Ministers have missed an opportunity to “change tack” in their dealings with civil service trade unions, FDA chief Dave Penman has said, as he laid into plans for a fresh overhaul of redundancy payouts.
The FDA, whose members are drawn from the civil service’s senior ranks, held its annual conference in London on Thursday, a year after it urged the Conservative government to strike a “new deal” with the workforce after five years of pay restraint and cuts to departmental budgets.
Penman, the FDA’s general secretary, said he would be “exaggerating” to claim that the FDA had expected a “radically” different approach from the government compared to its coalition predecessor.
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But he pointed to several measures floated in the last year which he argued had served to further erode trust between the government and unions.
Penman singled out the Cabinet Office’s plan to overhaul redunancy pay through further changes to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme for particular criticism.
The CSCS was last renegotiated in 2010, and the decision to reopen it has sparked the ire of all three main civil service unions — FDA, Prospect and PCS.
The Cabinet Office’s consultation on the shake-up argues that the CSCS in its current form is “not fully delivering against its aims” and is hindering workforce management by encouraging staff facing redundancy to hold on to their jobs in the hope of getting better exit terms later.
But Penman said the planned changes — which could see a cut in all three forms of redundancy payout as well as an end to access to unreduced pensions — were “ideological” rather than practical, and he said the move was “all the more galling” because unions had seen the 2010 deal as a long-term settlement.
The FDA chief told delegates: “Even the chancellor doesn’t say that our finances are in a worse state than in 2010 — so what, other than ideology, can be the driving force for cutting redundancy payments once again, never mind reneging on the deal we did with the previous minister?”
Penman also hit out at the Treasury’s decision to cap redundancy payments for civil servants leaving the workforce at £95,000.
The government has now legislated to impose the cap on the overall value of redundancy payouts, which the Treasury says are “far in excess of those available to most workers in the public sector or wider economy”.
But unions have warned that the change will adversely affect long-serving staff on lower salaries, and the FDA chief on Thursday branded the move “dog whistle politics” based on a myth of “fat cat public servants”.
“Now enshrined in legislation, it sends a message that you, senior public servants, don’t deserve the same value of compesnation when you’re made redndant, simply because of what you earn,” he said.
To coincide with its annual conference, the FDA on Thursday published a wide-ranging workforce survey highlighting concern among civil service managers about unpaid overtime and flexible working arrangements.
And Penman elsewhere used his address to warn FDA delegates that the union “must do more” to halt a decline in its membership as civil service staff numbers shrink.