We may never know if Gordon Brown’s fondness for Dear Prudence stemmed from a love of the Beatles’ 1968 vintage White Album track, but he was in the Fab Four’s home town yesterday, forced to confront the sort of economic and fiscal crisis that Dear P alone might not be able to solve. And there was, of course, no doubt that she is well and truly ‘out to play’.
Earlier, delegates had discussed a motion on the dangers of stilettos at work – perhaps not the subject most on people’s mind – and quite at odds with some real-life examples stalking the conference. Gordon’s speech reminded us all that there are more things in heaven and earth than killer footwear.
The future of public services and City profligacy was uppermost in the mind of the Unison delegation and most others in the hall. With the Tories and their friends in the Institute of Directors and the Taxpayers’ Alliance calling daily for massive cuts in public expenditure, public sector pay and those mythical ‘gold plated’ pensions, delegates were waiting anxiously to hear what Dear G would have to say on the subject.
He was clear. The government will provide 21,000 more public sector apprenticeships for young people, invest £1.5bn to build 20,000 affordable homes in the coming year, make sure the Minimum Wage increases and maintain support for business. Unite delegates were pleased to hear that a new industrial policy is being formulated that will signal the creation of 1.5 million jobs in green industries. No major surprises there, but delegates welcomed the vision of ‘a fairer, more responsible, greener and more democratic Britain’.
Dads are to get the chance to take up to three months – rather than two weeks – paid paternity leave in the second six months of their children’s lives and agency workers will at last receive equal treatment. That was very good news indeed for Unison delegates, who have seen whole swathes of the public sector peopled by agency workers – many on worse pay and conditions than those in negotiated agreements – leading to high turnover and real problems for the permanent staff who have to pick up the pieces.
Maintaining public service improvement will remain a priority – with shorter waiting lists for cancer treatment, greater access to GP services and free personal tuition for young people with special needs and special talents.
We applauded, but we all knew that the crunch point was nigh. These will all have to be provided ‘within a framework of sustainable finances’ and a ‘budget reduction plan to cut the deficit in half in the next four years’.
Increases in National Insurance, a 50 pence tax band and removal of unfair tax relief for the highest paid will fund some of these promises. But the devil was hinted at in the final detail of the speech. ‘Labour will cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets,’ we were told.
With local government having already having made 50% more ‘efficiencies’ than required by government, 8000 jobs lost already this year and cuts to core services such as home and day care happening with scary regularity, Unison delegates were left wondering what exactly this would mean? We are all are ready to facilitate improvements and maintain a lean public machine, but how much fat is really left to trim?
The scale of unmet need for adult social care is vast and growing. Vacancy rates for children’s social workers are running very high indeed and 5 million people languish on housing waiting lists. Many ‘frontline’ services are simply untenable without the ‘back-office’ support that is clearly in the firing line.
Dear Prudence is walking a political tightrope. While a Westminster Labour government plans for a sustainable future, Tory-led local government is already waging its ideological war by cutting council tax and local services, Ryanair- style. Dear Gordon needs to make sure that he’s not boxed in by this Conservative agenda.
Our public sector deficit – not the largest in the world – is not the result of overspending on health and social care or public housing. It’s not the product of over-generous pay rates either: last week local government workers accepted a pay offer that takes the lowest paid over the £12,000 threshold for the first time. It results from the £135bn bailout of the City, enjoying a bloated lifestyle once more. John Lennon’s ‘brand new day’ requires greater courage and control over local government if the vision we glimpsed at yesterday is to see the light of day.
Mythical “gold-plated” pensions? How much fat is really left to trim? Let me provide 2 examples. A family member is a serving police officer who can retire in 3 years (age 54) on an index linked pension. In all likelihood, he will die at age 89, so he will be on a pension for longer than he served as a policeman. An associate who works for local government, gets 35 days annual leave, plus 8 days Public Holidays, plus up to 24 days pa “flexi-time off” (known as a half-hour lunch to the private sector). In others words, he can legitimately be on leave for 67 days pa, so there is a 1 in 4 chance he will be on leave when someone tries to contact him. Now, since everyone knows we need to make efficiency savings and nobody wants to cut front-line services, were we to limit public sector pensions to a fixed term of, say, 25 years, we would save a fortune in the next 5 years (because people would defer them until later). Equally, if we abolished flexi-time working in the public sector, it would improve productivity by 10% overnight, so we could also reduce the payroll by 10%, doing away with the need for all those expensive agency staff. Neither of these “cuts” would have the slightest impact on “vital front-line services”. Would they? There seems to be an almost “holier than thou” tone to the subject of efficiency savings in the public sector and an unwillingness to think outside the box about what could actually be done. Both these changes would definitely be done by a private company that faced bankruptcy if it did not change. Public sector workers also need to remember that they do not work for the consumer of those services – they work for the taxpayer nd the tax payer wants the same services delivered at lower cost. Please stop saying “it can’t be done” until you run out of examples such as those painted above. The world has changed. People in the private secor no longer expect to be retiring until their seventies, because they won’t be able to afford to.
ANM – You obviously have friends in high places in local government ! Basic annual leave for the vast majority is 21 days, with an extra 4 after 5 years service. That just about clears the statutory minimum. Those on higher grades can get more if locally negotiated, though as trade unions we feel that grade-related leave can be discriminatory. Most of those benefiting are men, while 75% of the majority of local government workers are women. By the way, around 200,000 of them earn less than £6.50 an hour!!! Perhaps that’s why the average pension for a woman in local government is £1,800 a year! hardly gold-plated, I’m sure you’ll agree. For men, it’s around £3,000.
In comparison to most local government staff, police do very well when it comes to pay, conditions and pensions. If the narrowly constructed Equal Pay Act allowed us to compare across groups of public sector workers and use police as comparators, many women in local government would be in line for hefty hikes in pay, pensions, travel and housing allowances.