The Tory
Government’s consultation on the proposed cap on public sector exit payments
had illustrated the approach to consultation of which trade unionists often
complain.
They told us
what
they were going to do and now they tell us that
they are going to do it. This in spite of the overwhelming opposition to
their proposals from those consulted, most of whom were employers (many of them
Tory controlled).
The proposed
“cap” of £95,000 on the total value of “exit payments” for public servants will
be marketed as an attack on “fat cats” but, as I
have previously pointed out, will impact upon career local government
officers a long way from the top of the income pile (primarily because of the
inclusion within the cap of the capital cost of paying unreduced pensions when
making over 55s redundant).
The cap will
now proceed by way of Clause
26 of the Enterprise Bill, currently before the
House of Lords, which will give the Government the power to introduce
subsequent secondary legislation to implement the cap. This does mean that
effective Parliamentary opposition could limit the damage which this cap will
otherwise do to employee relations and to the interests of some employees (and
trade union members).
As well as
pursuing amendments to Clause 26 (for example to try to exclude pension costs
from the cap) the Parliamentary Opposition will also need to get into the
detail of how the cap will be applied (not least the Government’s proposal that
payments made following litigation for breach of contract or unfair dismissal
would be excluded).
Two things
are certain about this proposal. The first is that the wealthiest will find a
way to circumvent the cap (whilst the professionals and middle managers will
get hit).
The second
is that the public sector exit cap will be used by the Government to achieve
its real purpose, which is to engage in the decades long denigration of public
service and the public sector. The now faltering neoliberal consensus has, for
a generation, lauded the profit-driven private sector as the source of both
value and virtue, whilst the public sector is presented as nothing more than an
unproductive burden upon “hard working families”.
From a trade
union point of view we would sooner have no redundancies and no exit payments
at all, but if we are to see redundancies, and therefore redundancy payments
then we should oppose an arbitrary cap upon payments in just one sector of the
economy.
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