Civil Service World reports that the FDA and Prospect ‘are working up plans for an independent pay review body for rank-and-file officials to plug a gap in the current system.’ Responding in Civil Service World, PCS General Secretary Fran Heathcote has set out her arguments for why civil servants do not need a Pay Review Body (PRB).

The PCS General Secretary spinning her failure on members’ pay

Although the PCS Independent Left (IL) is itself opposed to a Pay Review Board (PRB), and we explain why below, Heathcote supports her argument with misleading statements about the outcomes of the 2022/23 pay dispute, covering up the failure of the then Left Unity (LU) led NEC, to which Heathcote was central, to reverse the years of pay decline despite members striking and paying a levy into the Fighting Fund.

According to Heathcote, “Through our campaign of industrial action, last year our members managed to secure a pay deal that more than doubled last year’s pay remit, with a £1,500 one-off lump sum, and secured the abandonment of proposed cuts to the civil service compensation scheme.”

The facts are:

• The strike action that we members were balloted for in 2022, and the action that we took in 2023, was in support of our demand for a 10% consolidated pay award for 2022/23 pay year, underpinned by our claim for a national minimum pay of £15 per hour. Yet the “scoresheet” shows that not one penny, consolidated or otherwise, was added to our 2022/23 salaries and that no other pay demand was won.
• Heathcote and her Left Unity (LU) faction shipwrecked the 2022/23 strike campaign despite them failing to deliver our 2022/23 pay demands. Their mis-leadership of our 2022/23 pay campaign was overwhelmingly and roundly rejected by PCS delegates at the 2024 conference.
• Heathcote glosses over the 2022/23 pay outcome by referring to the following year’s (2023/24) civil service pay remit, which we were not striking over and for which she and her LU allies did not submit a national pay claim.
• Even then Heathcote fails to note that the 2023/24 civil service pay remit delivered the lowest pay award in the public sector to non-senior civil servants and once again condemned most PCS members to below inflation pay rises.
• There is no evidence to show that our strikes over 2022 pay, and certainly not Heathcote’s/LU’s leadership, doubled the 2023/24 pay remit. No other, lower, pay remit for 2023/24 was ever put to PCS.
• In fact Mark Serwotka, the then £103,000 pa General Secretary when Heathcote was national PCS President, originally condemned the 2023/24 pay remit because it guaranteed another year of below inflation awards for PCS members. Serwotka/Heathcote/LU only changed their tune when they decided to call off the industrial action over 2022/23 pay and abandon our pay demands.
• Whilst the PCS IL believes that the then Tory Government decided to provide for a higher 2023/24 remit than it would otherwise have done because we were in dispute over the previous year’s pay award, the fact that that inflation was continuing to soar and that other unions were still in dispute and were about to be offered more money (and more than PCS), were also critical factors. Indeed, let us note that the senior civil service got a higher pay remit than we did and did not take a second of strike action.

Contrary to Heathcote’s statement, members didn’t get a £1,500 one-off lump sum, they got a non-pensionable, one off, pro-rated lump sum that was subjected to highly restrictive application rules. There is a big difference between the two. Despite the one-off payment supposedly being a flat payment compensation for high inflation, especially for the low paid, part time members, overwhelmingly female and concentrated in the lower grades, received lower (pro-rated) payment than full time staff. In a failure of their equality duties, Heathcote and her allies accepted this discriminatory pay decision

Heathcote further states in Civil Service World, “Last year, the government allowed for a remit of 4.5 to 5%. Our Home Office members, for example, in administrative grades won pay rises of more than double that level, and our executive officer members received 7.2% to 9.3%.”

This is so misleading it is outrageous. The outcome of the delegated pay talks for 2023/24 was that the vast majority of PCS members once again received below inflation pay awards, as the historic, unprecedented, 15 year decline of civil service salaries inevitably continued. Pay offers based on the 2023/24 pay remit that Heathcote is so proud off were rejected by PCS representatives in DWP, HMRC and elsewhere. When rejecting management’s 2023/24 pay offer, the then PCS HMRC Executive said that management’s pay offer fell significantly below its demands for a 10% increase to address the cost-of-living crisis, failed to secure consolidated and pensionable rises of a minimum of 4.5% for all staff, did not address issues of “endemic poverty pay”, and was “in effect a pay cut” because it was below inflation.

Heathcote focusses on the Home Office outlier (where members had been crucial to the selective strike action strategy) and ignores the brutal outcomes experienced by most members at a time of soaring inflation.

Interestingly if you read “Fixing the foundations: Public spending audit 2024-25”, which was published at the same time as Rachel Reeves made her announcement about public sector pay, you will see, at section “5.1 Costs from industrial action”, that the cost of the teachers and NHS strikes are calculated and used as a justification to accept the PRB reports, but PCS strikes are not even mentioned (and before you say it, the rail strikes were in the private sector).

So we ask the General Secretary, if the weak strike action and bargaining strategy you and your allies presided over was as effective as you claim it to be, why aren’t our strikes mentioned and costed in the document; why do tens of thousands of civil servants still languish f on or near the minimum wage; why did you and your allies fail to add a penny to 2022/23 salaries; and why did you preside over the poorest public sector settlement in 2023/24, leading to civil service wide PCS rejection of delegated pay offers?

Why we also oppose PRB
We oppose them because:

• Such bodies are not independent as their terms of reference are set by the government of the day.
• The workings of a PRB are opaque with unions not knowing how decisions are reached.
• A PRB won’t resolve the fundamental demands we have as to harmonising pay, terms and conditions across the civil service.
• Its recommendations can be rejected by the government of the day.
• Few unions subject to a PRB actually support such a body. That’s why the NEU General Secretary said regarding the latest PRB recommendation, “The so-called independent pay review body is a failed process that has resulted in pay cuts over the last 14 years, contributing to a deepening recruitment and retention crisis.”
• Unions act as supplicants to PRBs, making representations but not negotiating with the body.
• In the end, a PRB is a distraction from the key task of PCS which is to build the union and persuade members to take the necessary action so that our demands are met.
• A PRB stands in the way of our key strategic aim, which is to achieve national bargaining on pay, terms and conditions across the UK civil service.

In the next week, we will write further about the sheer importance of fighting for national bargaining. But in the here and now, we say no to Pay Review Bodies

IL supporters and the Coalition for Change majority put a motion outlining the above to the emergency NEC on the 12th of August. Unfortunately, just like the majority’s alternative strategy on the pay remit, the motion was undemocratically ruled out of order by the President against the will of the NEC majority.

Left Unity have once again prevented the members priorities being pursued by their union.