“Life quickly becomes a routine of work, commute, eat, sleep, repeat” is how one member of the FDA described their working life in a survey we recently conducted.
I imagine that’s not an unfamiliar description to many readers of CSW. It’s also not a new phenomenon. When I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed negotiator in my early days at the FDA in the early noughties, I made little headway with departments on any meaningful way of compensating members in senior grades for excess hours. It was generally accepted as just part and parcel of the role by senior management and, unfortunately, members alike.
But times change. For over a decade, the “offer” to civil servants, and I would argue the most senior grades in the service in particular, has been eroding at an ever-increasing rate of knots. Pay, pension scheme reform and increased pension contributions have all taken their toll on the bottom line of the payslip. We’ve got members – good performers – taking home less cash than they did five years ago. Add to that redundancy terms, the £95K cap and shameful rhetoric around “fat cats”, publishing of salaries, public criticism from ministers, trial by select committee – and all of this against a backdrop of austerity, with massive job cuts and workloads increasing.
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These are not the reasons why we’re focusing on compensation for excess hours, but in part they explain how we got to here. Civil servants have already delivered hugely ambitious efficiency savings for the government and are being asked to keep doing so. But having been promised that in this parliament, priorities would be set and commitments and resources would be matched, and then to have those promises evaporate in the blink of a Single Departmental Plan, then it’s no wonder many are saying enough is enough.
Civil servants don’t want to leave, which appears to be the only yardstick ministers or the Senior Salaries Review Body consider appropriate. But while most civil servants are passionate about the valuable and rewarding job they do, they do not want to be taken for granted.
Our survey, of over 1,000 senior managers and professionals in 50 different employers, demonstrates that an excess hours culture is endemic across the service. One in 10 are working the equivalent of a full weekend unpaid every week and nearly 60% work the equivalent of an extra day unpaid, every week. It’s a problem that’s having more than a blind eye turned to it. A total of 70% say their employer does not even record their hours and an even larger proportion say that long hours working is a problem in their department.
More than half were unable to take all of their leave entitlement, mainly through workload pressures, and those same pressures led to almost half saying they couldn’t consider working flexibly, despite most departments having laudable policies on paper.
"Simply pointing the finger at managers saying they have the skills to manage their own time effectively is no longer good enough"
John Manzoni said in his Institute for Government address last year that when you cut resources by this scale, you can’t simply ask staff to work harder. Yet that’s exactly what appears to be happening when you read the comments from members, who tell of the toll increased workloads and excess hours are taking on their family lives and relationships.
Matching commitments to resources was one of our big asks from the new government, which has failed miserably to meaningfully address the question. Civil servants should no longer have to pay the price for that failure. So the demand emanating from members, and just agreed at our annual conference, is that from now on every employer should compensate every civil servant for every hour worked.
This will of course mean different things to different employers. Some still retain an “all hours worked” arrangement, and while many hide behind glib statements that this shouldn’t mean “working all hours”, in reality this is exactly what it means. There is no monitoring or priority given to providing compensation with time off or, in many cases, no actual process at all for payment or time off for the grades we represent. Other areas have processes but they are bureaucratic and are not encouraged.
Simply pointing the finger at managers saying they have the skills to manage their own time effectively is no longer good enough. This is about culture and example as much as it is about resources. Member after member in our survey told of the pressure to simply get on with it and “do whatever it takes to get the work done” as one member described it.
So while of course this is about a union looking after its members, it’s also about the public services they deliver. Senior public servants are tasked with growing our economy, delivering justice, driving up education standards, challenging big accountancy, advising on the most complex legal issues and delivering policy advice to ministers. It cannot be in the public interest that these people are consistently fatigued and overworked.
Our members and you, the readers of this venerable publication, do some of the most difficult and critical tasks in public service, often unseen. It’s time that ministers faced up to the consequences of their inability to provide the resources required to deliver their priorities.