Cost-cutting wage review sees council spend £1.7m in pay rises

A review of staff pay intended to save Bath & North East Somerset Council millions has instead cost it £1.7 million in pay rises.

The Guildhall in Bath

The council had hoped to save £2.5 million in the last financial year through a pay and grading review.

But the review instead “resulted in a net increase in salary costs” which cost the council £1.7 million more than it had budgeted.

As a result, the council now has £4.2 million less than planned.

Council cabinet member resources Mark Elliott (Lansdown, Liberal Democrat) told a scrutiny committee on Tuesday 21st July: “Part of the whole point was to do a proper benchmarking exercise on the whole cohort of staff and we came up with a prediction of how much money that was going to save us — and it turned out that actually we needed to put quite a lot of salaries up a bit.”

Councillor Elliott said: “I am kind of proud of the result: that we did up the pay of 60% of our staff when we actually looked at it and benchmarked it.”

But he added: “20/20 hindsight, it would have been a good thing to have known upfront as we would have been able to predict better.”

Scrutiny panel member Councillor Colin Blackburn (Westmoreland, Independent) called the programme “badly managed” for projecting savings which were not delivered.

He said: “The whole point of that programme was to re-evaluate and get things right. We should have had far better visibility of those numbers.”

Councillor Joanna Wright (Lambridge, Green) added: “It’s really great that we’ve paid officers more money and so they should be, but the programme was poorly planned. It was optimistically budgeted and it was badly managed.”

She added: “We don’t seem to be getting answers back as to why that happened and that is really quite crucial because there has been a massive overspend on this and we should have known that in advance.”

The regrading was a part of the council’s major and multi-year ‘Being Our Best’ programme (often shortened to BOB) which aims to reform how large parts of the council are run as an organisation to aim to deliver the best service.

Work on reducing duplication of roles and getting departments to work together is still ongoing.

Councillor Elliott told the scrutiny panel: “There are still a pile of savings that are due to be delivered from the Being Our Best programme — over £2 million — which we are still being told will be delivered.”

The scrutiny panel has called for a specific report on the Being Our Best programme to come before a future meeting.

Despite continuing to face increasing children’s care costs and with global instability leading to a reduction in tourism, Bath & North East Somerset Council was just one per cent over budget at the end of the 2025/26 financial year.

Councillor Elliott said: “Given what the council has faced in 2025/26, it actually represents a genuinely creditable performance.”

John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter