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Another group of public sector workers has rejected the government’s plans to change their pension scheme.

Leaders of the Unite trade union have rejected changes to the local government pension scheme.

A revised offer was outlined in December by Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

It means that despite making concessions, the government is still facing significant opposition to its plans to cut its pension costs.

The Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, said his members no longer trusted Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who has been leading the coalition’s negotiations over the local government scheme.

“Our senior representatives believe they have no choice but to reject the ‘principles document’ after Eric Pickles claimed the unions had made commitments which have not been fully discussed,” Mr McCluskey said.

“There now needs to be genuine discussions without arbitrary deadlines.”

Long term plan.

Last year the government embarked on negotiations to implement a two-stage plan to knock billions of pounds off the long term cost of providing pensions for staff in most parts of the public sector.

That plan covers staff employed in the civil service, NHS, local government and education.

The strategy is a centre-piece of the coalition’s attempt to rein in the government’s spending deficit.

The first stage of the plan is to raise many members’ contributions substantially, by an average of 3.1 percentage points, in stages between April this year and April 2015.

Then, in the second stage, most serving staff will be moved from their current schemes into new, and less generous, career average ones.

One of the key features is that as well as paying in more, most staff will have to work longer, as the normal pension age in each scheme will rise steadily from 65, in line with the intended raising of the state pension age.

However lower paid staff will be exempt from paying higher contributions.

And those public sector staff who, on 1 April 2012, are within 10 years of their normal retirement age will be able to stay in their present schemes.

Opposition Continues

Unison, by far the largest union in local government and the NHS, will announce its stance on Tuesday.

Unite members in the NHS have already rejected the government’s latest plans for their pension scheme; the biggest civil service union the PCS has all along rejected proposed changes to the civil service pension scheme; and the two biggest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, last week refused to endorse the most recent pension proposals for the teachers’ pension scheme.

The initial version of the public sector pension changes led to a huge national one-day strike of trade union members last November.

The business process used to make policy decisions at Warwickshire County Council has been greatly improved thanks to CMIS Democratic Services software and a close working relationship between the council and the software provider, Astech Consultants Ltd.
As part of its on-going pursuit of good governance, in 2010 Warwickshire County Council undertook a review to find out if the council was making the best possible use of ICT. The project was led by the council’s Democratic Services Team in a programme of radical improvements to the decision making process aimed at achieving greater speed, consistency, accessibility and efficiency.
The review found that, for historical reasons, each of the nine directorates had their own process, resulting in serious inconsistency, confusion and waste. The Democratic Services team quickly agreed the improvements that were needed to unify and streamline the process and then produced a business case for purchasing a commercially available ICT system.
The resulting formal tendering process led to Warwickshire County Council choosing Astech to provide a tailored solution to suit the council’s requirements, on the basis of the outstanding flexibility of the CMIS software.

Software tailored for Warwickshire County Council

The CMIS suite of Democratic Management modules has provided the council with a software application capable of delivering the workflow control and functionality it required.

At the heart of the applications is a streamlined, error free process that:

• is designed to match WCC’s needs precisely
• simplifies the creation of proposals and reports
• creates reports, agendas and minutes
• proceeds on an intuitive, logical, step-by-step basis
• automates many historically manual procedures such as document distribution, consultation, collection of comments and approvals
• enables visual tracking of progress so giving the author full control and allowing other parties to check the stage of a job
• uses reminders to keep all interested parties to an agreed timetable
• speeds up and simplifies consultation and decision making
• significantly reduces costs

Additionally, the web-based nature of the CMIS system allows council officers remote access and flexible working from any computer, anywhere.
The package from CMIS includes comprehensive technical support and training, as required.

Saving Warwickshire County Council £124,000 a year

Warwickshire County Council have already, within the first year, recouped their initial investment in CMIS many times over.The savings have been achieved by a reduction in paper usage, distribution costs and an increase in productivity.In Warwickshire County Council’s own words, “The electronic preparation, consultation and distribution of reports and agendas has also resulted in considerable savings in printing and distribution costs.”Officers’ time previously spent administering the process is now diverted to other duties with resultant savings in all the council’s directorates.

Councillor Sarah Hayward, Camden Council’s Cabinet Member for Communities, Regeneration and Equalities, said: “Despite huge cuts to councils by central government we are more determined than ever to continue tackling the toughest social problems facing our residents. We know some of our residents have been dealt a tough hand in life and we want to make sure everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. “Camden Council’s equalities and cohesion fund is about breaking through the barriers created by inequality and lack of social cohesion and giving a helping hand to those who are being held back.”

Large scale government cuts last year saw Camden Council facing a budget gap of almost £100 million. In response to the changing financial climate Camden Council took a new approach to how it funds the voluntary and community sector. This meant the Council taking a hard look at how to make the most use of the diminishing pot available and to ensure that the money goes to projects likely to provide the best outcomes for Camden residents.

The Council has already extended the existing contracts in its dedicated VCS funding programme by nine months until December 2011 to give organisations time to plan ahead for a much more challenging financial environment. For the successful organisations in the equalities and cohesion fund, the new agreements will start from 1 January 2012.

Camden Council’s equalities and  cohesion fund provides £1 million per year over three years to help organisations run vital services such as supporting financially-challenged residents to access advice and for residents in need of employment advice and employability training. Following the first round of the application process the Council has worked closely with each organisation to develop their proposals to ensure maximum impact.

The fund was oversubscribed with the Council receiving 96 applications for funding totalling £3.8 million year – nearly four times the amount of funding available. Successful organisations and projects are:

Action for Blind People – Independent Living Advice- Action for Blind People in Camden

Action Space – Camden Creates

British Somali Community – British Somali Community

Camden Chinese Community Centre – Advocacy project

Camden Citizens Advice Bureau Service – Improving Access to Debt Advice for People with mild to moderate mental health problems

Camden Community Law Centre – Financial capability training and advice

Camden Cypriot Women’s Organisation – Services and activities for the Greek speaking community, Access to services; Equality of opportunity

Camden Jobtrain – Jobtrain Apex forum

Camden LGBT Forum – LGBT Forum

Camden Plus Credit Union – Financial Inclusion Project

The Camden Society – Worktrain Camden

Camden Volunteer Bureau – Skills for Sharing

The CarAf Centre – Improving Access to Achieve

Clean Break – Changing Lives

Groundswell UK – Homeless Health Peer Advocacy (HHPA)

Henna Asian Women’s Group – Women United

Highgate Newtown Community Centre – Phiz’n'bizz phase 2 (Youth Club funding for disadvantaged young people)

Holborn Community Association – Opening doors – Improve the health, access, social inclusion and quality of life of older people in Holborn

Holy Cross Centre Trust – Healthy Communities

Hopscotch Asian Womens Centre -Nubon yatra (new journey) Employment training and live support, increasing life chances for Asian women

Interchange Trust – Creative connections (arts and media education programme for 9 – 16 year olds at risk of exclusion and educational failure.)

The London Irish Centre – Living with Dignity

Mary Ward Centre – Mind the Gap – Widening Participation

Mary Ward Legal Centre – Financially capable Camden

Queens Crescent Community Association – Older People’s Healthy Living Programme

The Roundhouse Trust – Roundhouse Creative programme

Scene & Heard – Playmaking One Courses 2012-2014

Somali Community Centre – Sahal – provide information, advice and advocacy services for Somali speaking people in Camden

Somali Youth Development Resource Centre – Fresh Start -Youth project for Somali young people

The current rate of public sector job losses is far greater than official projections and suggests total job cuts in the sector will be 50% higher than forecast, researchers say.

Since April, the public sector shed jobs at five times the rate predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said.

The body called on the government to halt public sector job cuts.

The Treasury said the cuts were needed.

A spokesman said: “Risks in the global economy make it even more essential to stick to the government’s essential deficit reduction plan, which is supported by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the CBI.

“This plan is essential for sustainable growth and has helped deliver record low interest rates for families.”

A Treasury source told the BBC it was sceptical of the CIPD’s projections as it had previously overestimated the UK unemployment peak.

More losses .

However, the CIPD said the public sector job cuts could be far greater than the OBR’s latest projections.

In June 2010, the OBR forecast that the government’s spending cuts, designed to reduce its budget deficit, would lead to 610,000 public sector job losses between 2010/11 and 2015/16.

Chief economic adviser John Philpott: Government plans could “add to the public borrowing problem”

However, in November last year it reduced this projection to 410,000.

The CIPD said that, based on the current rate of job cuts, the actual number of jobs lost in the public sector was likely to be 610,000 – “exactly the same as the initial OBR projection”.

As a result, it called on the government to “call a halt to public sector job cuts while the economy and labour market remain in the current fragile condition”.

A number of economists and opposition politicians have called on the government to rethink its programme of spending cuts given the weak recover.

Figures released last week showed that the UK economy grew by 0.1% between April and June, slightly less than the previous estimate of 0.2%.

‘Strength sapping’.

The body also questioned whether the private sector was capable of compensating for public sector losses, as the government is hoping.

“Especially worrying is that public sector job losses in the second quarter of 2011 far exceeded net private sector job creation, which suggests that the slowdown in economic growth since the autumn of 2010 is gradually sapping the strength of those parts of the economy that were creating jobs in the initial part of the recovery,” the CIPD said.

Therefore it would be “sensible to delay all further job cuts to the end of this parliament and, if necessary, into the next”.

However, the government said private sector job creation would more than outweigh losses in the private sector.

“Half a million private sector jobs were created last year and the independent OBR has forecast that there will be 900,000 more jobs created in the private sector than lost in the public sector by 2015,” the Treasury spokesman said.

The OBR is a government-appointed body formed last year to make an independent assessment of the government’s finances and of the economy.

The government could save £900m a year from public sector pensions without raising workers’ contributions for two years, a lobbying group has argued.

The Local Government Group has written to the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles with its suggestions, which he says he is “considering carefully”.

It says employees could either pay more in – starting in two years’ time – to keep their benefits, or pay what they do now and get less when they retire.

But unions have dismissed the plan.

Public sector trade unions have already said they will go ahead with ballots for mass strike action on 30 November over pensions, after talks with ministers failed to reach a breakthrough.

But that was on the basis that millions of workers would have to pay more from next April while they were still experiencing a pay freeze.

‘Careful consideration’

The latest proposal, which could affect two million workers, claims to bring the £900m in savings the government is looking to make by 2014-15 without employees opting out of the pension scheme.

In the letter the group states that its proposal “delivers the required level of savings, other than wholly through an increase in employee contributions, minimises the impact on the lower-paid and offers choice to individuals”.

The proposals include an increase in the normal pension age from 65 to 66 from April 2014 which, the group claims, would save £300m a year. The remaining £600m comes from an increase in contribution rates with protection for the lower-paid, it says.

But for employees who were not willing or able to contribute more, there would be the option of accepting a reduction in their pension benefits.

No employee would face a rise in contributions for at least two years.

This plan could create problems for some of the main trades unions which represent public sector staff including Unison, the GMB and Unite.

Last week they announced plans to ballot members on strike action amid concerns that the government would force through increases in pension contributions.

But if workers no longer face an immediate rise in contributions, will they be prepared to go on strike?

The proposals could also create problems for Eric Pickles. His department is due to publish its own proposals on pension reform in the coming weeks.

Would it risk a row with the Tory-led Local Government Group by ignoring its plans and perhaps seeking savings in the scheme in years one and two?

The Department for Communities and Local Government now has to decide whether to adopt the latest proposal or launch its own proposals for pension changes at the end of the month.

‘Short-term tax’

A spokesman said these suggestions were a valid contribution to solving the public pension problem.

“This is a genuine consultation to which we are committed in order to try and agree a way forward with the unions and employers,” he said.

“Public service pensions will still be among the very best, with a guaranteed pension, but we must ensure that they remain affordable in the future and deliver better value for the taxpayer.”

In a statement, Unison said it could not “sign up to these plans, which are proposed to raise nothing more than a £900m ‘tax’ on local government pension scheme members for the government in the short term”.

The GMB said there were “significant problems” with the proposals and that the government did not look set to change its “hardline stance”.

On Thursday, a TUC-led delegation met Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude in the latest round of talks on pensions, but no agreement was reached.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber told the BBC there had been no “dramatic change”, with the two sides still “a long way apart”, but promised there would be further talks.

“Unions will continue to step up their efforts with the ballots of their members and planning of industrial action,” he added.

The Local Government Group says it works with local authorities, regional employers and other bodies to create solutions on pay, pensions and employment contracts.

The two largest civil service unions have lost their high court challenge to a scheme that will reduce benefits paid to members who are made redundant or take early retirement.

The Public and Commercial Services Union, which has 270,000 members, and the Prison Officers’ Association, which has 35,000, called for a judicial review of a decision made in December 2010 by the civil service minister to amend the civil service compensation scheme, which applies to more than 600,000 workers.

At a hearing last month, lawyers told Mr Justice McCombe that, because rights to certain redundancy terms had accrued through length of service, they were classed as a “possession” in human rights law and should not be “interfered with” unless there was an overriding public interest.

But last week the judge, sitting in London, dismissed the claim and said the new scheme was valid.

He concluded that, while the benefits under the old scheme were possessions within the meaning of the European convention, and the changes did amount to interference, this was justified.

He said: “First, the interference must be in accordance with law which itself must be accessible, precise and foreseeable in application.

“Secondly, the interference must be in pursuit of a legitimate aim in the public interest and, thirdly, it must strike a fair balance between the persons affected and the community as a whole.

“The individuals affected must not be required to bear a disproportionate or excessive burden.”

The only question was whether the minister had shown that the interference with scheme members’ rights was a proportionate one within the limits of what could be afforded.

The judge said that he bore in mind that the scheme and payments made under it were designed to plug a gap between employments or between leaving the service and full retirement.

To this extent, they were “weaker” than pension rights which afforded financial protection for many years and into old age and had a transfer value, such as on divorce.

“Salary and pension benefits remain unaffected. The rights of scheme members have not been eliminated by the new scheme; they have been reduced in a manner designed to spread the burden fairly among all civil servants.”

He said it was not contested that the new scheme, which was accepted by four unions, was still relatively favourable to departing employees when compared with statutory terms and the terms customarily on offer in the private sector and other public sector employments.

In his judgment, the reduction in benefits was “reasonable and commensurate” and the interference did not go beyond what was “reasonably necessary” to achieve the legitimate aim recognised on both sides – reduction of the national budget deficit.

Rhonda Miller

The public sector is facing an unprecedented period of declining resources and growing demands for their services.  This has resulted in dramatic changes to organisational structures requiring new ways of working.  While the configuration of the boxes may have changed, the people within those boxes may still be clinging to the behaviours that have worked for them in the past.

Organisational change requires people to do things differently – to change existing behaviour patterns.   This is not an easy task and attempts to change behaviour often have poor success rates.  Change initiators seldom take into consideration the fact that people have to change behaviour that has been successful for them for years.

Over the last 20 years, the integration of psychology and neuroscience has provided a new view of human nature and behaviour change. The use of imaging technologies such as fMRIs have identified formerly unseen neural connections in the living human brain.

One of the conclusions that can be drawn from this research is that change is linked to pain, even when the change appears to be in an individual’s best interest. It appears that our brains are programmed to resist change. We become comfortable with our habits as they require much less energy and use just one part of the brain.

Many of the activities that we perform at work are routine, like the way we communicate with colleagues or deliver a particular service.  These behaviours become habits. But changing requirements in the public sector, e.g., new ways of delivering services, different relationships with partner organisations, tighter time-frames, requires changing those engrained habits.  This requires large amounts of effort, which many people find difficult and uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid it.

The psychologist Edgar Schein describes human change as ‘a profound psychological dynamic process that involves painful unlearning… as one attempts to restructure one’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings and attitudes.’ We are, in effect, rewiring the circuits of our behaviour.

What needs to happen to ‘unlearn’?   Schein describes three critical processes that individuals need to pass through in order for there to be a readiness and motivation to change:

1. Disconfirmation

Most forms of learning and change start with some sort of dissatisfaction (pain) that comes from data that disconfirm expectations and hopes. Some examples of this could be:  the merger of two departments with overlapping responsibilities, a new IT system that is difficult to understand, or a rising sickness rate within the team.  If we don’t feel this dissatisfaction, there is little motivation for us to move out of our comfort zone.

2. Survival Anxiety

The disconfirming data somehow need to arouse what is described as ‘survival anxiety’. That is, the feeling that if we do not change, we will either fail to meet our own needs, or fail to achieve a particular goal.

An example of this might be a current high performer’s need to maintain her view of herself as a  high performer even though the job behaviours required have changed and she doesn’t have the new skills.  In order to feel the survival anxiety, we need to accept the disconfirming data. But, by accepting this, we are admitting that something is wrong, e.g., that we are not effective or we are not ‘doing our best’. This can impact our self esteem and possibly even our identity. Often it can seem safer to maintain our dysfunctional behaviour than actually risk failure and the potential loss of self esteem that is involved in the learning process.

3. Psychological Safety

Once we have accepted that we need to change, there may be concern that we are not ‘up to it’ and we won’t be able to learn the new behaviours required.   Somehow new learners need to feel ‘psychologically safe’ to enter this period of potential insecurity. There is a need to balance the amount of threat produced by the disconfirming data, with enough psychological safety to allow us to accept the information and become motivated to change.  This might take the form of training in the required new skill combined with support while the individual climbs the learning curve.

Behavioural change is often viewed as a painful and difficult process with an uncertain chance of success.   By employing an understanding of how people react to change, we can motivate ourselves and others to unlearn old behaviours and begin the process of learning those vital new ones.