"The FDA – together with other unions and organisations – has launched a legal challenge of the government's decision to switch the uprating index. We believe this switch – coming as it does on top of the other pensions threats – is wholly unacceptable and potentially illegal." Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the FDA.The article in full from The Guardian Thursday 19th May 2011 printed below.
As senior public servant delegates gather for the FDA's annual conference today, there is little doubt that the challenges facing them and their colleagues are some of the most difficult in recent times.
What makes this period particularly difficult is the large number of simultaneous – and urgent – pressures. The civil service is no stranger to job cuts, pay freezes and budget reductions, but it is unusual for so many different pressures to be bearing down over such a short timescale.
Public sector employment fell by 2.1% – or 132,000 jobs – in 2010, with 45,000 jobs lost in the last three months alone. This acceleration is likely to continue as the effect of departmental cuts and the civil service recruitment freeze – instigated immediately after the 2010 general election – begin to bite.
But even for those remaining in employment, the outlook is tough. Job insecurity – often over long periods – threatens the well-being of public servants at all levels. This difficulty may be increased for those senior managers who are under threat of redundancy and are managing staff also faced with uncertainty about their future. In these circumstances, morale is often a further casualty.
With the consumer price index (CPI) – the government's preferred inflation measure – running at a 30-month high of 4.5%, and retail inflation at 5.2%, those civil servants whose pay has been frozen are clearly facing a substantial erosion of their living standards. Public servants have not made their career choices on the basis of financial gain. Indeed, pay comparability data prepared for the Cabinet Office shows that pay rates for senior staff are now between 21.7% and 97.6% lower than for comparable jobs in the private sector. But as inflation climbs, they are seeing their reward diminishing still further.
All these pressures are compounded by the threats to pension arrangements: the government has decided to seek higher contribution rates from members from 2012, and to reopen the 2007 settlement negotiated for new and existing senior public servants. On top of those moves is the government's unilateral decision to change the pensions' uprating index from RPI to CPI. This threatens to reduce the value of public servants' pensions substantially. Lord Hutton's independent public service pensions commission estimates that this reduction in benefits will be 15% on average, and 25% for those in the career-average scheme for newer recruits.
The FDA – together with other unions and organisations – has launched a legal challenge of the government's decision to switch the uprating index. We believe this switch – coming as it does on top of the other pensions threats – is wholly unacceptable and potentially illegal.
We seek to engage with the government to find a solution to these issues that is in the interest of our members, and secure that solution through argument and discussion. But there is understandably a great degree of – justifiable – anger among FDA members, who see the "contract" between them and the state, their employer, being shaken to its core.
