Latest From Napo 228

Two mailouts to members today:-

JTU27-2021 12 November 2021

MEMBERS’ SOLIDARITY BRINGS EMPLOYER BACK TO PAY NEGOTIATIONS

Since the earlier publication of the indicative ballot results rejecting the Government Pay Freeze and derisory 2021-2022 Probation Pay Offer, strenuous efforts have been made to reopen talks on pay with the employer.

The delay has been caused by the need to await the outcomes from the Comprehensive Spending Review which were published last week. Since the round of Union conferences last month there has also been engagement with the new Probation Minister Kit Malthouse and the Director General Amy Rees. Here it has been made clear that our respective members demand their employer resume engagement on the pay claim and the prospects for a multi-year pay settlement.

Latest Position

The fact that talks are now underway again is because of the solidarity shown by members across the three unions in delivering a powerful message - that you have simply had enough of seeing no progress on pay at the same time as workloads being at unsustainable levels.

Three meetings have taken place this week and at Wednesday’s Probation Service Joint Negotiating Committee, the unions recorded a strong statement expressing our serious disappointment at the lack of delivery against a whole series of agreements; some of which extend as far back as the 2018 pay settlement. These include:

• The continuing delay to paying contractual incremental pay progression
• The failure to honour the agreement reached on the AP Residential Worker regrading and back pay.
• The lack of progress in concluding the talks on deleting Pay Band 1 and the assimilation arrangements.
• The promise of a Managerial Review which has yet to materialise.
• The Probation Service Pay Manual, which was agreed in 2018, and which is desperately needed to sort out the many pay problems members face
• The continuing difficulties that have been encountered in the Job Evaluation Scheme and the long delay in reviewing certain jobs several years after the E3 restructuring exercise

The nature of pay negotiations means that it is simply not possible to issue daily reports as to progress, but unions are on standby to call their respective Negotiating Committees together at the earliest opportunity.

Trade Dispute and Industrial Action still a real possibility

Despite the welcome resumption of dialogue on pay, these have been difficult discussions against the backdrop of the government’s pay freeze policy that is extremely hostile to the public service. We are therefore under no illusions about how challenging it will be to elicit an improved pay offer, if at all.

This means that all unions are continuing with their contingency planning for an industrial action campaign, but as our members would expect, we are at the same time doing all that we can to exhaust all opportunities to make progress.

More news on the pay negotiations will follow as soon as it becomes available.

Napo National Officers and Officials Updates

Following AGM and the formal change of officers for Napo we have reviewed the roles and responsibilities we hold. Find out who does what and how to contact them here

ViSOR update

Napo have been working on ViSOR related issues for some years now. Our main concerns are the workload implications of using an additional system for recording information and the consequences of using the Police Vetting required to access the system. At our AGM in October I reflected on the impact of the use of this level of Police Vetting on diversity in our workforce and noted that despite the fact that HMPPS now want to ensure they recruit staff with lived experience of the CJS, in Probation staff with that invaluable experience risk being sidelined and new recruits screened out at vetting stage.

Our relentless campaign on this is beginning to have an impact. At a meeting earlier this week we had our first breakthrough. Some significant changes are being made to the processes surrounding vetting and there is a real focus on avoiding inadvertent discrimination. There is undoubtedly more work to be done but in the six years since ViSOR use was announced as part of E3 we have secured significant concessions. The following is a summary of the progress made since 2015:

• Staff in employment who fail ViSOR vetting for a reason not connected to a disciplinary issue were given support to appeal and originally offered redeployment if it meant they could no longer carry out their role
• Work done at national level to ensure that issues of inconsistency and unusual outcomes were challenged
• Diversity monitoring is carried out on vetting failure rates to explore disproportionate impact on any groups with protected characteristics

It was clear however that the use of ViSOR wasn’t going to be abandoned so our campaign continued. The transfer of another 7,000 staff from CRCs was another opportunity to look again at ViSOR use and the vetting issues associated with it and just this week we attended a meeting to be told that our continuing solution-focussed approach to this has had a positive impact:

• There is now a national contract for vetting with a single Police Force to ensure consistency. This is part of the National Contractors Vetting Service (NCVI) and it allows for the use of a single form and a uniform approach to vetting.
• The NCVI arrangement also allows for work to be done with the vetting team to ensure they understand the purpose of vetting for Probation staff and that employment of those with lived experience of the CJS is encouraged
• There is now a better opportunity to appeal or challenge results and to take any learning from difficult experiences to apply to future vetting practices, the appeal deadlines have been extended to allow staff to seek support with this
• There are more staff working on vetting to avoid delays
• Applications are done wholly online and this avoids the privacy issues caused by forms being submitted on behalf of staff by administrators
• Now 9 out of 10 people whose vetting shows a hit on PNC or credit check go on to pass vetting

The Home Office want to build a replacement for the ViSOR system and HMPPS are partners in this project. They hope to remove the need for double entry of data by ensuring the system can share information to and from nDelius in a technological way

Crucially HMPPS have finally accepted our argument that staff who fail vetting for ViSOR will be able to remain in case management but hold only those cases which do not require ViSOR use. This is a significant shift to a simple and common sense approach that we have put forward since day one. It is far less stigmatising and career limiting than the previous approach of moving staff to work in programmes or courts and while it isn’t a commitment to ditch ViSOR (or to ditch Police Vetting for ViSOR use which are Napo’s preferred options) it is a step in the right direction.

We will be continuing to work with the HMPPS team on ViSOR related issues. We will be reviewing the form now used for the national vetting service and working together to find a way for those staff who might be concerned about their vetting to give fuller information at the time of application, to ensure that even fewer people fail and have to appeal. The failure rate is currently 1.9%, this may change going forward as the vetting is done at the recruitment stage but we will monitor this closely.

Job Evaluations (JE)

There are three sets of job evaluations outstanding at the moment, and all are running into difficulties caused by lack of resources in the JES team along with the failure to do preparation and follow up work with sufficient detail. We have now aired the deep concern we have with the JE process at the Probation JNC and it remains a high priority.

E3 Post Implementation JE reviews

There are a small number of reviews for jobs where the Unions either appealed the outcome or felt that items had not been fully explored during the original E3 JE process back in 2015-16. We have an agreement in place that these reviews would be done 6 months after the implementation of the job descriptions, for most roles this was between 2015 and 2017. In 2018 the Unions formally requested the reviews be undertaken and worked with the employer to agree a priority list for this (see below). Since then we have repeatedly been given timetables for the work which have not been met. We still await the start of this important work.

Priority order list for E3 Post Implementation Review Work

Group 1: Receptionist (separately dealt with as part of 202 pay deal), AP Residential Worker (done but now in dispute re application)
Group 2: VLO, Enforcement Officer, Business Manager
Group 3: AP Manager, SPO, MAPPA Co-ordinator

Unification and New Target Operating Model JE work

This is where the resource issues for JES really show, there have been a number of issues relating to the implementation of the JE scheme and you will recall that earlier in the process we announced the work was on pause while we conducted a review. This resulted in a number of recommendations aimed at ensuring that the best quality information went to the panel for scoring and that the process appropriately engages post-holders. Sadly, all of this work has not produced the required results and we had to step in once again to put a stop to panels for some roles where the paperwork was not up to the required standard. It is far more important to get the right outcome at the panel stage – especially at appeal – than to get the panel done quickly. This will cause misery and frustration for members who are still waiting for their JE results but we must avoid the situation being suffered by colleagues who were affected by E3, where the promised 6 month post-implementation reviews of their grading are up to six years late and their pay protection ran out some time ago. More steps have been put in place to ensure the process is strengthened and we continue to work with members and HMPPS on this.

Other JE work in progress

There are other pieces of JE work in progress, including new roles created in the Probation Service outside of the unification work. These are also being affected by the issues of resource in the JES team and while we expected that the best practice recommendations from the review we recently undertook are rolled out in all JE work, that turned out to not be the case. We now await an updated schedule as to where this work will fit into the wider JES programme. Yet again it has fallen to the unions to work across different departments in HMPPS to ensure best practice is shared and to try to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Have you got a horror story about Probation Estates?

It is a little late for Halloween but we have been hearing some horror stories about Probation Estates issues. We need your help.

OMiC and the transfer of Line Management of SPOs to the Prison Governor 

We have significant concerns about this move, which has not happened yet. We are currently consulting on the detail of the guidance that will be issued on it, in an attempt to ensure that member’s rights are protected as far as possible. Once we have the final version of the guidance we will be issuing further advice to members around this. We are working closely with Unison reps to highlight our shared concerns about the tensions between the different approaches of prisons and probation, the differing terms and conditions, different approaches to staff management and supervision, the importance of retaining probation culture and probation professional development and the real risks to both SPOs and POs working in prisons if formal HR processes are conducted by people outside of our employer.

AGM follow up Q&A session with Jim Barton

Thanks to the 80+ members who joined the Q&A session with Jim Barton that we held last Friday. It was really successful, with 28 questions asked in total in just one hour. In response to requests from members who attended, and from Jim himself, we will now be working on a programme of similar events across 2022 with HMPPS Senior Leaders joining Napo members “in conversation”. We will advertise these as soon as we have dates. Once we do please let your colleagues know – and encourage them to join Napo so that they can attend future events!

Best Wishes
Napo HQ