Bath and North East Somerset Council’s recent pay and grading review, which was expected to save the council £2.5 million in the last financial year, has instead led to a net increase in salary costs of £1.7 million. This outcome leaves the council with £4.2 million less than originally planned.
The pay review formed part of the council’s extensive “Being Our Best” (BOB) programme, a multi-year effort to reform the organisation and improve service delivery by reducing role duplication and enhancing departmental collaboration.
Speaking to a scrutiny committee on Tuesday 21 July, Mark Elliott, cabinet member for resources (Lansdown, Liberal Democrat), explained that the benchmarking exercise carried out during the review revealed that many staff salaries needed to be increased rather than decreased or maintained as initially projected. “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,” he said.
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Mr Elliott expressed some pride in the outcome, noting that 60% of staff saw their pay rise following the review. However, he acknowledged that “20/20 hindsight, it would have been a good thing to have known upfront as we would have been able to predict better.”
Council scrutiny panel member Colin Blackburn (Westmoreland, Independent) criticised the programme for its management, saying it was “badly managed” due to projecting savings that were not realised. “The whole point of that programme was to reevaluate and get things right. We should have had far better visibility of those numbers,” he added.
Joanna Wright (Lambridge, Green) emphasised both the positive and negative aspects of the review. “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 commented. She also highlighted concerns over a lack of explanations regarding the overspend: “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.”
Mr Elliott assured the scrutiny panel that the Being Our Best programme still anticipates delivering over £2 million in savings. He stated, “There are still a pile of savings that are due to be delivered from the Being Our Best programme - over £2m - which we are still being told will be delivered.”
The scrutiny panel has requested a dedicated report on the progress and outcomes of the Being Our Best programme to be submitted at a future meeting.
Despite facing rising costs in children’s care and broader global challenges impacting tourism, the council concluded the 2025/26 financial year just one per cent over budget. Mr Elliott described this as a “genuinely creditable performance” given the circumstances.