terms conditions

 

Terms & Conditions

 

YOUR RIGHT TO EMPLOYMENT IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

 

For many of us the threat of privatisation has been around for an apparent eternity. I came across the term twelve years ago when I had only been in the Prison Service for a couple of years. Since then the term MARKET TESTING has been a constant hammer the employer has used to ensure the Prison Service becomes cheaper and cheaper or in their words, “efficient”. What does it mean though and what is the real potential consequence to your future in the public sector with the newest threat that is being called THE CARTER REPORT. 

Market testing should mean to test your commercial viability in the current climate of the commercial market in comparison to other organisations of equal or similar stature. The latest terminology talks about contestability but this in reality means exactly the same thing. The method used to test our marketability has always given me a problem because we are not a commercial venture which aims to increase capital growth, in other words we are not aiming to be profitable. Our purpose is to provide a vital service to the whole of society for society and that makes us accountable to the public because the public pays for our services. It is a belief of mine that commercial profit should not be derived from money that all taxpayers contribute to public services. The absolute crisis that is occurring on the railways and other privatised public services in my opinion is the Prison Service’s destiny if our employers and the government keep to the current path we appear to be on.

 If we look at the railways their path to near oblivion started with what I would describe as contractual intimidation and chronic under funding. Does that sound familiar, does that sound like the organisation that you work for. The perversity of the word MARKET in the context of market testing needs to be explored. The word is a generically historic term that is derived from the feudalistic period in our dim and distant past. The idea is a simple one; vendors would all congregate at the market place and trade their goods with other vendors rather than sell them for money in the modern way. Equality would theoretically reign, i.e. the price of all goods in relation to each other would find a natural equilibrium level dependant on the need and complexity of the commodity. Every item would find its place in the market in relation to all the other items for sale. This concept where all vendors are equal did work as long as the marketplace was monopoly free. This concept is now being used within our modern capitalist society to mean the commercial market place and this in my opinion does not work. The monetarist economic model attempts to justify that commodities will find their own natural price in the high street in comparison to other items. The market place depends on all commodities being equal without the force of monopolies or monopsonies and in modern day society this is simply not the case. Now it is not my intention to turn this article into a heavy debate on economic policy but it has to be understood that in its fundamental form market testing should be a purely economically driven commercial decision, which is made within the natural and equal market.

 Flawed economic policy has and continues to be used to drive through a subliminal policy of nurturing commercial power at the expense of public services. This I believe is a disgusting and unprofessional abuse of power where loyal and dedicated penal staff, suffer immensely. The result is a perpetual threat of, behave or they might put you in grey and whites. The simple fact is there is no real market place within our sector, just as there was not in the railways. Governments have manipulated economic policy using their weight as a monopoly to fabricate a virtual market with which to judge you against. Then they spend huge amounts of public money to try to make it appear that the private sector with which you have been judged against is fantastic and what we should strive to be like. Well no thank you the perversity of that argument and the vigour in which the governments foot soldiers i.e. Prison Service senior managers attempt to pedal those fatally flawed ideological doctrines has never ceased to amaze me. The next time anyone tries to push that philosophy on you be like my daughter and just keep on asking why? I can assure you nothing of sense will prevail. They can sprout the doctrine but cannot sensibly explain why as there is no sensible reasoning behind it.

 The title of this article is your right to employment in the public sector. Now most of you will realise that the issues that this question poses are substantial. I have no hesitation in saying that as far as social justice is concerned that right should be sacrosanct. The public service is there for one reason and one reason only and that is to ensure that the social fabric of our society can function to an adequate standard. We are there to support and protect society. How can it be right that FAT CATS GET FATTER by feeding off our contributions to the funding of public services? The perversity of market testing and privatisation is seen first hand when we take a glance at our private sector comparators. All managers who are in charge of private sector facilities are deserters from the public sector, these are the people who have spent years intimidating and frightening you to attain utter submission all in the name of being efficient or should I say cheap. These are the people who are now earning astronomical wages while their staff are paid peanuts and treated like dirt.

 If I or any of you would have wanted to work in the commercial sector then that is what we would be doing. We chose to serve the public and now we are told that unless we do it cut price without any fuss then we will be privatised so our lords and masters can earn higher wages and shareholders can pick up large dividends. It is my belief that the time has come to deeply and honestly critique exactly where we stand and what are our rights.

 I deliberately have not used the words CARTER or NOMS up until this point but we have to be honest and admit that the attack on your terms and conditions is gathering momentum. We are lead by a gaggle of arrogant political liberals who have the affront to tell me they are going to start calling Her Majesty’s Prison Service, NOMS (National Offender Management Service). You are a member of Her Majesty the Queen’s Prison Service you are not a “gnome”. I believe there is an underlying reason for that change and it is to weaken our connection with the public sector. Your rights do exist and I believe you do have a right to employment in the public sector.

 I have read with interest that Martin Narey has now decided that there was never any intention of removing the Crown or the HMPS from us. I believe that the revelation has been fuelled by the press interest in our plight and that of the Crown Prosecution Service. The intention is to remove our status and that position has not changed. I do not accept any promises that our employers make and believe that ultimately they are determined to achieve their aim. We must be alive to that possibility and be prepared to stand up for ourselves to protect our status.   

 NOMS and the Carter Report are there to achieve an aim and that is why it is non-prescriptive and open to interpretation. The main aims within the context of this article I believe are two-fold, firstly to managerially restructure the criminal justice system and secondly to reduce your rights to employment in the public sector. As public servants we do possess contractual benefits that other sectors do not have, these include your pension and terms and conditions. I bet that there are unscrupulous Governors who are already threatening you that unless we agree to every whim of the Carter Report then we will be privatised. The simple truth is that Carter is so woolly and open to interpretation that members of parliament cannot find out what it means, yet Governors suddenly know all.

 The truth is Governors are so used to threatening you they just see this as another chalice and have lifted it and are following their path blindly and gladly. They are oblivious and uncaring to the harm that their threats and intimidation cause decent hard working people. I have seen the harm and destruction that bullying and intimidation has done to some of our members and I personally deplore any Governor that employs those tactics. They are not decent human beings and do not deserve to be in Her Majesty’s Prison Service.

 The terms and conditions that we enjoy, although not as good as we would like, tend to be far superior to the majority of the private sector. Our colleagues in private sector prisons I am sure will only too readily confirm this position as they have first hand experience of the utter ruthlessness of commercial multi-national companies. Staff sacked on a whim, mass managerial bullying and working conditions far inferior to that of the public sector. That is how the private sector continually amasses capital growth and it will not change. It cannot be right that contestability that is based on a service industry is cloaked in secrecy and deceit, we must expose the true costs which are hidden behind “commercial in confidence”.

 Our terms and conditions are protected and directly comparable to other civil service departments although in some respects not exact. Legally an employment and economic argument that is regularly used is comparability and within the civil service we do police other services and ensure the comparability condition is generally adhered to. The Prison Service has been bitten by the conflict of what they perceive your conditions should be in order to effect the desired change they would like for the service and what they in fact are. An example of this could be TUPE, which is the Transfer of Undertakings and Protection of Employees Regulations 1992, which have interfered with the will of the Prison Service to privatise parts of the estate. The problem has been with the alternate provider matching our terms and conditions, in other words they cannot where the issue has been tested give cost effective comparable conditions. We as a union have stood our ground in the face of archaic Tory legislation to protect our service and up until now we have been extremely effective but the battle is not yet over.

 It has always been my belief that as long as the public sector is managed effectively you get what you pay for. In a modern society an effective well-resourced criminal justice system is essential and with every threat that is made to you damage is done to that service. We have ended up embroiled in a virtuous circle where poor politically driven liberal management harms the service and leads to a poor service to society. The perpetual losers in this endless round of ping-pong is the whole of society because they are not being given the service they deserve.

I intend to run a series of articles over the coming twelve moths to highlight some of the conditions of service that we enjoy and how they fit into the bigger picture.

STEVE GOUGH, M.A.

N E C

 

 

PERFORMANCE TESTING - THE REAL REASON

 

 The concept of benchmarking and the ideologies that accompany the process are sold by the Prison Service as essential, fair, needed and as many other powerful value statements, but what is the real meaning behind the in doctrine. “Performance testing, bench marking and performance improvement plans are the biggest challenge facing our members for many years”. Our chairman has cited that it many forums during the past twelve months and how right he is. But let’s be honest the reality behind the words are not new or innovative concepts, they are not ground breaking processes that genuinely improve the performance of the prison service or increase the real effectiveness of the penal system. All they are is repackaged recourse cutting schemes with an added perverse mechanism of a great big mallet in the shape of direct privatisation that can be used whenever the government and our employer want to use it.

 We have all heard of man power, profiling and MCS, well that is all the process really is, budget capped resource management. The subversive element of performance testing is the use of direct privatisation merely to attain those outcomes and savings, which is the reason why this latest scheme is absolutely despicable. The National Executive Committee and I know every one of you want and strive for a well run efficient prison service; we all accept that we have a level of performance to meet as is expected by the public. A public Service should be accountable, but performance testing in reality takes away that accountability by stifling the voice of the staff, the people who really know and care. Fear is a strong motivator in the short term. It will though eventually deeply and fatally harm the organisation. Fear driven uniterist management is unfortunately an underpinning principal of our employer’s management style. We all know and accept that in concept there is nothing wrong with testing the performance of all our establishments and we argue that it has to occur. We cannot and will not be blackmailed into forging an unsafe unaccountable service that hides behind accountancy driven goals.

 What this executive wants is a process that is achieved in a professional, competent, sensible and joint manner not on some purely political sudo-economic based process that does not achieve or deliver for anyone that matters in the prison service. Before we look at what really matters lets take a closer look at the system as it stands. the prison service has a plan (god forbid) and that plan lasts for seven years, and in that seven year period every single one of you and your members will have the threat of direct privatisation hanging over your head that will be in the form of either a failed SLA or a failed performance test bid. We have some branches that have or are living with that threat as you read this article. I wish them and their family’s best wishes and would ask them to be strong through these difficult times. I with many of my colleagues on the executive have supported those branches that have already been through that process, I attended a number of branch meetings at HMP Liverpool while they attempted to make sense of the illogical. I saw the fear and the stress those hard working professional staff went through during that process and let me tell you it was horrendous, it is just not right that an employer or a government can even contemplate placing dedicated employees through such a tortuous ordeal.

 What does the process achieve? Well it saves money and Oh yes it tackles managements view of poor industrial relations or should we say good representation as it appears to be the same thing, in an oppressive dictatorial manner that is the real subliminal reason for this process. Well I'm sorry colleagues but that is just not good enough, even if you believe Martin Narey chose the process instead of market testing as was preferred by our old friend Paul Boatang it just is not the way to run a professional organisation.

 Let’s take a look at HMP Leicester and HMP Reading which were the lost leaders in this process, the apparent proof that it was a fair and honest process. Leicester is now being propped up by supplementary contract hours and Reading’s SLA has had to be amended.

The bottom line colleagues is this process is there to attack the POA and drive down the costs of under resourced overcrowded badly managed prisons and isn’t it funny that the process is designed to protect those bad managers.

Are we the only ones that really care about the prison service? The National Executive Committee has challenged the Prison Service board to constructively and genuinely enter into open and honest negotiations about devising and introducing a sensible structure for assessing the service delivery of prisons and the prison service. To date we have had no response but remain hopeful that one day they will be prepared to take industrial relations seriously.

 To give them a head start into our ideas of a well run efficient Prison service lets talk about what outcomes are really important to a public sector industry. Safety? Are our prisons safe. Last year according to the National Statistics (cm5743) there were 16905 proven violent offences and 6783 assaults on staff. There were also 734 fires and numerous accounts of concerted indiscipline. We do not believe our Penal System is as safe as it could be and this must form the foundation on which we must build. Recidivist rates are at unacceptable levels, and there is evidence to suggest that the resources invested in a Penal Establishment has a direct impact on the recidivist rates due to the resources available to manage the systems integral to the running of the establishment. All we see though are budget cuts so how can this be right.

Overcrowding gets worse by the day and prisons are expected to achieve more with fewer resources. The numbers in the system are not our direct concern or something we can affect, but the overcrowding rates directly effects the outcomes we strive to achieve and that does matter to us.

 Colleagues I could go on for ever about what we should and have to be assessed on but the above are a flavour of the issues that really matter and that is what we should be adequately resourced for and judged on. This executive is sick of the penal system being treated like a political football by the mandarins inside and outside the service. There may not be many votes in prisons but if our service doesn’t work then nor does society.

I sometimes address you and your members at branch meetings and through articles and feel like the Grim Reaper, I always seem to be the bearer of bad news but there is a silver lining in this process, an achievement that we should not under sell. Martin Narey, Phil Wheatley, and others were adamant that there would never be an appeal procedure to the Performance Testing procedure. We can understand why this was their view they had perfected a totally perverse system and why change or alter perfection. But you’re chairman lead a team from the executive all the way to the Home Secretary and gained an appeals procedure. That was a major achievement and a good start. I know it is not what a lot of you believe is enough and I agree, but it does start us on the path to a just and honourable system. 

We know there is a vast way to go and the road ahead is long and difficult but we will never stop fighting this process and we will always expose crisis management and inept policy making.

COLLEAGUES WE WILL ONLY SETTLE FOR A FAIR AND JUST SYSTEM.

 

STEVE GOUGH

N E C

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