Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) publishes its best and final offer

Details of the DE&S pay offer have now been published on the staff Intranet. The PCS Defence Sector group executive committee (DSG GEC) met on 8 July and 21 August to review the “best and final offer” and have unanimously voted to reject it.

Civil service pay has fallen far below the average salaries received in the 1970s and 1980s and since 2010 median annual pay has fallen between 15% and 38% depending on grade. Half of this pay erosion has been since 2010. Even to restore pay to 2020 levels this would require pay awards of between 11% and 27% depending on grade, due to inflation.

The PCS national pay claim demands:

• a cost-of-living rise, with an inflation proofed increase plus pay restoration,
• pay equality across departments on the best possible terms,
• a living wage of £15 per hour,
• London weighting provision of a minimum £5,000 per year,
• 35 days annual leave minimum,
• a significant shortening of the working week with no loss of pay.

The PCS Defence group does not believe the current offer from DE&S comes close to restoring this erosion of pay or create a wage that low earners can live on. The PCS claim for a minimum pay award equates to £15 an hour, something the offer still fails to meet.

DE&S continues to allocate large sums to non-consolidated pay awards and does this disproportionately so that higher earners gain more for a box 3 than lower earners get from a box 1 marking. If the objective is to motivate staff and improve performance this will clearly have a negative effect. The PCS position is that this money should be moved to consolidated pay and pension payments to help combat the cost-of-living crisis and give staff more certainty.

There was no movement from the employer on additional annual leave or a review of the working week to provide more flexible ways of working with the benefits of new technology.

Whilst we’ve negotiated improvements on the final offer and it is better than it was initially, clearly it does not meet the PCS national pay claim. DE&S members were balloted earlier this year as part of the national dispute but we were unable to meet the 50% threshold needed to take industrial action in order to get a bigger pot of money for staff. 

The GEC voted unanimously to reject the latest pay offer. With no mandate for industrial action from the members' ballot earlier this year, PCS will notify the employer that while we have rejected the offer, we won’t stand in the way of its imposition. 

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