Folkestone & Hythe District Council Pay Gap Widens Between Top Officers and Lowest-Paid Staff

There is a neat trick in town hall pay stories. Look only at percentages and the whole thing can start to seem almost modest. Look at the pounds, though, and the hierarchy comes sharply back into focus. At Folkestone & Hythe District Council, the lowest paid employee grade and the chief executive’s salary rose at a broadly similar percentage rate over five years. But the cash difference between the bottom and the top still widened by tens of thousands of pounds.

Shepway Vox has been on this ground before. Back in 2020 we were writing about Susan Priest’s pay rise, and in 2025 we returned to the theme of rising executive pay at FHDC. Set beside the council’s own pay policy papers and statements of accounts, our earlier reporting now looks less like a one-off burst of outrage and more like an early sighting of FHDC’s favourite magic trick: the salaries at the top rising ever higher while everyone else is expected to clap politely and pretend the rabbit definitely came out of an empty hat.

Start with the council’s own definition of the bottom rung. FHDC says its “lowest paid employees” are those in grade B, because grade B is the lowest grade on the council’s pay framework. Grade A was removed as part of the April 2020 pay negotiations. In the salary scale carried in the 2024/25 pay policy papers, grade B point 7 is shown at £17,998 from 1 April 2020 and £18,538 from 1 April 2021, while point 8 is shown at £19,477 from 1 April 2022 and £20,977 from 1 April 2023. In the 2025/26 pay policy, the council says grade B point 8 is £22,477 and records that the lowest grade was £11.65 an hour from 1 April 2024. So, for a simple five-year comparison of the lowest paid employee grade, the line runs from £17,998 in 2020/21 to £22,477 in 2024/25.

Now look at the top. FHDC’s 2020/21 statement of accounts shows the chief executive line at £136,714 salary and £160,048 including employer pension contributions. Its 2024/25 statement of accounts shows the chief executive line at £169,961 salary and £201,510 including pension, and names the post-holder as Dr Susan Priest. That means the chief executive’s salary rose by £33,247 over the period, while total remuneration rose by £41,462.

This is where the story gets more interesting than the usual shouting match. The lowest paid employee grade rose by £4,479 over the five years, which is 24.9 per cent. Dr Susan Priest’s salary rose by 24.3 per cent. Her total remuneration rose by 25.9 per cent. So in percentage terms, the lowest paid employee grade and the chief executive’s salary moved at a strikingly similar pace. But in cash terms they lived in entirely different worlds. The lowest paid employee grade gained £4,479. The chief executive’s salary gained £33,247. Her full package gained £41,462. The gap between the chief executive’s salary and the lowest paid employee grade widened from £118,716 to £147,484. That is another £28,768 of daylight.

That is why the charts matter. The indexed chart shows why the council might say the system moved in a balanced way: the percentage lines are not miles apart. But the cash-rise chart shows the reality residents will understand much faster. One line gets an extra £4,479 over five years. Another gets £33,247. Another gets £41,462. You do not need a doctorate in public finance to work out which end of the building that favours.

The upper echelon in 2024/25 remains a different financial universe altogether. The accounts show Dr Susan Priest on £201,510 including pension, Andy Blaszkowicz on £151,634, Ewan Green on £151,342, and Lydia Morrison on £135,929 in her interim governance and finance role. Amandeep Khroud appears on £176,405, but the same note says the monitoring officer “left 31st Dec 24 (including redundancy costs)”, so that figure is not a clean ordinary annual package and should not be treated as though it were one.

   

The council’s own documents also explain why the pattern changes over time. In the older pay policy, FHDC says annual pay awards for employees were considered “for all employees with the exception of the Chief Executive and Directors”. In the 2025/26 pay policy, it says that “from September 2023” the Personnel Committee decided to include directors and the chief executive’s pay framework in the council’s local pay negotiations. The same document says that after a review by an external adviser in 2023, the Personnel Committee approved new pay scales for those roles in September 2023. In plain English, the later movement at the top was not an accident. It followed a deliberate reset.

That leaves the real point. FHDC’s lowest paid employee grade did rise. This is not a story about the bottom being nailed to the floor while the top floated skywards untouched by reality. But it is also not a story of equality. The lowest paid employee grade rose by a few thousand pounds. The chief executive’s salary rose by more than £33,000. The chief executive’s total remuneration rose by more than £41,000. The upper tier stayed in a different pay league throughout, and the cash gulf between the bottom and the top ended the period wider than where it started. That, stripped of the jargon, is the council’s pay story over five years.

The Shepway Vox Team

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