- Conference
- 2021 Police and Justice Conference
- Date
- 22 June 2021
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes that it has been an ambition for UNISON to obtain a national job evaluation scheme and national pay and grading for police staff in England and Wales through negotiations over part 2 of the review of the Police Staff Council (PSC) Handbook. Conference believes that this may not be achievable due to a lack of employer side support.
Conference further notes that there are a variety of job evaluation schemes used by police forces with the Hay job evaluation scheme believed to be the most common.
In its publication ‘Negotiating job evaluation schemes’, UNISON’s Bargaining Support Group stated that:
‘The Hay system is sometimes used in local government (predominantly for managerial jobs) and other sectors. Reservations have been made that the original system has an inbuilt bias against jobs traditionally done by women, can be interpreted inconsistently, is not transparent about what the scoring and weighting system is based on and that some areas of a job are not measured adequately’.
Conference is concerned that a job evaluation system which could be biased against women, who make up the majority of police staff, continues to be used unchecked.
Conference believes that if a national approach to job evaluation and pay and grading cannot be achieved, UNISON should explore alternatives such as regional consistency of job evaluation schemes and pay and grading. In this respect Conference notes the significant work done by UNISON Police Scotland in moving to a single job evaluation scheme.
Conference therefore calls on the Police and Justice Service Group Executive to:
1)Gather, collate and if required commission research to identify evidence about any inbuilt biases in the Hay job evaluation scheme.
2)Produce a report or briefing about the successes and lessons learnt from the UNISON Police Scotland single job evaluation scheme.
3)Publish specific bargaining advice for branches and regions to use to move towards a more harmonised regional job evaluation process and consistent pay and grading, promoting the PSC Handbook 13-Factor job evaluation scheme as best practice.