THE successful applicants for two council jobs up for interview this week will both be paid £98,000.

South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse district councils will hold meetings of their joint staff committees between Today and Thursday this week.

Up for discussion are two council staff vacancies which need to be filled: an interim head of development and regeneration, and an interim head of corporate services.

Applicants for the former will be discussed on Today, and for the latter on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

The two councils share all their staff, so the £98,314 salaries the successful applicants receive will be shared between the both areas.

A spokesman for South and Vale said one of the two roles had been vacant for 15 months, as the council waited for some services it had hired out to a private company to be brought back in house at the start of April.

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Both posts are within the councils’ currently approved staffing budgets for the current financial year.

The spokesman added that it had become important to fill both roles because both South and Vale were facing extra demand for services because of the global pandemic.

They said: "As with other councils across the UK, additional demands placed on the councils, due to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing delivery of council functions, means that a number of temporary changes have had to be made to the councils’ management structure over the last few months, to enable us to prioritise and respond to various programmes of work and respond to central government requirements."

They added: "This has led to us now needing to progress recruitment to these fixed term posts, within existing budgets, and subject to the undertaking of an appointment process by the Joint Staff Committee."