13 January 2006
Experts have criticised the creation of the new public sector pay committee for bringing civil service pay deals closer to the Treasury's paymasters.
Treasury and Cabinet Office sources this week told Public Finance that the PSPC – announced by Chancellor Gordon Brown in his December Pre-Budget Report – would be chaired by Paul Britton, head of the Cabinet Office's economic and domestic affairs secretariat.
But senior Treasury and Number 10 civil servants will also be permanent members of the PSPC, providing the chancellor and Prime Minister Tony Blair with significant input into each stage of all Whitehall pay deals.
Indeed, some Whitehall commentators have viewed the creation of the PSPC as the 'recentralisation' of Treasury control over pay deals. The committee will, for example, report to the chief secretary to the Treasury, Des Browne, the chancellor announced in December.
Colin Talbot, professor of public policy and management at Manchester Business School, said the move would bring ultimate control of Whitehall pay back towards the Treasury for the first time since the early 1990s (when pay decisions became largely a matter of departmental budget considerations).
Whitehall sources told Public Finance that the new arrangement could help to prevent a repeat of last year's embarrassing pay deal for staff at the Department for Work and Pensions.
The DWP broke Treasury pay guidance in order to resolve a long-running pay dispute with civil service trade unions. Treasury officials had called for annual pay rises of around 2.5%, but many DWP staff received up to 15% under the multi-year deal.
Talbot said: 'The Treasury is getting increasingly unhappy that it is losing control of public expenditure, and the situation at the DWP last year may have reflected that. Moving these pay deals closer to the Treasury will provide the day-to-day micro-management the Treasury craves during this period when it is tightening the purse strings on all public expenditure.'
A Treasury spokesman, however, told PF the creation of the PSPC was 'about ensuring that these deals are consistent and that there is, ultimately, more accountability in the way that each deal is brokered'.
The PSPC will issue guidance and scrutinise the structure of all future civil service pay deals from this year, drawing heavily on the recommendations of the existing Senior Salaries Review Body when considering deals for senior staff. The SSRB's annual recommendations will be published in February.
For middle and lower-grade staff, senior officials at each Whitehall department will only 'join the PSPC when their department's pay deals are due for discussion', a Treasury spokesman explained.
CSA woes continue with missed targets and rising complaints
Officials at the Child Support Agency received a morale-sapping double blow this week when it emerged that the number of complaints about the CSA has risen substantially, while performance targets continue to be missed.
James Plaskitt, the minister responsible for the CSA in the Commons, revealed on January 10 that the agency has continually failed to meet crucial targets to improve payments from absent parents.
This covers payments made under both the old maintenance payment formula (used until 2003) and the new, supposedly simplified, version that has been stymied by continued problems with the organisation's £450m IT system.
Plaskitt revealed that CSA staff achieved a case compliance rate of 72% on claims made using the old formula in the quarter to September 2005, against a target of 75%.
But case compliance against new formula claims is worse: just 66% of new claims are processed accurately, against a target of 78%. IT difficulties have left the agency with problems transferring cases to the new system.
'Cash compliance' rates — the percentage of cases open at the end of the quarter for which maintenance was actually received — were worse. New scheme cash compliance was just 61% (against a target of 75%), while old scheme compliance was 71%.
Both figures represent worsening performance against the previous quarter, the Department for Work and Pensions later admitted.
Meanwhile, the number of complaints to the agency jumped dramatically last year. Over 39,780 complaints directly from clients were made in 2004/05, compared with 32,267 the previous year, according to figures released by CSA chief executive Stephen Geraghty.
Additionally, MPs made 8,871 complaints to CSA business units on behalf of constituents in 2004/05, compared with 5,317 in the previous year.
A spokesman for the DWP said: 'The CSA currently deals with around 1.4 million cases. In the 12 months up to November 2005, 54,000 complaints were received, which represents less than 4% of the caseload. The agency is always striving to improve the service it offers to customers.'
PFjan2006
