Civil service union chiefs seek ‘partnership’ with New Labour wreckers
Darren Williams, PCS Group Assistant Secretary, Office for National Statistics (personal capacity)
The whole public sector has been in a state of siege for the last twenty years. The very idea of ‘public service’ has been a target of the neo-liberal offensive driven forward by the Thatcher and Major governments, which denied that there was any sphere of life which could not be best served by private enterprises obeying the ‘laws’ of the market.
The effects of this ideology are best known in the context of the National Health Service and the education system. But the civil service has not escaped unscathed.
Until the mid-1990s, privatisation of central government services was virtually unknown. Even then, only a few smaller departments, like the Property Services Agency and Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, were sold off in their entirety. This was, however, only part of a much broader onslaught.
Throughout the civil service, the ideology and management techniques of private enterprise were introduced. Highly centralised structures were broken up into ever-smaller units, so that potentially profitable sections could be hived off to private companies. This was initially done through market testing; specific services within departments were put out to tender on a five-yearly basis.
The break-up of departments was accompanied by the ending of national collective bargaining on pay and conditions, with each department or agency given responsibility for its own arrangements.
This was a classic ‘divide and rule’ tactic. It ensured an increasing divergence in pay and conditions between deparrtments, with staff in smaller departments being left with little industrial muscle and therefore losing out. It made it almost impossible to organise legal industrial action across the whole civil service - in fact, the last time this happened was a one-day strike against market testing on 5 November 1993.
Even market testing’s dismal failure to save money did not dissuade the Tories from pursuing their attack on the civil service, albeit in a slightly modified form. The 1994 government White Paper Continuity and Change spelt out a range of options – ranging from outright privatisation to internal restructuring - which each department had to consider in order to become as ‘efficient’ as possible.
The meaning of ‘efficiency’ was spelt out: the document celebrated the loss of 32,000 jobs since January 1993 alone, and declared the intention of cutting at least 30,000 more over the next four years. This drive to meet this target proceeded at breakneck speed – both before and after the change of government on 2 May 1997.
New Labour’s policies for the civil service are rooted in the same ideology as those of the Tories. This was shown by the government’s attempt to privatise the Royal Mint (which it has now reluctantly abandoned) – despite the fact that the Mint was making an annual profit of £13.7m in the public sector.
It is certainly clear to anyone reading the Cabinet Office document, Better Quality Services, a handbook "on achieving the government’s objectives through competition involving the private sector".
In the foreword, Public Service Minister, David Clark, states: "What matters to the citizen, and therefore to the government, is quality for the customer at the most reasonable cost to the taxpayer. If these are right, the distinctions between public and private are not so important. We want to encourage business to play a fuller role in providing public services."
New Labour has accepted two key Tory principles: that essential public services must be provided only so long as their delivery is affordable under the existing regressive taxation system; and that private businesses are almost certain to be more efficient at providing such services than public bodies.
How this works in practice is clear from the example of the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The Treasury embarked on an ‘efficiency review’ of the ONS in July 1998, which it began by commissioning a report by private sector management consultants, KPMG, at a cost to the taxpayer of £130,000.
The KPMG Report’s highly superficial analysis of the ONS’s operations, padded out with flow charts, diagrams and meaningless management-speak, was apparently constructed purely to justify the predetermined conclusion that the department would be more ‘efficient’ if staffing levels were reduced by a third and large chunks of the department were hived off to private companies.
There was no indication in the report that the KPMG team considered any option other than contracting-out (or ‘outsourcing’), despite the guidance in Better Quality Services: "Departments should use whatever means will deliver best value for money. … without any inbuilt preference for any particular way forward."
Despite the well-known fiasco in the Passport Office, brought about by outsourcing, the ONS Efficiency Review is proceeding apace. The Treasury, and its agents in senior management, are hell-bent on cutting staffing levels to the bone and offering up key services to private profiteers. In this, it is being aided by further private sector consultancies, the bill for which now stands at around £1 million. So much for efficiency!
The impact on civil servants of the unrelenting attack which they faced since 1979, has been exacerbated by the complete failure of leadership by their trade unions. In the dying days of the Callaghan government, a pay strike by the two biggest unions, CPSA and SCPS, successful challenged the government’s incomes policy, and resistance to attacks on pay and conditions continued sporadically through the early 1980s, as the left (particularly in CPSA) alternated with the right in running the unions.
Since 1988, however the right have enjoyed unbroken power, to the detriment of members’ interests. All the worst excesses of the civil service ‘reform’ programme – including performance-related pay and the end of national collective bargaining – have been introduced in this period, with the response from the union bureaucrats being tough words but no action.
Moreover, this has been accompanied by a concerted effort to eliminate accountability. This has culminated in the new merged union, PCS, having one of the least democratic structures anywhere in the British trade union movement.
Despite the fact that there is now one union representing the vast majority of civil servants – where there were four in the 1980s – the bureaucracy continues to squander its potential strength. The result is clear: in its first year of existence, PCS’s membership declined by 11,600, against a trend of stabilisation across the TUC.
It is not surprising the leadership fails to inspire the confidence of civil servants, given its slavish attitude towards the New Labour government. It has issued a barely-qualified welcome to the Modernising Government White Paper, which insists that, "public servants must be the agents of changes citizens and businesses want."
A recent headquarters circular relates that the union has contributed to the preparation of a draft action plan on modernising the civil service, drawn up at a conference of Permanent Secretaries.
The five principles on which the union’s input has apparently been based is a strange list, with "serious concerns on the present performance pay system" right at the bottom, below "taking fear out of the process of change" (which presumably means breaking down members’ resistance to sweeping changes in their terms and conditions).
Right at the top of the list – above "employment security for members"! – is "the need to develop partnership working across the Civil Service".
A clearer idea of what the bureaucracy means by "partnership" can be gleaned from the July 1999 consultation document, Industrial Partnership. "The broad context of partnership", it says, "is the belief that, although there are areas of disagreement between union and employers’ sides, the two have shared mutual interest".
The document pays lip-service to the fact that the interests of management and unions are not identical, but draws no meaningful conclusions from this.
A revealing paragraph states: "Clearly a key part of the union’s agenda at departmental/agency level is to minimise outsourcing and ideally stop it altogether.
One of the attractions of the partnership approach is that, if it succeeds in merging together the management and unions agendas, the need for – and hence the drive for – outsourcing could be substantially reduced." Translation: "if union reps collaborate with management in ensuring implementation of ‘efficiency savings’ (whatever the impact in jobs, staffing levels, etc.), then the slightly more drastic alternative of privatisation might possibly be avoided".
Nowhere in the document is there any mention of an alternative approach to ‘partnership’ – even as a fallback, if management should spurn the union’s advances. Campaigning, mobilising members, and of course, industrial action, are taboo subjects in the new, modernised union that is PCS.
PCS members’ reaction to this misleadership of has increasingly taken the form of despair, cynicism and abstention from the union’s internal processes. As New Labour continues to push ahead with the break-up and commercialisation of the civil service, the need for a change of leadership has never been so great.
But the left is currently in no shape to rise to this challenge. Faced with ever-greater attacks from the government, employers and its ‘own’ side, the Socialist Party-led Left Unity organisation has retreated further into electoralism, pinning all its hopes on winning control of the National Executive Committee in May 2000.
Support for its slate is essential, but is unlikely to be forthcoming unless Left Unity takes a more proactive approach to campaigning on bread-and-butter issues. Its membership has shrunk to a tiny rump, and badly needs to turn this around before it becomes completely irrelevant.
Meanwhile, the Socialist Caucus, whose politics are more grassroots-oriented, has also declined in numbers and retreated into inactivity, outside the departments where it is strongest (the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency).
Ironically, it is mirroring Left Unity’s own electoralism by focussing its attention on an electoral challenge to the Left Unity-led Employment Service Group Executive Committee (GEC).
The GEC has failed to oppose initiatives like National Traineeships, but an electoral challenge will be meaningless unless it is combined with a coherent approach to organising and building the left in order to make a real challenge to the bureaucracy across the whole union.
The Socialist Caucus needs urgently to initiate a broad regroupment with other healthy sections of the left, to start this process .