Single Status

In 1997 the national agreement between local authority employers and trade unions required local authorities to look at all the different types of terms and conditions of employment within their organisation and 'harmonise' them - things like pay, annual leave entitlement, allowances etc. The ultimate goal was to ensure all Administrative, Professional, Technical & Clerical staff and manual employees shared the same 'single status' of employment - a set of common, fair and equal terms and conditions that applied to all workers within the organisation.

The national agreement does not apply to teachers, Chief Officers, Soulbury scale staff and a few other small groups of employees, such as craft workers. 

In 2004 local authorities agreed to the implementation of single status by April 2007. To achieve this, the county council began a comprehensive job evaluation exercise in 2004 - a key part of single status - which involved analysing jobs within the council to develop a more equitable pay and reward structure. 

Job evaluation has now largely been completed and that work resulted in large numbers of individual job evaluation questionnaires being produced for a wide variety of roles. In order to migrate these individual job evaluations into a modern and equitable council-wide pay structure a Job Families approach is being used to group similar jobs into occupational 'families' that emcompass work activities across the whole council, rather than within directorates. 

Work has also been continuing to identify the many and varied terms and conditions of employment in use within the council. Together the review of terms and conditions and the design of a new grading structure will be combined to produce the new pay and reward system. The overall aim is to achieve a modern and equitable pay and reward system to prevent any potential future pay inequality from arising.

An information pack is available by clicking here.