You are:

Comments from Members

Contents

 

(Times online) Steven Fielding wrote:

The Land Registry management have set out plans to cut between 1200 and 1700 jobs by 2012 and to privatise several functions. They are also looking to to cut further jobs to have just 3750 in post by 2014.

As a worker at the Land Registry in Plymouth I will be affected by the proposals to merge the two Plymouth offices into one. How this is going to be done is a mystery to everyone as there are far too many people to fit in any of the two existing buildings. For years and years we have been making huge profits which have been transferred to the Treasury. Suddenly we make a loss one year and the LR management are going crazy. We are in a global recession. If we axe jobs now we may temporarily meet the right staffing requirements for the job, but the very nature of a recession will mean there is a recovery. The job centre did much the same with job losses and now they are finding that they do not have enough staff or buildings to cope. The LR have already sold two buildings at a huge loss, the revenue being spent on voluntary redundancy packages for these two offices. If they could have rented the building out they would still have the building as an asset and ready for use at a later date. The board do not seem to be interested in alternatives to these "proposals". I think work pressures will increase and our excellent customer service levels will slip. We have a strong union membership through the PCS and have seen many workers join recently. Everyone is in shock and fully behind the campaign to save our jobs.

(Times online) floggle toggle wrote:

As an employee, this has come as a shock. While it could be said I have a axe-to-grind, I can see the need to do this, but WHY are all the affected offices are in the South-East? What have we done?

This will not only put-up unemployment here, it also creates a Black hole. Our regional office’s, not only register your property, but are also a bases for our Surveyors.

If it is a new registration, there is a boundary dispute etc., then the registry will send one of its surveyors.
By closing all these offices, the next nearest offices are Coventry or Weymouth. A survey in Margate Dover etc., is a long way!

(Times online) Mr D wrote:

As stated earlier, my office has been spared in this phase, but I feel sick for my colleagues in other offices.

All of the adverse comment comes from folks who have no appreciation of what we do.

You know all those fees you pay your conveyancers when you buy and sell your homes? I think you'd be amazed to learn that the majority of them (based on the questions we get from them on a daily basis) are clearly using the 'Ladybird book of conveyancing' as a handbook.

I have no law degree, but have to instruct solicitors what to do on the simplest of conveyancing matters. All for less than £20K/year after 20 years in the department. A department that doesn't take a penny from the taxpayer.

In fact, in the last round of redundancies, we had to ask the treasury to release some of the Registry's 'rainy day' money to pay staff what was due to them. The taxpayer didn't fund it, our hard work did.

Oh, by the way, we pay tax too.

My pay rise last year was around £800.

The Chief Exec got £20K.

The LR Board (all senior civil servants) should be ashamed of themselves.

Mr D.

(Times Online) Cybil Surname wrote:

I have worked at the Registry for 20 years and I have never played a computer game at work. We are not able to surf the net in works time and when we can look at the internet it is strictly limited with lots of websites ‘access denied’. We certainly can’t twitter!

The people who have put awful comments here should be ashamed of themselves. We are normal hard working professional people with low pay and families and are not fat cat mandarins in bowler hats. Today we have been told that 1500 of us good people will loose their jobs.

(Thisisnottingham.co.uk) Steve, Nottingham wrote:

How can anyone say this will not affect Nottingham when the Land Registry is trying to obtain planning permission for the land presently occupied by its Nottingham office?

No doubt if this is obtained the next stage will be to try and close Nottingham with the loss of many hundred jobs and a major effect on the city.

This yet another example of lies and spin. The current boss of the Land Regisrty received a 13 per cent pay increase last year whilst the workers face an uncertain future.

From a member - direct to PCS

Dear PCS

I read some of the consultation documents briefly. It was when I was reading the final paragraph on page 28 of the Business case that I had a moment of great insight, either that or I am totally paranoid!

The paragraph is this:

From the ATP announcements to March 2010 we will concentrate on three things: communicating the customer strategy and what it means; supporting and listening to those impacted by the changes announced; and actively engaging staff in how Land Registry should look and feel in the future. From this we will draw up our future ways of working and associated behaviours - with a view to launching these after the consultation period. Further interventions will be determined by this process.

Seems nothing on the face of it. To me it goes some long way to explaining why Management never consulted PCS on the Performance Objectives introduced for the second part of the reporting period and why the implementation and support for them looks so hopeless. It has troubled me since it was first mentioned and we read the supporting material, why was it all so little and not including any real examples for caseworkers?

My theory, or paranoia, is this:

  • In March 2010, along with the results of the consultation on ATP, official side also will announce their proposals for changing work teams along "Customer Focused" lines.
  • Alongside this proposals, details will be released of changes to working practices and objectives to fit into the new teams expected working patterns, i.e.. objectives specific to customer needs or behaviours to be addressed such as poor lodgement of applications to be dealt with.
  • Pay and performance to be increasingly linked to specific performance of the new teams.

Think about it. There is now ALWAYS a hidden agenda to whatever official side do. Why are the Performance Objectives so ineptly being trialled in each office? Why are there no real examples for caseworkers to follow? Nobody at DLR level seems to have any clue as to why and what they are doing with them, why? Because it is deliberate and intended to be so!!

It fits, it really does. A whole package of revised ways of working and revisions to performance and objectives based around the new ways of working. All including proposals to down grade work too, no doubt!

Make your own mind up. Am I paranoid or is it an insight to a possible future? If it is the latter, then every single PCS member in every office remaining after ATP will be affected and have a reason to join in the fight against ATP.

Regards

A Member

A critique of the business case from a member

A guide to the ATP business case

The ATP Business Case may be the most important document you will ever hear about in your Land Registry career. If adopted its proposals will have a seismic impact on the size, shape and culture of the Registry of the future.

But it’s 68 pages long, it contains jargon, and some parts of it are complex. We’d like you all to read every word of it but accept that most of you probably won’t examine it in such detail. So, here’s our guide to it. The quotes in italics come direct from the document, which is on the LR intranet pages. The comments that follow them are entirely ours.

The Business Case was produced by the LR Board with their £100k+ per year salaries, in conjunction with hordes of extremely well paid consultants. It has and will cost millions. This document was produced by a handful of ordinary PCS members in their own spare time and cost nothing.

Unlike the Board, our motivation is not to turn one of the public sector’s most efficient organisations into a private sector wannabe. It is to argue for the livelihoods of friends and colleagues who in many cases have dedicated their whole careers to HM Land Registry. We refuse to remain silent while their lives and the Registry are torn apart.

Predictions

Page 3: “Our current central forecast is for …”

The first of many predictions, the whole document is full of them - how many staff will be needed, how much intakes will increase by, how much income and expenditure will be, etc. The table on page 40 shows that the reserves will plummet from £294.4m in 2009 to £9.3m in 2014. If these predictions are out by even a small amount the Registry theoretically risks going bust. So how good is the Board at predicting the future? Well, in 2005 it predicted that 2009 would be the year that e-conveyancing transactions overtook traditional dealings. Say no more.

Age profile of the LR

Page 14: “The current average age of LR staff is 45 … if we do nothing we estimate the great majority of our staff will soon be within sight of retirement.”

Page 16: “The programme vision of ATP will be realised by …. starting the process of a sustainable workforce by recruiting about 150 new staff by 2011.”

Pages 36/37: “The Do Nothing Option … risks that LR would be left with a stagnant organisation that is insufficiently agile to deal with changes in the market place and an unsustainable age profile.”

The ageing profile of the LR is one of the reasons that ‘Do Nothing’ is not an option. The argument goes that we’d still be left with a high average age and little scope to motivate new or existing staff with promotion opportunities. BUT how will any future recruitment guarantee younger people? Any such process would have to be open and transparent, not to mention compliant with age discrimination legislation. There are lots of good 50+ people without work who presumably would apply. Many would succeed. By the way, the average age of the LR Board is over 50 and none of them were among the staff earmarked for redundancy under ATP.

Comparing now and then

Page 9: “Demand for LR services has reduced to 62% of its 2007/8 peak”

Page 19: “Our starting point for consideration of future staff numbers forecasts is that we need 4500 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents). This is based on 2007/8 productivity levels of 8.8 units per post per day across the organisation.”

2007/8 was an exceptional year - the all time high for intakes and productivity. You’re bound to get dramatic comparisons if you measure the all time high (then) with what is pretty much the all time low (now). An average of the five years up to and including 2007/8 would be a more usual approach but that wouldn’t fit the Business Case’s conclusion that drastic action is required quite so well.

When we all worked so hard to achieve 2007/8’s record performance little did we know that we were providing the Board with the yardstick they would later use to get rid of 1500 of us. Remember this the next time you’re urged to work harder to achieve targets.

Office space

Page 13: “We currently have too much space … ”

This assertion is borne out of space optimisation, which basically allows each person a desk and the proverbial room to swing a cat in. If there is too much space then why does it follow that offices have to close? Relocate in the same city/area. Downsize. Old age pensioners manage to do it with little fuss, why can’t we?

‘Add value' products

Page 14: “We need to generate £29m incremental gross revenue by 2014 through the development and sale of add value products and services.”

This refers to the extra ways we can raise income by selling products or services such as house price data. We currently generate £4.9m from these. It’s not clear how this going to be boosted by an extra £24m. Sources in our Marketing Division have told us it’s a big ask.

The future?

Page 6: “Driving efficiencies from remaining areas across the organisation using a defined approach."

We don’t know what these efficiencies are, it doesn’t say. Could it mean things such as LR nursery subsidies?

Page 28: “Establish (with staff) what good (and bad) looks like and the ways in which we might instil the desired behaviours.”

What exactly are “the desired behaviours” and what happens in the Registry of the future to those who don‘t exhibit them?

Page 12: “The organisation works better and more efficiently when we have more work than staff (within reason).”

The Board seem to be admitting here that their preferred work environment involves overworked, under pressure staff? Too much work, too few people to do it is a familiar tale in the Registry, perhaps now we know why.

E-services 

Page 7: “The take up of e services has been slow."

The Business Case justifies the need for far fewer staff in a number of ways. One is the assumption that our professional customers will abandon their reticence to use e services. How will this be achieved? Perhaps by asking LR staff to become salespeople for e-services (see Customer Engagement below).

Customer engagement

Page 23: “All customers will be allocated to a single office/team. The anticipated benefits are … reduced inbound errors through establishing closer relationships”.

30% of all applications lodged end up in standover. The cost of servicing these ’inbound’ errors adds up. Running ‘educational’ sessions with solicitors has done little to improve the problem. The Board are pinning their hopes firmly to this new way of dealing with them. Furthermore, they appear to also be relying on LR staff to use the closer relationships to encourage solicitors to use e-services more and more. Ask colleagues who came to the Registry in recent years from the banking sector what it’s like to have sales targets built into your existing workload. Many came to us to get away from this unwanted pressure.#

What also isn’t mentioned is the risk that familiarity may breed inconsistency. Staff may come under pressure to bend the rules to oblige their new customer/friends.

Page 18: “Closing down all CICs by 2014.”

The public get a new name - “citizens”. 85% of personal visitors to CICs are citizens. It’s not clear how ending all face to face contact and channelling them through our website or call centres instead will “make customers feel more valued in their relationship with us” (also page 18).

Redundancy 

Page 25: “The main phase of the change programme (to 2011) has to be managed under a single compensation system.”

It’s good that the Board are hoping to offer redundancy under the old terms (3 x final salary), rather than the new ones (2 x final salary). But this seems to have little to do with looking after their departing staff. It’s based on the very real risk that offering the new terms would delay the whole programme and lead to spiralling costs. That and “the adverse industrial relations impacts” also mentioned on page 25.

Conclusion 

We believe that the Business Case is a blinkered document. It attempts to justify why drastic action is required, a complete “transformation” of the Registry. But is such action really needed? If we cast our minds back just two years the organisation was a shining example of public sector success, completely self financing and contributing millions to Treasury through the 3.5% dividend it paid each year to The Consolidated Fund.

Some changes may be needed but the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression should not be used as the excuse to dismember something that has worked so well in the past and will do so again in the future. Not when the reserves are still healthy and certainly not when a third of the land in England and Wales is still unregistered.

The changes proposed could place the Registry in peril. The Board maintain that their predictions are sound but it’s partly their failure to properly plan for the future that has put us in our current position.

If this document has raised questions you hadn’t thought about before please ask the Board for answers. That’s what the consultation period that runs until the end of January is for.

If, like us, you feel that the Business Case is fundamentally flawed, take your concerns beyond the Board. Take them to your MPs, councillors, local and national media, to anyone or any organisation that may have an interest. But most importantly discuss them with your colleagues who may not have looked into them in much detail. These proposals are not a fait a compli, they can be defeated. But not without your support.