Contract change and pay cut - feel sick

[nutellademon]

I am a regular poster but have name changed for this for obvious reasons.

I work for a public sector large employer. We are going through structure changes at the moment and everyone has had their pay scale re-evaluated. I have had notification that mine is going to go down by about £2500 (pro rata - I'm half time so my actual loss will be about £1250 p.a. , or £120 a month net).
I am a relatively low earner (my total wage on half time is about £9500 p.a. gross - so will be just over £8k).

I am so stressed about this it's making me ill. We are going through appeal but I don't have much hope.
The thing is - the evaluation people asked for any obvious error requests to be put in before implementation and the whole official appeals process. Each scoring sheet was sent out, and on mine I have what looks like an obvious error. It takes a while to realise because of the complicated system they use, but I traced it back through all their tables and fancy data and it looks like a genuine error in post allocation. Based on the scores I received, it looks like I should be a scale above what I have been allocated (so still losing money, but not as much).

I have shown this info to my boss, who agrees, my dh, who agrees, the union - who initially agreed and took it to our service head. However since it has been queried with the evaluation team, they have been very evasive, given us 3 different answers as to why it's not an anomaly but should come under appeal (despite this not being an option to site on the appeal form!) - nobody has given me a satisfactory answer or explanation, they say they can't explain it to me.
I am livid - to a lay person (and indeed everyone I have shown it to) it seems an obvious scoring miscalculation. I don't understand how they can just stonewall me and fob me off with waffling irrelavent reasons.

I don't know where else to go. Is it worth having 30 mins free with a solicitor to see if they have a case? Or should I assume that with such a large scale employer they have their backs covered?

What a horrible place to be.
No, don't assume that big means back covered. If they have made a mistake, it needs to be rectified.
I'd push it through the union, and if the rep you've got atm isn't strong enough to take it where it needs to go, ask for someone more senior.

Good luck, and I hope someone with more knowledge comes along soon.

this happened to me when my council went through single status. my role was downgraded by over 5k per year!!!! I kicked off massively to my employer (a school) and in the end what they did was keep me in the same job but call me something else. the new role had also had a small pay cut but it was as good as I was going to get and ended up losing around 1k per annum rather than 5.

if you talk to your employer there may be a way to change your job name to a similar earning role but still carry on doing the same job you do. This situation is so messed up I'm sorry for you. This was happening to me in 2010/11 conveniently (not) when I was just about to take mat leave so I had to do all correspondence over email.

have you talked to union?

Your union should be doing more. So go back to them and ask how you escalate this. Don't back down. You're in a strong position because they've ballsed up and as a low paid public sector worker the government is trying to protect you from cuts.