Ministers must end “barking mad” restraints on civil service pay or risk being unable to recruit the technical and digital specialists it needs to keep pace, a union leader has warned.
Mike Clancy, the Prospect general secretary, said the government should end the “rightwing trope” that restrained the pay of highly skilled civil servants and left government unable to compete with the private sector. He said it should be realistic for senior specialists in competitive fields to be paid more than the prime minister.
His intervention comes after the prime minister’s chief secretary, Darren Jones, said he wanted more risk-takers and delivery experts to create a civil service that “moves fast and fixes things”, saying hiring criteria would be changed to “promote the doers, not just the talkers”.
Clancy said the civil service had significant issues retaining technical experts because of the low pay and lack of progression.
In an interview with the Guardian, Clancy also told the government to take more care with its approach to deregulation, and said it could risk falling foul of its own Employment Rights Act.
The union – which represents workers at a number of regulators – said resourcing was by far the biggest cause of delay, rather than the regulations themselves.
It said Natural England was unable to meet target response times for 1,316 planning applications as a result of low resources such as staff absence or lack of specialist expertise, accounting for 58% of missed deadlines. For the Environment Agency, lack of resources was the reason for 75% of missed deadlines.
“The government has not done enough and has not been as energetic on setting a clear pay and reward agenda for deliverers,” Clancy said. “If it’s keen on actively recruiting and retaining them, and them being the driver of the civil service mission, you can’t divorce it from pay. This is a deep inhibitor upon the government’s plans.”
He said the government should reject “some of the daft stuff that used to be around civil service pay [at very senior levels] being at the same level as the prime minister.
“It’s all barking mad, playing to a rightwing trope of the civil service, and actually very careless about what the nature of civil servants are – in the MoD, in the Hydrographic Office, in the Met Office. They’ve got to sort this out and the clock is really ticking on this.”
Clancy said the government should not “make stump speeches” about deregulation when often the issues about delays in building infrastructure, housing or nuclear were about resources. “We think regulation is a key to productivity and good business growth, not an inhibitor. Regulators are builders, not blockers,” he said.
“I think this government really should stay away from that. I think they have been vulnerable to the pressure they’ve been put under by business about regulation personally.
“If there’s anything which is plainly difficult to justify, gather the evidence, have the conversation, make the change. But don’t make stump speeches, ‘we’re going to just deregulate’ because you sound like the other lot [the Conservatives].”
Clancy was the TUC’s lead on the Employment Rights Act, and said he was concerned about how angrily business groups were still lobbying against the changes. He said the government should come out more forcefully to demonstrate that there had been a fundamental shift back towards workers in the labour market.
But he said there was “every risk” of diluting the zero-hours contracts measures in the implementation phase of the act – with some other protections not due to come until the end of next year. Another manifesto promise, to end bogus self-employment and create a single status of worker, was “well on the back burner”, he said.
“The Employment Rights Act is changing labour market orthodoxy,” he said. “It’s saying that employee voice matters, individual rights matter and that we want to pursue growth, not on the basis of precarity.
“Now that’s a massive change for employers from what they’ve been used to – relatively untrammelled authority for a decade and a half.
“I think they should be more confident in saying to employers, ‘we’re going to listen to you but yes, we have shifted’. And we mean to be determined to do that – because we think that’s a fairer and better labour market and a productive one.”
