Cabinet Office must address staff pay crisis

PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka wrote to the Tory MP ahead of our meeting with him tomorrow calling on him to also address the other issues that PCS is currently in dispute about:

• job protection
• redundancy payments
• and pension contributions.

In a letter on 5 January, Mr Quin expressed a desire to engage constructively with PCS over discussing next year’s pay, but in reply Mark strongly urged him to meet us to resolve the current dispute.

The minister seems to misunderstand how civil service pay operates by setting out in his letter that the Cabinet Office will “be publishing our economic evidence to pay review bodies so that union members and the wider public can see the context within which we need to work.”

There is no pay review body for the civil service below the senior civil service.

Mark said: “It is therefore difficult for us to understand how we can respond to an invitation to discuss evidence to a body that does not exist. It is also difficult for us to understand how the government can publish evidence that it is submitting to a non-existent body.”

Mark also highlighted how there is no provision within the present Treasury pay remit process for delegated grades for evidence to be submitted to inform the outcome.

“The government is entirely in control of the content of the pay remit guidance. Any evidence therefore that the government wishes to submit as part of this process, it would only be submitting to itself. This appears to us to be a rather bizarre proposition,” he wrote.

Each year our union submits a national pay claim but there are no substantive discussions at the national level as to these claims or about the remit itself. If the government is serious about constructively engaging with us, then there needs to be effective national negotiations about pay and the terms of the remit.

Mark concluded his letter by saying we welcome the minister’s commitment to setting out a path for constructive engagement and that “we stand ready, as we always have, to enter discussions with you on solutions to the current cost-of-living crisis being endured by workers within the civil service”.