Aunt Sally Arguments (16/10/14)


Here's the companion post to the one about Freedom of Information (FoI) and a report to South Lanarkshire Council's Corporate Management Team.

A similar line of argument is now being used by North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) to try and prevent disclosure of a report to NLC's own management team back in 2006 which is very odd if you ask me.

Because North Lanarkshire Council is a Labour-run council which says it supports the principles of openness, transparency and freedom of information yet here is NLC doing its level best to prevent the public from learning about how senior council officials behaved in relation to equal pay.  

Aunt Sally Arguments (7 September 2011)


An Aunt Sally is a false argument - a premise that is deliberately 'stood up' - so that it can be knocked back down again - to make its proponents look good.

Aunt Sally arguments are often used by people trying to make a particular case - for or against something - but they deliberately distort and skew the debate in one direction - which has already been carefully pre-determined.

A good example is South Lanarkshire's Corporate Management Team report - dated 7 October 1999 - on Single Status and Equal Pay.

The section dealing with an alleged loss of jobs and higher charges is highlighted and reproduced below:

"The Council may choose to implement single status without embracing the potential for change or making significant alterations to the workforce and the delivery of service. However, this will merely result in the following adjustments to manual employee's (sic) conditions, while incurring costs:-

•Job evaluation increasing the pay bill by up to 10% (higher evaluated manual jobs, protection for APT&C)

•Costs of lower production by a reduction in the working week for manual workers, Residential staff and Nursery staff to 37 hours

•Retrospective challenges under the equal pay act due to bonus schemes which are indefensible

•Conditions of service anomalies remaining un-addressed; continuous divisions in the workforce

•Potential employer/employee relations problems; lower morale for existing APT&C employees for whom there will be no advantage

•A reduction in provision of Council services with no gain to the customer or the Council; loss of jobs, higher charges"

The reason this is so disingenuous is that back in late 1999 - the country was more than two years into a new Labour government.

Council budgets were growing not shrinking, but in fact doubled over the ten years up to 2007 and so in the crucial period for Single Status local government finance in Scotland was in a state of relative plenty, not penury.

And councils in Scotland knew what was coming down the pipe, so to speak, because what was known as the Comprehensive Spending Review which set out plans for future public spending for three years at a time.

So to pretend that Single Status and Equal Pay was 'all pain and no gain' for the employers was simply not true, nor were the council's claims about higher charges and the loss of jobs and services.

Just to set the record straight.

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