After 15 years of cuts to public services, pay freezes and pay caps, and attacks on trade unions, many of our members will have welcomed the change of government this year.
While, as civil servants, our members are politically neutral in their jobs, they are not neutral about their jobs or about their pay and rights at work. We want 2025 to be a year of positive change for our members and the vital services they provide.
Civil service pay has been driven down year after year – and that has left the workforce demoralised, as well as making recruitment and retention harder in some areas.
Our members welcomed the new government junking the outgoing administration’s commitment to cut 72,000 civil service jobs. That was a reckless proposal that would have left vital services in a terrible state and remaining workers with unsustainable workloads.
For the first year in far too long, our members received an above-inflation pay settlement, but when our members’ pay has been driven down for a decade and a half, that can only be a first step on a journey towards pay restoration.
So the government’s apparent 2.8% offer for the public sector in 2025-26 has gone down badly not just in the civil service but right across the public sector.
We have thousands of members whose wage will need to increase in April to keep them above the minimum wage. It’s appalling that so many workers doing vital jobs for government are paid at poverty rates. These are members working at AA and AO grades in some departments, as well as those employed through contractors like G4S and ISS.
This government came to office promising to “carry out the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation”. Our members on low wages, and denied decent terms and conditions, deserve that pledge to be fulfilled in 2025.
"This government came to office promising to 'carry out the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation'. Our members deserve that pledge to be fulfilled in 2025"
Bringing services in-house could bring benefit to both the taxpayer and to our members. Outsourcing companies paying poverty wages leave our members reliant on Universal Credit and housing benefit to make ends meet – while paying out dividends to shareholders and eye-watering bonuses to executives from public money. Let’s end this rip-off and deliver that tsunami of insourcing next year.
Stronger rights at work is a key plank of the new government’s "Make Work Pay" agenda and their flagship employment rights bill. Much of that agenda could be implemented tomorrow in the civil service – like better facility time, trade union access to workplaces, and sectoral collective bargaining. What better way to show private sector employers they have nothing to fear from these measures than the government setting an example with their own workforce? Let’s get 2025 off to a positive start and get this implemented early in the new year.
In recent years, the civil service has been asked to do more and more, as the government took on more responsibilities as we left the European Union. The UK also has an ageing population, and more people in poverty. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the number of people experiencing destitution has increased by 150% since 2017. That results in growing pressures on the NHS, on local councils and on the social security system too.
This government also rightly has ambitious plans to collect more of the tens of billions of pounds of avoided and evaded tax; and to tighten up regulation of water companies, housing and building safety, and the labour market.
All of that needs more resource, not less – and so it was disappointing to read briefings in the press recently that ministers think 10,000 jobs could be cut from the civil service. Combine that with the insult that civil servants are comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”, and it felt like the worst of the Tories were back in charge. It was politicians, not civil servants, that inflicted “managed decline” on public services with years of austerity – which was opposed tooth and nail by this union because our members are passionate about the services they provide.
With backlogs in the courts, family courts and asylum system – and unemployment forecast to rise next year – we’ll need more resources in the civil service, not fewer, if we are going to meet the new government’s ambitious targets.
I hope 2025 can be a year of positive change – for the fortunes of the country, public services, for our members who deliver them. Looking at the polls, the government could do with winning more people over too – so what better place to start than with its own skilled and dedicated workforce?
Fran Heathcote is president of the PCS union