A month later than usual, but we have crunched the pay numbers from September to see what forecourts were paying their hourly-paid staff. This is the thirteenth year in succession that we’ve done it, but for any readers not yet familiar with this report here’s a quick reminder of how we do it and why it’s unique: we process the weekly and monthly payslips of several thousands of staff on behalf of hundreds of forecourt operators across the British Isles. At a similar point each September we capture a ‘freeze-frame’ of what each hourly-paid employee received as his or her hourly rate during that month. The data is then split by geographic region and we work out the national and regional average pay rates. Simple really. As we repeat each year, these are actual pay rates that have been processed on behalf of employers – as far as we’re aware every other ‘pay survey’ is the result of employers or employees being asked how much they pay or receive, questions that can result in some rather dubious answers.
So on with the figures. Twelve months ago, with the then national average at £5.90/hour, our historic data trend analysis predicted a national rate for this year of £6.13 per hour. Well, we weren’t far off; the actual figure for September 2010 was:
- UK National Average Rate September 2010 = £6.04 per hour.
- Increase on 2009 = 2.4%
While that national average across the UK didn’t really come as a big surprise, there was a lot of movement between different regions of the country – and some of that movement was quite unpredictable:
↑ Midlands £6.31/hr– up from £5.90 last year with an extremely surprising increase of 6.9% to become the top-paying region for the first time since we started compiling these reports. The one constant with last year’s result in this region was that it again had the highest individual site-rate in the country at £7.74/hr.
↑ North of England* £6.11/hr – a region that saw another above-average increase of pay [by 3.0% from £5.93] to move up to second place in the pay-league this year.
↓ South West England £6.08/hr – this had been the top-paying region for the last couple of years, although it only recorded a tiny increase of 0.8% this year [from £6.03 a year ago] and has now been overtaken in the league.
↑ South East England £6.05/hr – Historically a region that has featured in the top three more often than not over the years, but fell to sixth place last year. Our recorded wage rate here went up by 2.4% from £5.91/hour last year.
↑ Greater London £6.04/hr – Over the last thirteen years this region had rarely been out of the top three, and often top, until the shock result in 2009 which had recorded a fall of 1.5% that year and put it close to the bottom of the league. Since then we’ve seen a 3.2% increase to bring it back to mid-table, and pay rates here are now bang in line with the national average.
↑ North West England £6.01/hr – a 2.9% increase on last year’s rate [£5.84] sees this region climb into mid-table.
↑ Scotland £5.97/hr – had been bottom of the league in 2009, but a 2.6% increase [from £5.82] has pushed it higher this year.
↓ Eastern England £5.94/hr – once a regular amongst the top three paying areas, falls in successive years make those days seem long-gone. There was a slight increase recorded here [up 0.3% on £5.92] but in relative terms this region has now slipped into the bottom three.
↓ Wales £5.87/hr – one of the two regions this year to record an actual fall in rates, the (1.3%) fall [from 2009’s £5.95/hr] has put pay here back to near the bottom of the league, which is in line with our historic results. Last-year’s joint-second-top finish now looks like it was a bit of a fluke result!
↔ Northern Ireland £5.84/hr – as in Wales, so here we saw a fall of (1.8%) which again makes last-year’s joint-second place seem like a one-off.
*Incidentally, we have had to merge the former “North” and “North East” regions of England this year for technical reasons.
These detailed results were indeed less expected than the national headline figures: what we seem to be seeing is an overall flattening-out of pay rates; the gap between top and bottom regions is less than 50p /hour, which is again amongst the narrowest ranges we’ve recorded. Even the spread between the highest- and lowest-paying individual sites [within each region] is now much tighter than before.
It’s tempting to speculate as to why this may be happening, but one possible factor is that multi-site operators now run so many forecourts; most such operators will tend to set a ‘standard’ pay rate across all of the sites in their network rather than have different pay rates in each location – especially important when they often wish to move staff between sites to cover for holidays and sickness absence. Also, in a market with relatively few individual operators, many of them working within oil company owned networks, is there a tendency to see ‘the competition’ for staff coming not from the next similar forecourt a mile or two away, but from the nearest hypermarket maybe four or five miles away?
National Minimum Wage Rate from 1st October 2010
Just a reminder that the NMWR increased slightly on 1st October 2010 [i.e. just a few weeks after these figures were compiled] to:
£5.93 per hour for employees 21 years of age and over [up from £5.80]
£4.92 per hour for employees between 18 and 21 years of age [up from £4.83]
£3.64 per hour for employees 16 and 17 years of age [up fro£3.57]
Here’s our one annual attempt at predicting the future: the mathematical trend from our last thirteen years’ published data suggests a rate of £6.30/hr by this time next year –although since the ‘trend’ is rather weighted by the higher increases recorded during the earlier years of the series, the prediction already looks to be too high for the current economic climate!
