Performance Pay
Gavin Whitefield CBE, Chief Executive
The Chief Executive within North Lanarkshire is the council's chief policy advisor. He is the main link between council officials and elected members. He is responsible for corporate governance and seeks to ensure the co-ordination of the organisation and all its functions. Of primary concern to the Chief Executive is the overall direction and performance of the council.
Salary 2012/13: £136,473 (plus performance-related pay of £11,039.20)
In its recent FoI response to me North Lanarkshire Council had the cheek to ask that I send any future requests to a particular email mail address as follows: committeea@northlan.gov.uk
As if this explained or justified in some way the Council's screwing things up and failing to respond to my original FoI request which was dated 20 June 2014.
Now, as North Lanarkshire says a person is entitled to send an FoI request to anyone within the Council and I have always sent my requests direct to the chief executive, both in North Lanarkshire and elsewhere.
And anyway to make matters worse my emailed FoI request to North Lanarkshire's highest paid official was acknowledged by the man himself, Gavin Whitefield, or at least someone in the CEO's office acting on his behalf - on 23 June 2014.
-----Original Message-----
From: Whitefield Gavin <WhitefieldG@northlan.gcsx.gov.uk>
Sent: Mon, Jun 23, 2014 10:47 am
Subject: RE: FoI Request
Mr Irvine
I acknowledge receipt of your email regarding the above and would advise that I have forwarded it to the Executive Director of Corporate Services to process as a Freedom of Information enquiry.
Gavin Whitefield
Chief Executive
Tel: 01698 302452
I wonder if this incident will have an adverse effect on the chief executive's annual performance bonus which was worth £11,039.02 in 2012/13 - according to the Council's web site.
Council Bigwigs (14 March 2014)
Here's another post from the blog site archive about North Lanarkshire Council which speaks for itself if you ask me - the only thing I would add is that given recent events in the Employment Tribunal, the officials involved should now be asked to hand these ridiculous bonuses back.
Because their performance has been shoddy, to say the least, in terms of looking after the interests of the workforce, so given what we know now how can the Council's senior managers defend these bonus payments?
The whole sorry business is enough to make a banker blush.
Pay Freeze Hypocrites ( 26 March 2012)
North Lanarkshire Council should hang its head in shame.
The Sunday Herald has exposed a secret pay deal involving big bonus payments to some of the council's most senior officials - which must have been approved by the Labour Group that runs North Lanarkshire Council (NLC).
The truth has been dragged out of North Lanarkshire Council - and shows that 29 senior staff scooped approximately £184,000 in extra payments - chief executive Gavin Whitefield being the biggest winner with an extra £12,050 on top of his £136,848 salary.
Which must make other council workers hopping mad - because at a time when their pay is being frozen - the chief executive is awarded an 9% pay increase.
How's that for hypocrisy and double standards?
The Sunday Herald goes on to point out that five executive directors - who earn salaries of £113,250 a year - all received more than £9000 - as did the assistant chief executive John Ellerby.
And more than 20 heads of service - on salaries between £77,166 and £85,761 - each took home bonus payments of approximately £4000 to £6000.
Now the council calls these extra payments performance related pay - but they are really just bonuses by another name.
Apparently only a select group of people can access such payments - and I imagine the scheme works in only one direction in the sense that a senior official's core salary is guaranteed - so the chief executive can never earn less than £136,848 a year.
In which case how can it be a genuine performance based scheme - if people's pay can only go up but never down?
The salaries of all council chief executives is determined by collective bargaining - in a similar way to other groups of council employees - via a Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee (SJNC).
On the SJNC for chief executives and chief officials - where COSLA represents the employers' interests and Unison is the main trade union - salaries for chief executives are set as part of a Scotland-wide agreement - and the pay of Glasgow's chief executive always comes out on top.
Because Glasgow is by far the largest council - and by and large that is what any sensible person would expect.
But there is no provision in the Scotland-wide salary agreement - for locally determined performance pay - since that would be against the spirit of national bargaining and would be potentially discriminatory as well - especially if such payments are only available to elite groups of senior staff.
So the whole thing's a disgrace if you ask me.
In many ways it reminds me of the secret 'top-up' payments made by Glasgow City Council - to councillors who acted as Chairs of its arm's length external organisations (such as Cordia) - or ALEOs as they became known.
Regular readers will remember that these payments were stopped by the Scottish Government - but only after an independent enquiry criticised Glasgow's top-up payments - as unjustified, unnecessary and a complete waste of taxpayers' money.
So I would be interested to hear how a Labour-run council can justify this kind of behaviour.
Especially at a time when thousands of people in North Lanarkshire Council are still fighting for equal pay.
How can the senior Labour councillors who signed off on this deal - look a low paid worker in the eye without feeling a huge sense of embarrassment and shame?
And have you noticed how the tame Labour unions have nothing to say - just as they did over equal pay the unions seem to have lost their voices.
Roll on the local council elections on 3rd May, I say - there is a day of reckoning coming and the sooner it comes the better.
If I had a vote in North Lanarkshire in May - I'd vote for a party which promised to end the scandal of Labour's secret bonus payments - to the council's most senior and well paid staff.
