Council to bring in consultants for pay review

A council said it will spend £3m on external consultants to review the pay structure of its staff.

Liberal Democrat-run Somerset Council said it was "high time" a pay and grading review was carried out for its more than 4,000 full time staff and a new system was launched from April 2027.

When the council formed by uniting five local authorities in 2023, it inherited different sets of payment structures for its staff.

Somerset councillor Theo Butt-Philip said: "It's highly likely that in a number of areas we will see staff being paid more. It is possible that there will be some staff who see their pay reduced but I very much hope that won't be the case."

A council report said the normal expectation following a pay and grading review is that some roles will increase in pay, some will remain the same, and some will decrease in pay and be subject to contractual pay protection.

Mr Butt-Philip said it was "always going to be necessary" to do a full pay and grading review after the local councils united.

"It's high time the whole thing was reviewed. Morally it's right that we ensure we are paying our staff fairly," he said.

"We know there's a few roles we are finding it hard to recruit to and we know one of the drivers is we are just not paying the right amount by market standards."

He added the price for the consultants was budgeted for by the council.

"It's an enormous amount of work," said Mr Butt-Philip. "It will take over a year to conduct it, the figure we budgeted for is based on how much it has cost for other similar authorities to undergo this work."

Somerset Council declared a 'financial emergency' in November 2023 and had to find £100m of savings and cuts to balance its budget for 2024/25.

In December 2024, the government announced £607.9 million funding for the council for 2025, which was a 5.6% increase on the year before.

However, at the time, the local authority said it is not enough to fill gaps in its funding, and services outside of adult and social care could still be lost.

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