
“This is why we came out of Cosla, and John Swinney is just hiding behind Cosla to impose this cut on Aberdeen.”
Swinney’s letter to councils yesterday sets out the detail for the funding settlement for all 32 councils for 2015-16. It means they will effectively receive the same share of funding as 2014-15. In all, 20 councils lose out against the proposed figures for the needs-based system.
The Finance Secretary says in his letter he has accepted Cosla leaders’ “majority decision” on the issue.
But he adds: “My preference will always be to have a fair and equitable settlement for all councils that is based on local needs and gives the maximum opportunity to deliver strong local services for local people.”
Scotland and Equal Pay (24 January 2014)
If you ask me, Margaret Curran's comments are ill-informed and ludicrous because the main reason that the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement was not implemented properly - was down to the role of the big Labour councils which controlled CoSLA at the time and the failure of the Labour supporting trade unions to stand up for the interests of low paid women workers.
Money was never the stumbling block because the Labour-led Scottish Government along with CoSLA (the umbrella body for local councils) managed to find £800 million to fund the McCrone pay deal which in the year 2000 handed an eye-watering 23.5% pay increase to another group of council employees - Scottish school teachers.
Now this £800 million was built into the Scottish Government's base budget which means that it costs the country and extra £800 million every year to pay teachers a good salary - at the level determined by the historic McCrone Agreement.
But the McCrone Agreement somehow leapfrogged and took precedence over the cost of implementing the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement which, at the time, was estimated to be £400 to £500 million a year.
Interestingly, the Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement would have benefited well over 90,000 very low paid council workers, most of them women, while the McCrone Agreement gave an unprecedented pay increase to a smaller group of around 70,000 teachers.
So, why was the money found for teachers and not other employees much further down the pay ladder?
I don't know, but the answer to that question lies with the Scottish Government, the council employers and the trade unions - all three organisations being dominated by the political priorities of Labour Party.
Politics of Equal Pay (20 August 2013)
I came across this article on equal pay which I missed for some reason - when it was published in The Herald back in January 2013.
Now the writer involved - Ruth Wishart - is an experienced journalist, so I was both surprised and disappointed that the piece contained so many inaccuracies and mistakes.
For a start to use the words 'pay anomalies' to describe what was going in Glasgow back in 2005 is an abuse of the English language - as if there were just a few wrinkles here and there.
Because what was taking place in Glasgow (and elsewhere) - right under the noses of the trade unions and seasoned journalists like Ruth Wishart - was widespread pay discrimination against thousands of low paid women.
Women in caring, catering, cleaning clerical and classroom assistant jobs - who were routinely being paid thousands of pounds a year less than relatively unskilled male jobs such as refuse workers or gardeners.
When Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES) arrived on the scene in 2005, things began to change because we explained to women workers exactly what was going on - and the fact that council employers and trade unions in Scotland had promised to sweep away this widespread pay discrimination as far back as 1999.
And this was during a 10 year period between 1997 and 2007 - when the budgets of councils in Scotland actually doubled in size, of course.
But the employers and the unions failed to keep their promises which is why so many of these cases ended up in the Employment Tribunals - as union members voted with their feet and decided to pursue their equal pay claims with A4ES.
So much so that A4ES clients outnumber the trade union backed cases by a ratio of 10 to 1 - not 4 to 1 as Ruth Wishart wrongly suggests - and A4ES charges a its clients a success fee of 10% which Ruth would also know if she had bothered to check her facts.
Another glaring error is Ruth's reference to a Scottish Joint Council Job Evaluation scheme which she says was still under negotiation - but the truth is that a nationally approved Job Evaluation scheme specifically developed for Scottish councils had been available for use since 1999 - and this scheme was supported by the trade unions.
So Glasgow's decision to use a different scheme had nothing to do with choosing a quicker option - quite the opposite in fact.
I find this all the more amazing because Ruth is (or was until recently ) a member of the Leveson Expert Group - whose advice on how to implement the Leveson Report in Scotland was quickly binned by the Scottish Government.
Yet the original Leveson Report was concerned with journalistic standards in the press and media - such as the importance of behaving with integrity and getting your facts right even when writing an opinion piece.
For example, Ruth's comment that "The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing" is plainly wrong - because the unions charged their low paid women members millions of pounds in contributions (membership fees) over this period - yet let them down miserably when it came to sweeping away years of pay discrimination.
I was genuinely taken aback to such an ill-informed and unbalanced piece, so I decided to write to Ruth Wishart recently and invite her to meet with Mark Irvine and Carol Fox - to set the record straight.
Sad to say that offer wasn't taken up, but there is still an open invitation for any journalist who - like Ruth - appears to be struggling to grasp the basic rights and wrongs of equal pay.
By Ruth Wishart (22 January 2013)
On one level it sounds so simple.
People should get the same pay for work of similar value regardless of gender. The Treaty of Rome said so way back in 1957. The UK law enshrined it when the Equal Pay Act came fully into force in 1975. What could go wrong?
Pretty well every thing as it happens. From dodgy employers in the early days who thought it smart practice to promote every single bloke on the payroll, to mass re-writing of job descriptions, to assembly lines being re-jigged to make them single sex.
And even when the rogues were rounded up, the earnings gap stubbornly persisted. Still does. But now all these years of underpayment have come back to bite cash-strapped local authorities who, not exactly obstructed by male-dominated unions, continued to preside over arrangements which turned out to be institutionally discriminatory.
A landmark judgment at the end of last year found Birmingham City Council on the wrong end of a court case brought by more than 170 women claiming back pay over six years. It is likely to open the floodgates for hundreds, if not thousands more.
Meanwhile, next month sees Glasgow City Council at a second session of an employment tribunal – there's a third scheduled for May – defending the arrangements it has come to after a process which began way back in 2005. A process which has already cost it over £50 million in compensation packages to female employees.
But this is not a straightforward tale of winners and losers, nor for that matter heroes and villains. When Glasgow City Council did its job evaluation exercise seven years ago there was no shortage of pay anomalies tumbling out of the woodwork.
As was the case with other councils, pay rates had grown up which made the casual assumption that outdoor dirty jobs like refuse collection and grave digging were intrinsically worth more than indoor manual work like cooking and cleaning. No prizes for guessing which of these categories employed more men than women and vice versa.
On top of that was an extraordinary bonus culture which widened the pay gap quite dramatically. As one executive explained "it seems that in some areas bonuses were being paid for turning up to work". And a lack of transparency around who got paid what and why meant that many of the disadvantaged women had no notion just how poorly paid they were by comparison with similar or poorer male skill levels.
The workforce pay and benefit review was designed to examine and eradicate these anomalies. Glasgow decided not to use the Scottish Joint Council Scheme still under negotiation, but used the Greater London Provincial Model on the grounds it would be a faster option than re-inventing the wheel. This entailed putting diverse jobs into 13 "job families" depending on the working context and skills.
The exercise meant higher pay for almost 25,000 employees, but loss of earnings for just under 4000. Under the deal anyone losing more than £500 would be offered skills development and there would be pay protection for three years.
The unions had several complaints about this, suggesting – among other complaints – that employees having to sign on the dotted line before being compensated for previous inequities was a form of blackmail.
But their cages were also being rattled by a new breed of specialist lawyers who saw the fight for equal pay as a lucrative niche market.
Their pitch was that on a no-win-no-fee basis they could get the women a better deal than union reps who, they suggested, had been asleep on the job in order to protect the incomes of their male membership.
Since the lawyers' cut of a successful action involved anything from 10% to 25% of the women's compensation packages, it seems somewhat disingenuous to suppose the main motive was a lofty crusade against injustice and discrimination. The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing.
In the event, four times as many Glasgow employees plumped for a private law firm than for Unison, though not the least of the ironies in this saga is that many of the lawyers involved had previously worked for Unison.
But, as I said, this is not a simple tale. Righting previous wrongs is important. Equal pay for work of equal value is essential. Yet all of this unfolds against a backdrop of budget cuts inevitably resulting in job losses.
It's not so much being careful what we wish for, more a dispiriting calculation on benefits versus costs.
