By Local Democracy Reporter.

ESSEX County Council is spending an extra £3.3 million to create a fairer wage system.

The council – which has just started implementing the change to its pay structure – employs more than 8,000 people excluding school staff.

It says that about 69 per cent of the workforce is entitled to an immediate pay increase.

Pam Parkes, director, organisation development and people, said that the system had not been reviewed for ten years – leaving very broad and overlapping pay bands.

She said that as a result some individuals who were doing the same job as others who had been employed for a longer tenure would more likely to be at the bottom of the pay range and newer employees were more likely to be at the top of the pay range.

She said: “It is pay for more salaries. As I said before you could have had a situation where you had five finance officers all on the same role profile but have a variety of differences in their pay.

“And the extreme could be £10,000 difference. That’s because of the system we had before.

“Now we are changing to a system where we decide what the rate is for the job and they should all receive the same pay.”