Civil Service Compensation Scheme

Debate between Mhairi Black and Chris Stephens

Tuesday 19th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Chris Stephens]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, because that is exactly what happened. I will come on to that later.

Gus O’Donnell, the then head of the civil service, echoed Francis Maude’s comments, stating:

“It was important that we achieved a scheme which is sustainable, affordable and fair.”

However, those were hollow words, as just five years later the Conservative-majority Government elected in 2015 decided to proceed with further cuts to the civil service compensation scheme. On 8 February 2016, the Cabinet Office launched a consultation on reforming the scheme. During the consultation, it took the extraordinary step of debarring the trade unions that refused to agree cuts as a pre-condition for talks.

PCS balloted its members on the final offer and it was overwhelmingly rejected. Unsurprisingly, PCS again took the matter to the High Court. The primary argument was that, by debarring the union from talks, the Cabinet Office had breached its obligation to consult the trade unions with a view to reaching agreement. Mr Justice Sales and Mrs Justice Whipple agreed. They held that:

“The Minister could not lawfully exclude the PCSU from the consultation which ultimately mattered in terms of his statutory duty”.

They added that he

“was not entitled to impose additional entry conditions above and beyond those stipulated in the 1972 Act for participation in that consultation, in the form of the pre-commitments he required the unions to make.”

Accordingly, the Court quashed the changes. That was a significant victory for civil servants, which forced the Government to restore the terms of the scheme so that many members achieved higher payments and the pace of job cuts in some Departments slowed.

Not content to leave it there, the Government announced in September 2017 a further consultation on reforming the scheme. It is believed that the consultation is another attempt to make cuts. The Government’s position will worsen even the proposed 2016 scheme terms that PCS members overwhelmingly rejected in a ballot and that were overturned by the High Court. Nevertheless, the trade unions engaged in talks with the employer.

PCS has been clear that there is no case for changing the terms of the scheme that were reinstated by the High Court. Notwithstanding that, it is engaging to protect its members’ interests, as would be expected. It is participating in talks alongside other unions—the GMB, the Prison Officers Association and Unite the union, which have also adopted the position that there is no case for cuts in the scheme. Those unions represent the overwhelming majority of trade union members affected by the scheme, and they have been in detailed discussions with the Cabinet Office since late 2017. The objectives of the negotiations are fair: to secure maximum protection for the lowest paid; to secure maximum protection for the greatest possible number of members—more often than not they are the lowest paid—and for those who want to remain in a job, thereby prioritising compulsory redundancy terms over voluntary exit and voluntary redundancy terms; and to eradicate the age discriminatory aspects of the current scheme.

I was sent a note by the Prison Officers Association, and I will reiterate its concerns. After prison officers are injured in the line of duty, how they are treated appears to be a lottery. In some cases, if the injury is judged severe enough—by outsourcers and privateers, naturally—they will be issued with a medical retirement, at which point they are entitled to their accrued pension. However, they can instead be issued with a medical inefficiency, which can have severe financial consequences. To be clear, we are talking about the same scenario: officers being so severely injured by prisoners that they cannot return to work. In one case they can retire and keep their pension, sometimes along with permanent injuries, while in the other they are often left in a position where they cannot even afford the urgent medical care they need.

The Prison Officers Association believes that the planned cuts to that scheme threaten to make an unfair situation even worse, by limiting further the number of weeks that critically injured prison officers can receive pay. That literally adds insult to injury, and this Government must act to make sure those brave men and women are not further penalised for working in such dangerous conditions while they diligently protect the public.

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the problems that runs alongside this and most pension issues is a total lack of communication? A constituent who is affected by the changes contacted me; once my office got involved, it took four months to get any clear answers, excluding the amount of time that my competent constituent had spent trying to fix the problem on her own. There is a complete blame game between Departments, rather than an attempt to resolve things.

[Chris Stephens]

That is certainly my experience from some of my casework relating to the scheme. I hope that the Minister takes cognisance of my hon. Friend’s remarks about how we should try to fix these issues.

The Minister should be under no illusion that the crisis unfolding in our prisons is anything less than a health and safety emergency, with violence against staff not only at a record level but rising at a record rate. According to Ministry of Justice figures, there were more than 10,000 assaults against officers in England in the past 12 months—an average of 28 each and every day.

It is perfectly reasonable to argue that these days many roles and professions, from shop worker to firefighter, unfortunately involve some exposure to violence, and that there is nothing unique about prison officers facing assaults at work. That is true, and I wish to see proper pension protection for those workers too, but prison officers work in a uniquely violent environment. According to their trade union, which will hold a march and a rally on this issue at Westminster tomorrow, it is the most violent and dangerous workplace in western Europe.

Beyond the chaos and carnage that the Government unleashed by sacking 7,000 prison officers, which opened the gates to unseen levels of violence, we must accept that prisons are inherently violent institutions. They are places where hundreds of criminals, many of them guilty of violent crimes, are held against their will using the threat—and sometimes the application—of force. That makes prisons unique workplaces. We expect the brave men and women who serve inside them to confront violence when necessary. When prison officers are injured in the line of duty, protecting the public from dangerous criminals, we as a society have a special responsibility to protect them. Quite simply, if they are too badly injured to return to work, we must not add insult to injury by leaving them in financial as well as physical peril.

I turn to the current talks and the counter-proposal that the trade unions have sent the Government. After a year of talks, during which the 2010 terms remained in place, to the benefit of civil servants, the Government took the position that they could bring the negotiations to a close unless the unions made a counter-proposal. The trade unions agreed to submit a counter-proposal to the Government’s plans, in line with their negotiating objectives.

The unions’ proposal seeks to redistribute the scheme so that those affected by office closures and other redundancy situations—those who require the compensation the most—receive the most from the scheme. In other words, they argue that people being forced out of their jobs against their wishes should be prioritised. The trade unions met the Minister on 6 February to present their counter-proposal. He undertook to consider those representations and then to respond formally. As I am sure he will tell us, a further meeting is scheduled for next week.

The onus is now on the Government. It is expected that the Minister will soon come to a conclusion about his approach. I ask him to take cognisance of the following key factors before he does so. First, the commitments given by Francis Maude following the 2010 changes should hold firm. Reneging on those commitments now would only lead people to conclude that the commitments of Conservative Ministers count for nothing.

Secondly, there is no majority in the House in support of the Government’s proposed changes; all parties, bar the Conservatives, oppose them. That includes the Democratic Unionist party, which—unsurprisingly, given the dangers that loyal, hard-working civil servants have been exposed to in its part of the world—supports the trade unions in this campaign and recognises that those workers should not be treated with contempt.

Thirdly, the counter-proposal put forward by the trade unions delivers the Government’s stated objective of producing significant savings for the taxpayer, while ensuring that those most in need of the scheme derive the most benefit from it. That is in line with the Government’s stated objectives of helping those who are just about managing and preventing excessive pay-outs at the top.

Fourthly, low-paid civil servants who work in towns and cities subjected to office closures will find it harder to obtain work. Take, for example, the office closure programme of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In many towns, HMRC is the largest employer. The highest-paid civil servants will be able to obtain other employment in the public sector, but it will be more difficult for those at the lower end, who will see the largest employer move out of the area, to obtain other work.

We call on the Minister to hold good to previous commitments and not to proceed with cuts to the civil service compensation scheme. Failing that, we call on him to adopt the counter-proposal put forward by the trade unions. I look forward to his response.

Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill

Debate between Mhairi Black and Chris Stephens

Friday 2nd December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black]

I have let the hon. Lady in multiple times, and she has sat there and not listened to a single word. She can put her hand up all she likes. Shaking her head and wishing that this was not the reality is exactly the attitude that is wrong; it is what I am trying to challenge. SNP Members experience day in, day out the hardship that the Government are causing, so I suggest she sits back and genuinely listens to what I am proposing in the Bill rather than trying to score political points and build her ego.

If the Tories are so convinced that they have adequate protections in place, why not support a Bill that formally establishes them for the most vulnerable? The UK Government will say that they already have the guidance in place, which I appreciate. That is all the more reason to protect it formally and give it statutory power and cover. The Bill would also ensure consistency across the board. In reality, the protections in the Bill go beyond the vague protections within guidance by specifically protecting vulnerable groups and putting responsibility on the Government to assess a person’s individual circumstance.

The Government say that they have already taken measures to protect claimants from sanctions when they announced their intention to undertake a trial involving warning claimants of the intention to impose a sanction on them—a yellow card system whereby people are given a period of 14 days to provide evidence of a good reason. In a written answer on 18 November, the Minister stated:

“The Jobseeker’s Allowance Sanctions Early Warning Trial in Scotland ran until September 2016 and involved approximately 6,500 claimants. Data was collected throughout the trial period to assess the extent to which the warning trial affected sanction decisions.

Qualitative interviews are currently being undertaken with a sample of these claimants to gain an understanding of how the new process affected claimant behaviour. The trial has now finished and a full evaluation is being undertaken.

The interim report will be published at the end of the year and the final report around April 2017. Findings from the trial will inform any decisions on future roll-out.”

If the Government are prepared to make small changes, then surely for the reasons I have outlined for the last wee while, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them to support the Bill, or at least to give some kind of concession or introduce a similar proposal of their own.

Fundamentally, the Bill has two points: first, to assess the individual’s personal circumstances before any sanction is applied; and, secondly, when a sanction is applied, to assess them automatically for a hardship payment. They are very small asks. As I have said, I have tried to be as constructive as possible to introduce a measure that the Government can get on board with, and to put aside party political differences and the different routes that we believe politics should go down.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend has given a tour de force this morning. Is it the case that support for the Bill also comes from the trade union representing staff employed by the Department for Work and Pensions—the Public and Commercial Services Union—which wants consistency across the board?

[Mhairi Black]

When I was first putting out the feelers to find out what people thought should be in the Bill, I went to numerous jobcentres. All the jobcentre staff I came across said that the Bill would be brilliant for them. They said it would be great because it would give clarity on what they can do. If they had a list or a code of conduct, they could say, “Right. You’ve got a child who is sick. It is clear that this does not apply”, and it would not be left to their personal judgment.

The Bill is logical and small. It protects not only our citizens and the most vulnerable people in our society, but the staff, who are under tremendous pressure in a system that is constantly changing at a rapid pace. I have genuinely tried to make the Bill one that we can pass together. I have tried to build a bridge over which all political parties can cross. I ask the Minister and all hon. Members who have sat in the Chamber today—I imagine the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) will not be joining me—to support the Bill as much as they possibly can.