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£750k, 126 health professionals and zero accountability…for the States workers currently disputing their working conditions, Health’s “disastrous” pay review risks adding insult to injury amidst already strained relations.
The reversal of pay rises given to 126 health workers including physiotherapists, occupational health staff and social workers, amongst others, could see some staff taking as much as an £11,500 pay cut as of April next year - but those who spearheaded the failed review are no longer around to be held accountable for the blunder.
126 civil servants have been informed that the £746,000 in pay rises they received as part of a review done last November are going to be reversed from next April onwards after it was discovered that the pay increases were “not appropriate” and that “job descriptions… had been ‘inflated’.”
This is a tough pill to swallow in a political moment fractured by the embittered row over public sector wages and adds a stark caveat to the States' refrain: “there is no more money."
Pictured: The pay review u-turn comes amidst fraught negotiations between unions and the States Employment Board over public sector pay for next year.
In real-terms, the pay increases are substantial for those 126 health professionals whose roles were regraded. Based on the States’ current civil service pay grades, the values of the salary uplifts are as follows:
Just days after hundreds of civil servants took to the streets to strike over stilted pay deal negotiations, this report into the “disastrous” pay review pours salt in the wound and begs the question: what went so dreadfully wrong?
The report into the now scrapped pay review was commissioned by Interim HR support to the Health Department Darren Skinner at the beginning of June 2018 and was carried out by external consultants.
Summing up its findings, the report talks about a complete lack of evidence “to show that [the health professionals] were underpaid or that they had a recruitment and retention issue” and that “...the decision to re-evaluate these posts was made at the eleventh hour."
Further to this, the consultants describe the choice to use the 30-year-old job evaluation mechanism that was used to regrade the posts as “questionable."
In the bigger picture, however, the external investigation into the “disastrous” review has dredged up deep-seated issues with the controversial ‘Workforce Modernisation Programme’ – a three-year project which sought to assess and consolidate the public sector.
Pictured: The controversial Workforce Modernisation programme provides the backdrop for the "disastrous" pay review.
Workforce Modernisation was ultimately abandoned as it was overwhelmingly rejected by the unions, but this report indicates that staff members weren’t the only ones concerned about the project.
The idea for the pay review separate to Workforce Modernisation was kicked off by a letter sent in August 2017 by one of the directors expressing “considerable concerns at some of the costs and impacts of the implementation of Workforce Modernisation…” for the department. The names in the published report are all redacted, save for in one place which attributes this letter to someone with the initials ‘JG’.
Pictured: The initials in the list of appendices have not been redacted in the publicly available report.
This is presumably former Chief Officer for Health and Social Services Julie Garbutt who announced her resignation at around the same time the investigation into the review was commissioned in order to look after her elderly parents.
The letter is addressed to the unredacted initials ‘RS’ which, due to the fact Mrs Garbutt refers to him as “the States Director for HR” – would have been Richard Stevens at the time, before he stepped down from his role in May of this year.
Within her letter, Mrs Garbutt outlines her fears about Workforce Modernisation including the “cost pressure” of Family Nursing and Home Care should they “adopt all or at least all the attractive elements of Workforce Modernisation with States of Jersey standing the cost.”
The former Health and Social Services Chief Officer was also concerned about the fact the project hadn’t factored in how to fund “the welcome and necessary increase in annual leave entitlements”, a worry about senior nurses being placed on the same grade as the nurses they lead – amongst other issues related to the Workforce Modernisation programme.
Pictured: Former Chief Officer of Health and Social Services Julie Garbutt was concerned about the impact of Workforce Modernisation on the department.
In the report’s findings, the investigators write that Workforce Modernisation “was highly complex” and that the team of Directors “may not have engaged, understood or given enough attention to the implications of” the project for the department “until too late in the day."
The complicated backdrop of the Workforce Modernisation overhaul placed particular pressure on directors and the report acknowledges that “they were genuinely concerned about the Workforce Modernisation outcomes for some of their staff and their ability to deliver front-line services as a result.”
However it also presents one anecdote about how they handled the growing controversy: when the pay review was brought up at a workshop in March of this year to develop the department’s “new set of values”, the director (whose name is redacted) “suggested that it be discussed at the end of the meeting when the workshop had concluded” before proceeding to leave the workshop early, and so forcing his colleague to “’pick up the pieces’ in his absence."
The States now say that “those with primary responsibility for these failings are no longer with the organisation.”
Pictured: 126 health professionals will see their substantial pay increases reversed in April.
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