PCS meets the Defence Secretary

Our meeting on Tuesday was our first meeting with a secretary of state since the coalition government and was a welcome development.

With many issues to discuss, PCS, alongside colleagues from the other MoD civil service unions, covered a number of issues including defence reform, workforce change, pay and raising our standards.

On defence reform, we highlighted the pace of change and how these changes land and gain buy-in with staff, believing that the trade unions could help with this task.

The programme is waiting for key decisions as to how the new quad set up operates and how these functions are delivered. The aim is to concentrate decision-making at the quad level, but so far we have seen little sight of this in operation, meaning we are left dealing with both the former TLBs and the quads on issues affecting staff.

On “raising our standards”, the response to the women in defence letter and the problems of sexual harassment it raised, the secretary of state acknowledged the work the trade unions have done in this area and the work to date and confirmed it was a standing agenda item at all meetings to ensure the issue is tackled and culture changed across defence.

On pay, we highlighted the growing gap between civil service pay rates and some private sector equivalents, along with the structural problems in the current pay system caused by pay freezes during the austerity years. The current public sector pay remit provides insufficient funding to correct these issues, while the welcome increases each year to the National Living Wage have reduced pay differentials to the grades above.

We believe that the MoD should at least move to the real living wage rate across the defence sector. The secretary of state acknowledged that these were points of concern and the impact that this has on retention and recruitment.

On civil service workforce change, we await key decisions from the Defence Reform Efficiency Plan and the Defence Investment Plan, both due to be launched before Christmas. The civil service workforce plan calls for a smaller, more agile civil service that is better rewarded. While the impact of the recruitment freezes and the previous permanent secretary's confirmation of a 10% reduction of staff certainly means we’re seeing a smaller workforce, the better rewarded part is still to be seen.

We asked how the employer will measure being “agile” and how so-called "productivity gains" will be measured.  There is huge organisational change still to take place and we’ll engage with the department and seek future meetings with the ministers to ensure it takes place.

This is intended to be the first of a series of meetings with the secretary of state and his ministerial team.