Major review to start after “unsackable” civil servant figures revealed

Friday 13 March 2015

An independent report into a three-year project to modernise States HR, pay and disciplinary systems is about to begin, just after Bailiwick Express revealed that just 60 States workers have been sacked in five years, less than a third of the UK civil service dismissal rate.

The politician who heads the spending watchdog says that his panel will investigate the internal States reform programme, which has been going on since 2012.

That programme began after the States then-HR director Mark Sinclair said publicly that their HR systems and work practices were stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the organisation was “haemorrhaging money” as a result.

A key criticism at the time was that the public sector pay progression system rewarded people who stayed with the organisation for a long time, not those who worked hardest or performed best – and now Public Accounts Committee chairman Andrew Lewis says that he wants to review progress so far.

His comments come after stats released to Bailiwick Express under the Freedom of Information Law showed that over the last five years, the rate of dismissals works out at around 0.14% of staff per year, much lower than the UK civil service rate of 0.5% per year.

They also showed that the rate is far lower than the most recent estimate for the UK dismissal rate across both the private and public sectors. A 2009 OECD report estimated the total UK dismissal rate at 3.6% - that would mean that workers in England are 25 times more likely to be sacked than a Jersey civil servant.

Deputy Lewis said: “The States are either an exceptionally good employer or they have not got a handle on reform.

“What it suggests to me is that we have been slow to reform the public sector, whereas the UK government has had to reform quickly and they have become more efficient and are doing more with less staff. They have had to ‘thin out’ staff in some back office areas, which has enabled them to put more money into frontline services such as health and schools.”