- Conference
- 2006 Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 23 December 2005
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes that the Agenda for Change Terms and Conditions Handbook:
·had to be concluded by a pre-agreed deadline
·was not widely available to UNISON’s lay membership before the
Agenda for Change ballot
·leaves around a hundred terms open to local negotiation rather than
the nineteen or so originally envisaged
·is often unclearly-expressed or ambiguous and open to widely-
differing interpretations
A key UNISON aim in the AfC negotiations was to retain a national system of pay, terms and conditions and national pay bargaining. Conference is concerned that, instead, the Handbook merely provides a national framework for locally-determined terms and conditions
The resulting local agreements vary widely.
Some consistency has been provided by “guidance” from regional AfC “networks”, but these have been largely management-dominated and have poor lines of accountability to union members.
Local negotiators have found it difficult to obtain timely, clear, authoritative national interpretations of the many unclear parts of the Handbook. Where it exists, such guidance has been produced as “Questions and Answers” rather than as revisions to the Handbook.
It is unclear whether regional “guidance” or national “Q and A’s” have contractually-enforceable status, for example at an Employment Tribunal.
Conference reiterates that we need a Terms and Conditions Handbook with nationally-agreed terms and conditions, clearly and unambiguously set out, making it the definitive resource for settling disagreements between management, staff and staff representatives locally. Only an absolute minimum should be left to local determination and the Handbook should specify where this applies. The current Handbook should be regarded as “work in progress”.
Conference calls on the SGE and our negotiators on the Staff Council to:
1. identify all the parts of the Handbook that – either explicitly, or because the wording allows significant differences of interpretation – currently necessitate local determination
2. improve the system for progressing enquiries and local “best practice” to the national negotiators
3. work though the Staff Council to schedule, agree and issue a series of revisions to the Handbook in order to meet the requirement of this motion.