States responds in pension scheme dispute
CHANGES made to the rules of the States employees' pension scheme did not equate to changing their contracts of employment, an industrial tribunal was told yesterday as a claim by more than 250 civil servants entered its second day.
Two groups of civil servants are behind the action – 53 members of the Guernsey Police Association and the so-called Group of 50, or G50, which comprises 209 current and former employees.
Day two heard from the States side, with Advocate Alison Ozanne appearing on behalf of the Policy & Resources Committee.
‘Forget everything you have heard over the last day and a half,' she said, 'because we are putting our case on a completely different basis.'
The tribunal was being asked to establish what the contracts between the States and its employees meant, she said.
‘Your role is to find what the contract between the parties meant at the time it was made,’ she said.
If the tribunal accepted the applicants’ case it would give them the right to take the matter to the Royal Court to claim breaches of contract, she said.
The GPA and the G50 was asking for the tribunal to grant members of the pension scheme an award based on the rules of the States’ pension scheme as it stood in 1972, when the scheme was based on final salary. It was later changed to a career average revalued earnings scheme.
Advocate Ozanne said the applicants were relying on implied terms that appeared in the contracts, not express terms.
The States had every right to change the rules of the pension scheme. It was subordinate legislation, she said.
‘It’s not the contracts that are being varied, it’s the rules that are being varied, and they are two entirely different things.’
These changes had involved a consultation process, not the collective bargaining which would be used to make changes to terms and conditions of employment like pay and holiday allocation.
She likened the changes to what might be done to an employee handbook that could be referred to in a contract. If this handbook was varied, that did not change the contract, since the handbook was incorporated into it. The hearing continues.
