Defence Equipment and Support Material Strategy

Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond has today announced that the MoD intends to take forward work to transfer Defence Equipment and Support into a Government Owned Contractor Operated entity or GOCO.

This announcement was made to by a written Ministerial Statement in the House of Commons, on that day that the House breaks for the summer, thus avoiding any debate on the issue.

Further value for money assessments of the GOCO option over the other option of an Executive Non Departmental Public Body (ENDPB) will continue over the summer, after which the GOCO option would be the subject of a full investment appraisal where it would be tested against a full value for money benchmark or public sector comparator.

Our union is opposed to transferring DE&S into a GOCO operation. We believe that the problems of defence acquisition and support come mainly from poor decision making by Ministers, who have failed over time to get a grip of the equipment programme.

As launched under our Fair Deal in Defence campaign our objectives are -

· To give job security for all civilian defence workers. To give the best support to the front line, we need a period of certainty for defence workers and that means no imposed redundancies or relocations.

· Where the trade unions have identified savings e.g. £100m in FATS contract, these savings must be offset against headcount reductions.

· To stop the ideological move to privatise defence services and review all previous transfers of work including all the defence PFI contracts that we are tied into for 30 or 40 years..

· To get the proper level of consultation on all aspects of activities that affect the working lives of staff. The appropriate level of facility time should be provided for this.

· Agreement with the department that members will not work out of grade or cover work from vacant posts.

· Equality of opportunity and a respect for diversity in all MoD activities.

· The above principles to be replicated across private sector areas of defence.

We will be supporting the construction of a robust value for money benchmark which builds upon the emerging Interim Structure to become the best that DE&S can achieve remaining in-house and seeking the support of interested members to work on developing that value for money benchmark, to ensure that all possible in-house improvements and efficiencies are captured.

Value for Money can be achieved in-house and trade union input is critical to that achievement.

Army 2020

Earlier this year the Public Accounts Committee said that cuts to defence personnel had been determined by short-term savings and without understanding what skills it needed for the future.

The proposals coming from Army 2020 has critical flaws and unanswered questions:

• The reduced footprint will remove employment from rural areas whose local economy is underpinned by the armed forces presence increasing unemployment
• Reliance upon non regulars, when there are currently issues with recruiting and retaining regulars
• How would non regulars be release from employment for lengthy tours of duty?
• Training capacity reduced under the Strategic Defence and Security Review to a position that it cannot support defence transformation
• The supply chain is already under strain and modernising equipment so regulars and non regulars have the same kit may bring it to its knees on both cost and delivery
• Whatever the politicians might indicate, there is no headroom in the MOD's budget, otherwise thousands and thousands of people would not be losing their jobs
• Our defence deployment has been heavily reliant upon infantry capability, the reduction in capacity will directly reduce defence capability
• No mention of addressing an all time low in morale is made
• No mention of the benefits of civilianising non deployable post to save money and retain skill sets

We believe that the armed forces should be modernised to improve them but defence cannot be weighed in pounds and pence. If the politicians get this wrong, Defence Cuts will Cost Lives.

Army 2020 is yet another politically driven decision based on cost cutting and not on defence capability and need. It does not take into account the economic impact of removing another 20,000 jobs and has the potential to relegate our armed forces to the third division.

No way to postcode pay

Postcode pay is the next step in the government’s austerity agenda and attacks the poorest areas in the UK.

Postcode pay will mean that the government split public sector pay into bands depending on where you live. This means nurses, teachers and civil servants will face a pay freeze that could last more than a decade.

Please send this action to your MP and encourage them to sign EDM 55 tabled by Tony Lloyd that opposes the government’s plans to introduce postcode pay.

Fair Deal in Defence

Cuts cost

Our union knows from our extensive campaigning that defence cuts cost. We have seen posts cut but their outputs remain. We see members leave the department but their workload passed onto others and we have witnessed sites closing but their projects simply moved to a remaining site.

The time has come for those of us who remain – the survivors – to campaign and fight for the best possible terms and conditions as we try and give the best possible support to the front line.

Fair Deal

The ‘Fair Deal’ campaign is seeking to ensure that civilian defence workers are treated properly from now on. The campaign objectives are -

 

·       To give job security for all civilian defence workers. To give the best support to the front line, we need a period of certainty for defence workers and that means no imposed redundancies or relocations.

·       Where the trade unions have identified savings e.g. £100n in FATS contract, these savings must be offset against headcount reductions.

·       The UK Living wage (£7.20 per hour outside London and £8.30 in London) is paid to all civilian defence workers and that the department sets a precedent and doesn’t introduce any form of regional pay as it recognises all civilian defence workers work towards giving best possible support to the front line.

·       To stop the ideological move to privatise defence services and review all previous transfers of work including all the defence PFI contracts that we are tied into for 30 or 40 years..

·       To get the proper level of consultation on all aspects of activities that affect the working lives of staff. The appropriate level of facility time should be provided for this.

·       Agreement with the department that members will not work out of grade or cover work from vacant posts.

·       Equality of opportunity and a respect for diversity in all MoD activities.

·       The above principles to be replicated across private sector areas of defence.

Difficult Period

SDSR proposed the MoD will be at a steady state position by 2020. In the eight year period till then, our unions’ members will be asked to deliver this steady state with vastly less numbers than were in the department at the time of the SDSR announcement in October 2010. It is not too much to ask that we are treated fairly and equitably as we try to get through this very difficult period.

Government Civil Service reform in nothing more than another attack on its employees

The civil service reform plan published today is "built on sand" because it is impossible to cut more than 100,000 jobs and improve services to the public.

The plan confirms the huge and unsustainable number of job cuts planned by this government, which means more use of the private sector, allowing profit margins to drive decisions about the provision of services instead of public need.

It will do nothing to address the major concerns of civil and public servants, that their jobs are being slashed, their pay is being cut and their pensions are being raided to pay off a deficit caused by the recession and bailing out the banks.

And instead of accepting that their political choices are making our economic situation worse and damaging the public services we all rely on, ministers appear to want to blame civil servants and claim that the answer is to cut the civil service down to record levels.

The My Civil Service Pension 'mutual' model mentioned by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude in his Commons speech has been imposed on an unwilling workforce and has led to staff there taking industrial action. A recent survey by a respected civil service newspaper found there was no appetite for mutualism among civil servants of all grades.

The most recent obvious example of the problems caused by cutting staff is the chaos at our borders and the knock-on effects across the rest of the UK Border Agency and the Home Office as senior managers continue to adopt panic measures to move staff onto passport checks from other areas such as customs and immigration casework.

Elsewhere, HM Revenue and Customs has faced criticism from an influential committee of MPs for ploughing ahead with plans to cut 10,000 more jobs by 2015, when the case for investment in tax collection is obvious. The 55,000 PCS members in the department will be on strike on Monday 25 June against these cuts and the threat of privatisation.

This month the union's 8,000 members in the Department for Transport - including staff in the 39 closure-threatened DVLA local offices, driving examiners and coastguards - are taking part in rolling strikes against cuts to jobs, offices and services.

The union is also central to ongoing national co-ordinated industrial action against the cuts to public sector pensions, which will mean civil and public servants having to pay more and work up to eight years longer for tens of thousands of pounds less in retirement.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: "This plan is built on sand because cutting more than 100,000 jobs and allowing the pursuit of private profit to dictate what we do is entirely incompatible with providing the kind of good quality public services that we all rightly expect and demand.

"Instead of seeking to blame civil servants, ministers should recognise that austerity isn't working and, far from making our economic situation better, it is their political choices that are causing misery for millions of people in this country."

Daft, Damaging and Demoralising

Addressing the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mr Hammond said in future there would be greater use of part-time reserves and private contractors.

The British Army is being cut from 102,000 soldiers to 82,000 under SDSR and today Mr Hammond said: "A regular Army of 82,000 will have a different structure to one of 102,000. And some units inevitably will be lost or will merge."

He said in future there would be greater use of part-time reserves and private contractors and it would mean "thinking innovatively about how combat service support is provided" and "using more systematically the skills available in the reserves and from our contractors".

As we continue to see on a daily basis the demands on our armed forces do not diminish and they deserve support that is capable of supporting them on the front line.

Our armed forces are the best of the best, yet this announcement smacks of being the cheapest of the cheap.

Our armed forces put their lives on the line and the government should be supporting them with dedicated resources that retain delivery and risk management within the Ministry of Defence.

If the government is serious about supporting the front line it should review how many non deployable personnel posts could be filled by civil servants which on average could reduce costs by a third. End the use of expensive private sector contracts that deliver nothing above or beyond what can be delivered in-house and finally stop political based cuts that are decimating our defence capability as well as jobs in some of the most remote and economically poor areas of this country.

We want our armed forces to be the best of best and this can be achieved by them being supported by military and civilian staff.

Daft, Damaging and Demoralising sums up the latest announcement.

Why we are striking on 10 May

The government want PCS members to:

• Pay more – Extra pension contributions have been imposed for most civil servants –with further increases planned for the next two years.
• Work longer – Civil service retirement is now linked to the state pension age – that’s already rising to 68 and the government says it will get higher.
• Get less – Changes to indexation from RPI to the lower CPI inflation mean pensions fall by 15 to 20%.

And a two-year pay freeze is to be followed by 1% rises. New regional pay plans mean that everyone outside London might face further cuts.

We can’t afford not to

Civil servants and other public sector workers are uniting to defend everything we have worked for.

The government is

• Making civil servants pay up to three times as much for smaller pensions after working up to eight more years – or even longer.
• Freezing wages while prices are soaring

The latest scheme is regional pay – which would mean wage cuts for everyone outside London.

The strike is your chance to take a stand with colleagues from across government departments and with other trade unions across the public services.

We are demanding real negotiations with the government, not imposed cuts.

Who else is involved?

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers across the civil service, the health service and education will be joining the 10 May walkout.