Forestry Commission Trade Unions - www.fctu.org.uk
Pay 2007
Further Information
Pay Notices
Pay Notice Number 3 (2007)
Progress on the 2007 pay offer and on the longer term pay review. (July 2007)
Ballot Result UPDATED 10th Mar 2008
The balloting period for the 2007 pay offer has now closed and the members of each of the unions have voted to accept the offer. Each of the unions will communicate their own results to their own members in accordance with their own rules, but in summary of the total votes cast across all of the unions, 91% were in favour of accepting the offer.
HR will now make the necessary arrangements to implement the award as part of the March salary payments.Latest News 7th Feb 2008
Details of the final pay offer have now been issued to all staff. As indicated below balloting of union members will take place from 11th February through to 7th March, and the results will be announced on Monday 10th March.
Further Information: 2007 Pay Offer
23rd Jan 2008
We have now finished our formal pay negotiations and are in the in the process of finalising the pay notices - which will be issued to union members in the next couple of weeks. Consideration of the offer is a matter for each individual union and its members, so we shall not be posting any collective opinion of commentary on this site; however you are still welcome to post comments on our discussion forum if you wish.
Once the pay offer has been issued, each union will consider the offer and ballot its members. Balloting will take place from 11th February through to 7th March, and the results will be announced on Monday 10th March.
10th Jan 2008
A further update on the delay in last year's settlement: At the moment the underlying cause for the delay is really two-fold. Firstly, most of you will be aware that HM Treasury is currently operating a policy of restricting public sector pay rises to 2.0%. This is causing problems throughout the public sector, with the highest profile examples currently being the police and prison service officers. Against this backdrop we are currently trying to negotiate a 6.0%+ pay rise, and this is proving difficult. The quick outcome would be to simply accept the reality of the HMT policy, spend a month balloting on an offer which would almost certainly be unacceptable, and then join the ranks of the discontented. It may be that this outcome proves unavoidable, but at the moment it has to be said that there is a genuine will on both sides and we are trying to explore all the room for manoeuvre that there is. The second reason for the delay is one of affordability. The FC's financial position is currently changing quite significantly and this has necessitated a re-assessment of what impact - if any - this might have on our discussions.
Now it may be that both of these avenues come to nothing, or do not enable the negotiations to reach a point where we have an offer that we feel we can recommend to you, but at the moment our discussions are positive and constructive and they are worth pursuing a little further. That said we are fully aware that a settlement is now long overdue and I can assure you that we are progressing with all possible haste.
17th Dec 2007
Despite every effort to progress our pay negotiations, as of today we are still waiting for a response from the EB following our meeting in early November. We have voiced our strong concerns and are pushing to make progress as soon as possible. Although time is of the essence, it is clearly important that we get the best possible deal, and we'll update everyone just as soon as we have any more news.
20th Nov 2007
A couple of weeks ago we had our first formal meeting with FC management. At the moment there is not much that I can report, or indeed to report; we are currently discussing what impact, if any, changes in timber prices might have on our negotiations. This is likely to take a little while longer, but once this point has been assessed then I anticipate that the remainder of the negotiations should be completed quite quickly. We still hope to have a final offer available for members to consider by Christmas, but unfortunately the initial delay waiting for Treasury and Ministers does mean that it will again probably be into the new year before any increases can be paid.
17th Oct 2007
We have received an opening offer from the management side so negotiations are now officially underway! Also several weeks ago Robert Beaney and Edward Shephard met with Mike Russell (the lead Minister for forestry in Scotland) to discuss a number of issues of concern, and we have subsequently sent him a one-page brief on pay, initially for interest.
4th Oct 2007
We have today heard that management has received approval for their pay remit from HM Treasury—this is the final hurdle needed to be crossed in order to begin pay negotiations. Dates for our opening discussions are now being agreed and we'll update this page asap.
7th Sept 2007
Having received our claim to the Executive Board has now received approval for its pay position from ministers in all three countries. Their remit request will now go forward to HM Treasury for final approval - once this is received we can start our negotiations. Our hope is to start negotiations asap, and to implement an agreement by the end of the year.
Background
In June the FCTU submitted its pay claim for 2007 on behalf of all members in the FC. A full copy of the claim can be downloaded from here, but the main elements of it are:
- Maintaining the pay progression system, and
- increasing the value of the pay bands, and in particular the maxima of the pay scales, at least in line with inflation.
Although we do not yet know how much money the FC will offer for this year's pay round, as in recent years the challenge will probably be to try and achieve the above points within the available money. To put this in context, depending on which measure you choose (RPI, RPIx, CPI) inflation is currently running at around 4.0%, and maintaining the pay progression system is likely to cost an additional 1.5%-2.0% - giving a total basic cost of around 6.0%. This can be contrasted with a HM Treasury spending target of 2.0% + progression, and internal business plan projections of increases around 3.5%.
In order to try and highlight funding required to maintain our pay progression system, we have written directly to HMT in order to highlight our concerns. We are currently awaiting a response to this, but given the general pressure on public sector expenses the chances of this approach being successful are not great - but we believe that it is important that we at least try.
We hope that the management side will enter negotiations with sufficient money to find the current pay system which they signed up to, but if they don't the dilemma for us as union members may be to whether we are willing to accept an offer which does not meet inflation separately from the pay progression system, or whether we wish to mount a campaign to protect our standard of living.