P&R not budging on public sector 5% pay offer – Trott
PUBLIC sector employees’ opposition to a 5% pay increase is yet to force Policy & Resources to improve its offer.
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Various staff groups, including civil servants, customs officers and prison workers, have voted against the deal, while others such as manual workers, fire fighters and teachers have not yet agreed to a ballot on terms which are known to fall well short of their pay claims.
P&R president Lyndon Trott indicated that his committee would not budge when he faced questions at this week’s States meeting.
‘The offer that P&R has made to civil servants is in our view appropriate and it was very nearly accepted – it was narrowly defeated,’ said Deputy Trott.
‘My recommendation to our hard-working civil servants is that they reconsider that offer and accept it speedily.’
Health service staff on ‘agenda for change’ contracts, including nurses and midwives, are the only public sector employees known to have accepted the States’ pay offer so far. The result is awaited of a ballot of airport fire fighters which opened earlier this week.
Unions have claimed the pay offer is below-inflation but the States has confirmed that the 5% offer is based on the RPIX figure for June 2024, which was 4.5%, and not on headline inflation, which was 5.3% at that time.
RPIX measures price rises excluding mortgage interest payments, and is regarded by the States to be the key inflation figure in wage negotiations, though several unions believe would be a fairer figure to use headline RPI in wage negotiations.
Former P&R member Mark Helyar acknowledged the ‘large number of very hard-working members of the public sector’, but said he was mindful of ‘the parlous state of public finances’.
He criticised unions which had requested ‘inflation-busting pay rises completely out of kilter and also completely beyond the expectation of the public’.
Deputy Helyar was P&R’s treasury lead when the senior committee introduced a three-year across-the-board deal which provided the island’s 5,000 public sector workers with increases of 5% plus £500 in 2022, 7% in 2023 and 5.8% in 2024.
That deal, which ended up being broadly in line with RPIX inflation over the three-year period, expired on 31 December. Staff groups yet to reach a new agreement have received no increase since January last year.
P&R also faced questions in the States about the overall number of public sector workers, which John Dyke said was continuing to increase ‘to the dismay of the population’.
Deputy Dyke asked if the senior committee had ‘any plans to stop employing more and more people’ in an effort to contain public spending and ease pressure on housing.
‘All five members of P&R are very vigilant of this issue,’ said Deputy Trott.
‘But the majority of the increase in head count in the public sector has been nurses and health workers and that is because we are an ageing community. It is as simple as that.
‘With regard to white-collar workers, the restraint exercised by this committee and its predecessor during this term has been material, but there are consequences of having an under-resourced white-collar public sector.’
Deputy Trott agreed that the overall increase relating to health service workers had been ‘in the hundreds’ and said the expansion had been agreed by the previous P&R, which was replaced in December 2023 after losing a motion of no confidence.