Agenda item

To receive a report by the Pay and Reward specialist (copy attached), to seek approval of the attached Pay Policy Statement for 2025/26.

The Deputy Leader and Lead Member for Corporate Strategy, Policy and Equalities, Councillor Julie Matthews, introduced a report on the Pay Policy Statement 2025 / 2026 (previously circulated).

Councillor Matthews advised that the Council was committed to transparency in its pay policy for all staff grades. The Localism Act 2011 required local authorities to prepare pay policy statements. Members were advised that the statements must articulate an authority’s own policies towards a range of issues relating to the pay of its workforce particularly its senior staff (or “chief officers”) and its lowest paid employees. Pay Policy Statements must be approved and published by the Council on an annual basis.

Councillor Matthews highlighted the Council’s pay policy for contributing towards a highly motivated workforce and she advised that the pay policy statement had been recommended for adoption in April 2025 by the Council’s Senior Leadership Remuneration Panel which she had chaired. The Pay Policy Statement's aims were to provide a reward package that was competitive and enabled the Council to attract, motivate and retain the appropriately talented people needed to maintain and improve the Council’s performance and meet future challenges. It set out a consistent approach to pay, terms and conditions across the Council which staff and managers understand and apply to a diverse workforce that reflected the community it served in a transparent, equitable and fair way, complying with legislation.

The Head of Corporate Support Services – People (HCSSP) reported that the annual pay policy tended to remain fairly static from one year to the next and there were very few changes to this year’s document. 

The HCSSP directed members’ attention to paragraph 1.3 of the pay policy which summarised the significant financial challenges over the medium term to all councils in the UK. The increasing costs of service delivery and increases in complexity for statutory demand-led services resulted in the Council’s budget requirement increasing year on year.

The HCSSP outlined the changes:

·       The statement had been updated with the 2024 – 2025 pay award for all staff.

·       The statement did not include the 2025 – 2026 pay award because that had not yet been agreed. The pay policy would be updated once the nationally agreed pay award had been agreed.

·       An important aspect of the pay policy was the pay relativities within the Council, where the Chief Executive’s salary was 6.4 times the salary of the lowest paid Council employee and the average chief officer salary was 4.4 times the salary of the lowest paid employee.

·       The Chief Executive’s salary was 5 times the salary of the average of all Council employees and the average chief officer salary was 3.4 times the salary of the average of all Council employees.

·       There was a requirement that no public sector manager could earn more than 20 times the salary of the lowest paid employee in the organisation, so Denbighshire’s figures were well within that limit.

·       A full copy of the policy and a Well-being Impact Assessment were included in the documentation for today’s report.

In response to queries from Councillor Martyn Hogg, the HCSSP clarified that the reference to ‘median average’ in paragraph 7.3 of the statement should be ‘average salary’ and that the document would be updated. In terms of how the pay relativities compared with other councils the Lead Member reported that data from other councils was considered, and though the data was not immediately to hand, her recollection was that the Council was satisfactorily placed in the middle of the range.

RESOLVED that Full Council accepts the recommendation from the Senior Leadership Remuneration Panel and approves the Pay Policy for 2025/26 (copy in Appendix A) and confirms that it has read, understood, and taken account of the Well-being Impact Assessment (Appendix B) as part of its consideration.