North Lanarkshire Update

Here's the letter from North Lanarkshire's head of human resources, Iris Wylie, which was only made public after a long battle with the Council and an 'order' to release the document following a decision by the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC).

Now if you ask me the intervention of SIC was completely unnecessary, because this kind of information ought to be freely available to anyone who asks for it, especially the workforce in North Lanarkshire whose jobs and livelihoods were being affected by decisions that were being taken behind closed doors.

The crux of the issues is that the Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) was supposed to ensure that the Council's new pay arrangements were fair, objective and no longer discriminated against predominantly female jobs.

But as everyone now knows that is not what happened and the new NLC pay arrangements introduced in 2007 continued to favour traditional male council jobs which is astonishing, I have to admit.

Even more astonishing is the fact that the Council has not instigated an investigation to discover how this happened and report its findings to elected councillors - and the workforce, of course.

Gerry Crawley, by the way, is or at least was a regional officer (full-time official) with Unison and I'm sure that all of these issues, and more, were discussed in great detail by the local trade unions. 

More to follow in the days ahead, but the big question for the workforce in NLC to ponder is: 

"If this could happen once, what's to stop it from happening all over again?"

North Lanarkshire Update (09/02/15)

I promised to share the letter from North Lanarkshire's head of personnel services  setting out the terms of reference for an Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) of the Council's new pay proposals back in 2006. 

Now it's pretty clear that this EIA didn't do the trick because what we've ended up in North Lanarkshire with is a 'dog's dinner' of a mess and more equal pay claims that you can shake a stick at.

I will have more to say on the contents of the letter in the days ahead, but in the meantime here is what the Council wanted to prevent people from seeing - a letter from Iris Wylie (now head of human resources) to Gerry Crawley of Unison. 


From:      Head of Personnel Services
Sent:       07 March 2006 12.10
To:           'g.crawley@unison.co.uk'
Cc:          Chief Executive; Director of Administration; Dinwoodie Linda; Selkirk Brian
Subject:  JOB EVALUATION - EQUALITY IMPACT ASSESSMENT

Gerry,

The Chief Executive has passed to me a copy of your e-mail of 6 March, 2006 in response to the Council's final offer. You have confirmed your request for an Equality Impact Assessment to be carried out by the Council with a jointly agreed independent pay expert being commissioned to undertake this assessment.

You have not specified the areas you would wish to have covered in the impact assessment. Could I suggest that the Equality Impact Assessment focus on the following areas:-

• for the pay model overall, identify the number of males and females who are green, white and red circles as well as the proportionate percentages

• within each of the 18 grades within pay model NLC 5C, identify the number of males and females within each grade as well as the proportionate percentages

• within each grade identify the number of males and females who are green circles i.e. moving up the rank order as well as the proportionate percentages 

• within each grade identify the number of males and females who are red circles i.e. moving down the rank order as well as the proportionate percentages 

• identify predominantly male or predominantly female jobs in the existing grading structure and confirm how they move within the new evaluated rank order of jobs i.e. upwards or downwards

• check whether any predominantly female jobs are close ti the upper boundary of a grade

• check whether any predominantly male jobs are close to the lower boundary of a grade

Unless there are any other points which you feel are essential to cover in the Equality Impact Assessment, I would suggest that the work be taken forward as specified above. If you wish to revise the specification in any way, please let me know by close of business today if at all possible.

From the discussions which you had involving John O'Hagan, Director of Administration, last week I understand that Rosie Docherty, consultant to the Cosla Job Evaluation Consortium would be an acceptable independent expert to undertake this work. I should be grateful to receive your confirmation and I shall then engage Rosie to undertake the work specified above.

I look forward to hearing from you.


Iris