GLASGOW councillors are to take the next step towards fully settling long-running equal pay issues.

Jubilant campaigners celebrated last month as an almost £550m deal was signed off, securing pay-outs for nearly 16,000 current and former employees of Glasgow City Council.

Now, work is under way to bring ongoing equal pay liability to an end by April 2021, ensuring current and future council staff receive a fair wage.

Members of the City Administration Committee are being asked to back the introduction of a Job Evaluation Scheme, which will pave the way for a new pay and grading system to replace the Workforce Pay and Benefits System.

Implementing the Scottish Joint Council (SJC) scheme would mean producing a ranked order of jobs.

Councillor Michelle Ferns, City Convener for Workforce, said: “The Council’s objective in implementing the SJC Job Evaluation Scheme is to secure a pay and grading system for employees that is free from any inequality or bias in terms of gender but, equally importantly, in terms of the other five protected characteristics of race, sexuality, religious belief, age and disability.

“Equality will be at the centre of the implementation and the required training for those involved in its delivery will include the principles of equality and the concept of equal pay for work of equal value.”

Introducing the evaluation scheme involves placing jobs into three categories. These are benchmark jobs, a sample of jobs used for evaluation purposes to develop a new structure, generic jobs, covering a number of jobholders who do similar work, and unique jobs, which will need to be evaluated separately.

Information on different roles will be gathered before job analysts create a rank order of jobs.

A report on the pay and grading system will be submitted to a future meeting of the City Administration Committee.

An appeal process also needs to be put into place to allow employees to challenge the outcomes.

The implementation plan for the Job Evaluation Scheme has been broken down into three phases.

From April this year until March 2021, the evaluation process will take place to produce the rank order of all jobs and implement changes to payroll.

Phase two, from April 2021 to March 2022, is outlined for the appeal process. The third phase, which will be ongoing from April 2021, will evaluate all positions created by service reform, job redesign and grading appeals.

Outcomes from the evaluation process are expected to be shared with employees in December 2020.

Ms Ferns said: “Implementation by April 2021 is ambitious. It is driven by a requirement on the part of the Council to limit the on-going liability of equal pay.

“No council has delivered implementation of the SJC Job Evaluation Scheme in such a tight time frame.”

If councillors back the scheme then a job evaluation team will be created over the next month. Once the scheme is implemented, a small team will be retained to “ensure continued consistency and fairness”.