Negotiations took place at the National Negotiating Council (NNC) on 11 November between the probation unions, employers and the ministry of justice over the draft staff transfer and protections agreement.
This agreement will manage the way in which staff are transferred to either the National Probation Service (NPS) or one of the community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), if the government reforms to probation take place.
UNISON asked for members’ opinions on the draft agreement last month and received many helpful and positive comments, which we used in the negotiations.
Justice secretary Chris Grayling expected us to agree on the details of the agreement by 11 November. Although we did make major progress, it was not possible to agree on the following subjects:
- Continuity of service. UNISON wants the agreement to protect your continuity of service in case you want to move jobs from the NPS to a CRC, or the other way round. Continuity of service is important because it sets out the amount of annual leave, maternity leave, sick leave and redundancy that you are entitled to;
- Corporate services staff. UNISON wants to make sure that probation corporate services staff are given the first opportunity to apply for any new corporate services posts in the NPS following the split in the service;
- Prison and youth offending team (YOT) secondees. No agreement was made to how these staff will be treated in the staff transfer process;
- Period over which the voluntary redundancy (VR) scheme will be payable. At the moment, the agreement allows staff to be offered VR up until March 2015. UNISON would like this period extended.
Near the end of the talks, the unions and employers were informed that the national offender management service (NOMS) would be issuing an instruction to probation trusts within the next few days to start the staff assignment process – even if we could not agree on the details of the final document.
As a result of this, UNISON, Napo and GMB issued a joint statement to the NNC, saying that if any probation trust acted on the instruction from NOMS, the unions would be in dispute and that we would refer the matters at dispute to ACAS, and remind the Cabinet Office that the staffing split could breach its own statement of staff transfers in the public sector.
What next?
Since the talks on 11 November we have made further progress and a final revised offer will be made to the NNC on Wednesday 20 November, addressing the outstanding issues.
The ministry of justice has notified trusts of Mr Grayling’s desire to start the staffing split and reassign staff. UNISON, Napo and the GMB have emphasised to the ministry that we do not expect to see any local moves to carry out the split before the NNC meeting on 20 November.
UNISON remains committed to reaching a deal on the agreement. Although we are campaigning against the transforming rehabilitation plans, our members expect us to do all we can to protect their welfare in the event that we cannot prevent the government’s plans going ahead. This is what we will continue to do.
What about industrial action?
UNISON still wants to see if we can reach a successful conclusion to the NNC negotiations, before we take a decision about industrial action.
We have made some good progress this week in improving the draft agreement. This will now be considered by UNISON’s probation committee at a special meeting on Tuesday 19 November. The committee will decide whether or not UNISON can now sign up to the revised draft agreement.
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