North Lanarkshire Update

A number of readers have been in touch in recent weeks to ask my views on a topical question:

"Which council has the worst track record when it comes to equal pay - North Lanarkshire or South Lanarkshire?"

Now there are similarities as well as differences and I would summarise things like this:

• Both are Labour-led councils
• Both councils presided over discriminatory pay arrangements for years
• Both councils effectively preserved the bonus related earnings of male jobs
• Both councils were in breach of the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement
• Both councils had close political (Labour Party) connections with the trade unions

• South Lanarkshire lost a landmark FoI case at the UK Supreme Court
• North Lanarkshire has lost major FoI cases, but has stayed out of the UKSC 
• South Lanarkshire's unions actively discouraged members from pursuing equal pay
• North Lanarkshire's unions started off badly, but have learned from the shameful behaviour of their colleagues in SLC

So by a short head I would say that NLC should be awarded the Dunce's Hat because the Council's senior officials claimed to have solved their equal pay problems back in 2005/06 - yet all they succeeded in doing, arguably, was to make a bad situation even worse.

In effect, the Council's most highly paid officials betrayed the interests of lowest paid employees in the workforce. 

Now as far as I know, no one has been held to account for this terrible mess, quite the opposite in fact since the Council's 'top brass' introduced a scandalous performance scheme which paid NLC's chief officials around £2 million in performance bonuses between 2002-2014.

If this had happened in the private sector, you can bet your bottom dollar everyone would be demanding that heads should roll - including the trade unions and local Labour MPs.