5. Job evaluation
The development of case law on sex discrimination and equal pay for equal value of work over the past 15 years combined with the 1997 ‘single status’ agreement in the National Joint Council for Local Government Services make it vital that pay levels are directly proportionate to relative job size or responsibility levels, within the organisation, irrespective of the gender of the job holder.
There are difficulties associated with measuring relative job sizes in a local authority. This is due to:
- The size of the organisation and the number of jobs – even the smallest District Council is likely to have employees in over 150 discrete jobs, making the task of determining relative responsibilities complex.
- The multifunctional nature of local authorities introduces additional complexities of needing to establish relativities between jobs which are in totally different functions and undertake totally different types of work.
For this reason, we have adopted an analytical job evaluation scheme called the Greater London Provincial Council (GLPC) scheme as these types of schemes are considered most effective where there is a diverse and complex set of posts. For more information read the Greater London Provincial Scheme.
The introduction of age discrimination legislation means that pay systems where a higher rate of pay that derives from the employee being in the post for a longer period of time may be discriminatory, unless it can be shown to fulfil a reasonable business need. In general terms, if the pay range means that an employee is able to progress through more than five incremental pay increases on the basis of time served in their post alone, there is a high risk that this will be held to be indirectly discriminatory on age grounds.
Our pay system is constructed so that the longer someone is in the post the greater their basic pay within the grade. The grades all contain five increments or less.
It should be noted that managers are responsible for ensuring that job descriptions are updated annually through the Performance Excellence Review process or when a re-grading occurs through job evaluation.
It is important to note that within our ever changing context, that jobs and job context will vary from time to time without changing the general character of the duties or the level of responsibility.
Therefore, it is not necessary to re-evaluate a job simply because the duties or activities change. It is only if these changes represent a material, substantial change in the level of work undertaken that consideration to re-grading should be given.