SENIOR managers at West Berkshire Council will receive a pay rise which will be paid for through staff restructuring.

Six jobs will likely go over the next two years to cover the cost of the increase, and some staff could be made redundant.

The council chose to increase the pay of its senior managers ‘to assist recruitment and retention’. It has not been made public how much the pay rise is.

The need to have an ‘effective management team’, is unlikely to be met ‘without paying the going rate’, Nick Carter, the council’s chief executive, said in a recent report.

However, staying within the budget, despite giving senior managers a pay rise, ‘can only be done through restructuring’. The third tier of managers, service directors, will see six jobs go gradually over the next two to three years, either through redundancies or ‘natural wastage’.

Staff were consulted in January and February about the changes. Mr Carter said: “In the case of senior management, it was perhaps inevitable that concerns regarding their own personal positions were reflected in some of the responses.“

Staff changes have to be approved by the personnel committee, not the executive, for independent scrutiny. However, only half of the six councillors on the committee attended the meeting on Monday morning, and the report was not debated.

The council was approached for comment.

Separately, the personnel committee also discussed whether to pay its lowest earning staff the real living wage. The real living wage is higher than the government minimum, the ‘national living wage’.

The personnel committee decided to decouple how much the council pays its lowest earners from the real living wage, and pay on the national joint committee (NJC) levels instead, which are negotiated by Unison.

While the NJC minimum is currently the same, £9 an hour, in the future the real living wage may increase faster.