Editors Blog

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it a little odd when I ring up the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) press office to find out about new HR posts being advertised (is there any restructing going on? does this mean the body will be recruiting more posts? what HR developments are there?) only to be told they dont know about the posts being advertised yet?

I've been trying to find out for the past two days what the big HR recruitment drive seems to be at the NPIA, an policing body which came into being in April this year, but have just received a stalling response from a press officer that there is no-one available to respond to my enquiry today, and that she is still "trying to establish" the posts I am referring to?

I was astonished at how quickly the media snapped into action over the weekend to criticise Gordon Brown’s decision not to call for an early election.

And how pathetic did the Conservative supporters look dressed up as Newcastle Brown Ale - chanting the words “Bottler Brown”, among others in the general direction of government offices to heckle the prime minister. “How very clever we are,” they must have thought to themselves as they merrily sang: 'Ten Brown Bottles'.

If only they had known, their kids would have been so proud. I can only imagine what a conversation back at the family home might have sounded like: “Look nana, dad is on the tele dressed as an, um, er a bottle of Brown stuff.” I was secretly hoping for a large bowling ball to skittle them over when I saw them standing there, especially after England’s euphoric display against the Wallabies at the Rugby World Cup during roughly the same time.

Anyway, I suspect the media’s vigour to persecute Brown in such haste has something to do with the fact that his decision denies them from running so many hundreds of political pages for months to come.

Beware the power of the media is perhaps a moral that Brown can take away from this episode.

Finally the family and friends of Jean Charles de Menezes have justice for the day the innocent Brazilian was shot to death by our police for getting on the Tube - or do they?

Despite the Metropolitan Police being found guilty of breaking health and safety laws and endangering the public when they mistook the electrician for a suicide bomber on 22 July 2005, nobody seems to be taking responsibility for the atrocity.

It’s been a whole 12 months since the Leitch Review of Skills was published, so listening to skills minister David Lammy speak yesterday at the Public Sector Skills Conference in London, I was waiting for some big announcement to mark its first anniversary.

I was expecting to hear what government had achieved and employer comment one year on since the Review, which told the UK to ‘shape up or ship out’ of the global economy.

I wanted to hear the latest thinking behind mandatory, paid time off for employee training or employer self-accreditation of internal qualifications.

How wrong I was:

Predictably, Lammy plugged the skills pledge: a formal, voluntary commitment by employers to train their staff to Level 2 by 2010. “There are 14 more employers signing up today”, he said, in what felt like a hopeful plea to get everyone in that audience to sign on the dotted line – now.

And if I can sidetrack slightly – 14 more employers? That brings the grand total of signatures signed up to the pledge to somewhere between 550 and 600, does it not? Which covers around three million employees, Lammy said. What about the remaining 25 million employees in work that aren’t covered? When will they be ‘covered’ by the pledge?

You have to love the Home Office. It is doing its best to keep both illegal immigrants and sarcastic journalists in easy work for eternity.

Yesterday, as I was leaving the Home Office's grand Marsham Street HQ, I was wondering what I would write about following a very on-message interview with a senior official about the importance of checking the employment status of migrant job applicants.

What are we to make of schools secretary Ed Balls’s announcement that teachers will receive a 2.45% pay rise this year?

The award is the first of the government’s hyped three-year pay deals, which we covered on the front page of this week’s Personnel Today magazine.

Teachers are to get 2.45% in September, followed by increases of 2.3% in 2009 and 2010. Balls accepted the recommendations of the School Teachers’ Review Body in deciding the rate.

The NHS should go further than disciplining staff for not washing their hands when walking between wards or as part of their day-to-day role. What about all the visitors?

On the numerous times I've visited people in hospital recently absolutely nobody washes their hands. The staff aren't doing it, and they're not asking hospital visitors to do it. I've seen ward sisters just sit at the reception desk, gazing glumly into the distance while strides of people walk through the door without giving a second thought to washing their hands. And nothing is done about it.

I remember on one occassion a bunch of builders turned up to visit their pal - they still had their overalls on with paint, dust and whatever else they'd picked up during their shift. They didnt wash their hands, weren't asked to wash their hands and certainly didnt think twice about walking through the ward full of critically ill people with all their dirty work clothes on.

The fact that public sector employees will be banned from taking their laptops outside of the building is a typical government knee-jerk reaction.

Surely the whole point of a work laptop is to work on it whilst on the move or in a different locations - when you're on the train or working from home for example. The fact that now employees have been banned from removing their laptops from the office to do such a thing is highly amusing and counter-productive.

What about all those homeworkers, part-time workers and so on that went through all the palava of getting set up on a portable machine (believe me I used to work in government agencies and it can take weeks) only to find out they cannot use it? It denies the most basic principle of home-working.

Now I know this ban only affects those employees with sensitive data on their laptop - but think of the countless administrative officers that might well have access to protected files to carry out the most simple of tasks.

The Royal Navy's recruitment officer story is a case in point. The database on his laptop, which was stolen on 9 January, contained sensitive details about 600,000 prospective military recruits, including details of religions and some banking records, and was not encrypted. But I am assuming, unlike Des Browne, British defence secretary, that he needed this to do his job?

And in the left corner, weighing in at 120 pounds, Flo…ren…ce Nightingale!

The latest research on nurse attacks will come as a punch in the face to hard working, and dare I say, underpaid nurses.

A study of 69 NHS trusts and private hospitals in England and Wales conducted on behalf of the Healthcare Commission by the Royal College of Psychiatrists found that more than half of nurses on mental health wards have been physically assaulted.

Two thirds of nurses in wards for older people said they had been physically attacked, with injuries including fractures, dislocations and black eyes.

The health watchdog called for a review on the provision of training relating to managing violence. The survey found that nurses on wards for older people were less likely to receive training, with 66% reporting they had been trained to manage incidents, compared to 75% of nurses on working-age wards.

This new report comes not long after health secretary Alan Johnson told delegates at Labour Party Conference last year that tougher action would be taken against people abusing NHS staff.

It also follows a report from Downing Street, last year, which said nurses should smile more to show patients they care about them? Wow!

Which of these subjects can you not combine with HR management for an undergraduate degree at some of the UK's burgeoning number of universities: Forensic Studies? Waste Management? Dance? Festival Management? Music? Abuse Studies? Geography?

See below for the answer. It all goes to show that long gone are the days when HR was a definite no-no as a university subject – a golden age some would say. Nowadays there are more HR degree courses then you can shake a high potentials list at and they can be combined with any manner of topics.

Findings announced today by the National Audit Office (NAO) show – alarmingly if not surprisingly – that the government’s cure-all contract to improve GP’s pay and efficiency has failed. Or rather, it’s failed for the patients, and for GPs employed on a salary basis, while those with their own practices have achieved an impressive double whammy – 58% pay-rises coupled with an end to having to provide 24-hour cover for their patients. And it’s scarcely worth noting that, as ever, nurses come out worse, with a real-term decline in pay.

Personnel Today's front-page exclusive this week highlights how the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) has fared shockingly in its staff survey.
Just two in five staff at the NPIA understand their employer’s goals, while only a third agree the business strategy has been clearly communicated. Only 14% feel they have opportunity for promotion.
And the NPIA is far from alone, with poor communications, old-fashioned reward systems and bad succession planning dogging many other public sector employers.
Yet there really is plenty to celebrate...

Teachers are striking nationwide today for the first time in 21 years.

Not content with a real term pay increase of 19% over the last decade and at least 13 weeks holiday per year, teachers are unhappy with the 2.45% pay offered by the government and are demanding 4.1%.

A colleague recently claimed that teaching was not a "particularly skilled" job and at primary school level was essentially "babysitting".

Not sure that I exactly agree with that view, but I don't think they do too badly. The problem is that now they have decided to walkout, the teachers immediately lose any shred of sympathy from parents who see their child being denied a days education.

Parents also have to take time off work or arrange extra childcare, no doubt at extra cost. Employers are hit by staff missing for the day or having to make last minute arrangements.

One MP even went so far to say that teachers should be subject to a no-strike agreement, much the same as police or prison officers.

Whichever side of the fence you come down on, I think teachers need a healthy dose of realism injected into the staffroom.

Delegates at this week's Public Sector People Managers Association Conference enjoyed a taste of how technology will impact what they do as new generations enter the workforce.
Inventor and author Russell Prue of Anderton Tiger called upon delegates to text him during his presentation, 'poking' them via Bluetooth and quizzing them about how much they really knew about the online 'world' Second Life .

Home secretary Jacqui Smith took an absolute battering during her keynote speech at this morning's Police Federation conference.

Her decision to cut police pay from 2.5% to 1.9% in last year's pay deal was simply unforgivable in police officers' eyes - all four hundred pairs of them staring back at her on the lonely stage.

Abuse was hurled from officer after officer queuing up to ask her why she had cheated them out of the pay deal they had been expecting and had been agreed from the independent arbitration ruling.

Cheat! Fraud! Betrayed! As each word was shouted so cheers and jeers came from the rest of the delegates. All that was missing was the 'Ding Ding' of a boxing bell. 

The Federation's chairman Jan Berry, who will retire at this week's conference, got in on the act too. Berry's opening remarks to the delegates included alluding to the fact Smith's role as home secretary was on the ropes.

"Home Secretary this is my sixth and last Annual Conference Speech. So much has happened. Two prime ministers and counting, four home secretaries [she left a massive pause here], four police ministers, five police bills..." and so on.

Once again the BBC has been slapped on the wrists for overpaying its leading presenters and DJs.

The BBC claims that Oliver & Ohlbaum, the consultants it invited in (probably at a huge cost to licence-payers), found that the likes of chat show host Jonathan Ross and radio DJ Chris Moyles were not paid above the market rate. But O&O also found that the BBC relied on "a limited number of lead presenters" and questioned how successful the organisation had been in nurturing new talent.

Ross reportedly signed a 'golden handcuffs' deal recently for £18m over three years, and the BBC has an overall 'talent budget' of £242m.The very top stars can expect to earn at least £3m annually from appearance fees, repeats, publishing deals and royalties.

Pay will always be a thorny issue, especially when the public are bankrolling these salaries, but are the likes of Rossy really overpaid? All HR professionals know that nurturing new talent is a high priority - especially in these times of financial instability and demographic change. But talent pipelines can take years to get results, and in the interim it's important to keep your key people happy.

That said, money isn't everything. Just ask Natasha Kaplinsky, who left her already well-paid job at the BBC last year for a £1m a year role as the anchor on Five News, only to tell bosses six weeks later that she was pregnant.  

For weeks the email inboxes of the Personnel Today team have been bombarded by press releases from all manner of companies jumping aboard The Apprentice bandwagon.

Now ahead of the show's final episode tonight, that bombardment has reached unprecedented levels with firms eager to dispense advice on interview techniques, employment law, pyschometric testing, body language, CV-writing... the list goes on.

Perhaps the naffest example of this publicity seeking comes from Essex County Council.

The council has said it would consider offering the runner-up in tonight's final a job "to help the authority continue its drive to deliver excellent quality services".

Council leader Lord Hanningfield said he wanted the "best and the brightest" to come and work for the organisation. He obviously hasn't been watching the show. The remaining contestants have spent most of the last two months lying, back-stabbing, lurching from one balls-up to the next and desperately trying to save their own backsides.

Actually, perhaps they might be suited to a career in local government.

The move has been attacked - quite correctly - as a publicity stunt. Note the council's use of the word consider. No cast iron offer, and a convenient get-out clause for the brainiacs in Essex's PR department, just in case the bloke who does the pterodactyl impression wins.

For those of you slightly bemused by the relationship between wages and the effect it has on inflation, my colleague Sheila Atwood on XpertHR's Employment Intelligence blog gives a good explanation.

Chancellor Alistair Darling reiterated his call for pay restraint earlier this week, and with inflation running at an 11-year high of 3.8%, workers and unions will be demanding higher pay deals.

But as Sheila points out, the next big round of pay deals is scheduled for January 2009, with inflation widely expected to be on a downward curve by then.

Writing exclusively for Personneltoday.com, Jim Savege, the lead on pay at the Public Sector People Managers' Association, said this week's public sector strikes demonstrated a real need for pay modernisation in local government and beyond.

But while trade unions are determined to make their point over low pay for their members, the immediate challenge is settling this year's disputes before employers can even contemplate looking ahead to 2009.

The equal pay saga dominating the local government landscape continues to rumble on its destructive course. Equal pay is now not so much the elephant in the room but a stampeding herd of angry pachyderms.

Last week the Court of Appeal paved the way for tens of thousands of women to claim billions in compensation for unequal pay from the NHS and local authorities.

The ruling overturned a previous decision that two councils in north east England were essentially entitled to continue discriminating against female employees because they could not afford to bring them into line with the men.

Acas figures released last week also showed that the number of equal pay tribunal claims it dealt with last year more than doubled - it is now the most popular form of claim.

It's not often HR makes it into the pages of top satirical mag Private Eye. But in the latest issue hacks at the magazine have taken issue with the government's latest initiative to help smaller firms with employment law.

The campaign aims to help employers by directing them to Business Link's online tools, calculators and interactive guides, saving cash so they don't have to buy in professional HR advice. The Eye goes on to say:

"Sadly the advice to stop buying in expensive HR comes too late for many public sector bodies. Buying in staff admin services from Capita proved disastrous for the Leicester Hospitals NHS Trust, which ended up paying bank charges for staff after their payroll was botched month after month last year. Also stuck with Capita is the BBC, which can't afford to break its £100m outsourced HR deal even though the firm lost personal details of staff."

The article also highlights the cost of outsourcing Northern Ireland's Civil Service HR spiralling from the planned £328m to £465m.

I interviewed BBC HR chief Stephen Kelly earlier this month and he admitted that the corporation's contract with Capita was suffering from problems. But he said he was determined to put things right and was confident its full benefits would soon be realised.

Until he does, then the spectre of another mention in Private Eye looms...

NHS HR chief Clare Chapman - in the news today for the controversy over her salary and pay rises of NHS management - has started to become more visible to the rest of the profession.

When Chapman first joined the NHS back in January 2007 after several years at Tesco she was exceptionally hard to pin down, with several requests for interviews filed (and seemingly ignored), and the odd speaking engagement here and there.

Her argument was that it's only worth talking when you've got something interesting to say. Fair enough - and we are starting to see Chapman boost her public profile and tell the HR profession - and the NHS workforce - what her vision is.

This morning's papers were reeling with whether or not Britney Spears' performance on The X Factor was the comeback she'd hoped for. Her miming clearly put fans off despite a raunchy dance set. While I don't usually compare Saturday night TV to public sector skills conferences, I think on this occasion there are some stark similarities in how each was received.

As I arrive at the Public Sector Skills Conference in London's QEII conference centre, it struck me this was not going to be the 'buzziest' event of the year. The auditorium was half empty - did they not sell enough tickets? Nor was there any blaring video or music to kick-start the speakers' presentations. Patronising though this can be, it seemed a little odd and low-key without it.

More importantly this lunchtime, after talking to several delegates at the event, it has all become clear to me what this conference is lacking: the X factor. I begin overhearing chants of how the audience had been let down by the presentations so far and weren't enticed by what they saw. The main content lacked imagination:

1. The breakout sessions were "too vague" according to one delegate, and "not juicy enough" according to another.

2. Even as I write this I overhear one unlucky delgate on the phone to his office. Quote on quote, he says: "It's so boring you just want to peel your face off."

3. Another guy I met in the incredibly long lunch queue just now. He tells me he has never been on a London Underground tube before. Heck, this is more interesting than the conference itself. How can you be about 40 years old and not have been on the tube?

4. The fact I got diverted about whether or not it's strange not to have taken tube journeys before says it all.

The director general of workforce at the NHS Clare Chapman is said to be going back to the 'shop floor' from next week onwards, as part of a wider plan to put staff at the centre of everything the organisation does.

Clare will begin to visit frontline staff working at some of the country's NHS trusts to get a better feel for workforce issues across the healthcare system. It's not known yet exactly what will happen during the visits, or how many trusts Clare intends to get to (there are 450), but it is clear that this move is part of the wider NHS focus to help staff to 'work smarter''.

Staff survey results from last year found most NHS employees were committed to their jobs and enjoyed working in the healthcare sector. But many also found 'the system' got in the way: bureacracy and IT slowed things down. Perhaps the staff visits will give staff some hope that there is a committment to change all this from the top..

As the chill winds of reality continue to bite, it's interesting to see that the world of HR is gearing up for a good old bunfight over the idea of pay freezes in the public sector.

The idea that pay freezes are a good idea would come easily to a beancounter, of course, so it should come as no surprise that the CIPD's chief economist John Philpott sees the current economic malaise as the perfect opportunity for the public sector to cut costs.

Meanwhile, the unions and the head honcho of the HR in the public sector, PPMA head honcho Stephen Moir, think that pay freezes in the sector would be demotivating at a time when staff need a boost as more and more people use public sector services on account of being without work as a result of the recession.

The moral argument would suggest that Philpott is probably in the right, as to take a pay rise when colleagues are being shown the door smacks of double standards and demonstrates a distinct lack of integrity.

That's not to say Moir's position is immoral in any way, but it does have a public-sector-tinted pair of spectacles attached, and surely now is the time to be thinking of the greater good, rather than the motivational, not to say pocket-lining, needs of the few who still have jobs to go to.

But who is right?

Setting aside the green-eyed monster view of the unions, and stopping short of a TV Burp-style fist fight, perhaps Philpott and Moir should get together to discuss the matter in a mature and sensible way and try to come up with a unified way forward that all organisations - including the union dinosaurs - could buy into.

Having said that, perhaps it's time for Philpott and Moir to take off those glasses, put up their dukes and get Harry Hill to adjudicate.

FIGHT!!!!!!!

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has published guidance which says senior public officials' salary bands should be publicly available as a matter of routine.

The guidance, When should salaries be disclosed?, explains that salary details, bonuses and performance related pay should be in the public domain to the nearest £5,000 band when there is a legitimate public interest. Disclosing exact salaries will only be required in exceptional circumstances.

Gerrard Tracey, assistant information commissioner, said: "Those who are paid from the public purse should expect information on their salaries to be made public. There is a legitimate public interest in knowing how public money is spent, how public sector salaries compare with those in other areas, and how money is distributed between different levels of staff."

It's usually the domain of the Taxpayers Alliance to reveal how much council top brass are paid. Its Town Hall Rich List last year named several HR professionals that enjoyed salaries well over £100,000.

It could be that this kind of information is more readily available in the future - something that will be increasingly sensitive if councils continue to cut jobs like many have done in response to falling budgets.

Following the loss of four of the most senior women in British politics this week, it naturally follows that people are starting to wonder whether Gordon Brown's new government will continue to represent women.

Equality campaign group the Fawcett Society has already voiced concerns that the prime minister's cabinet re-shuffle won't lead to many top jobs for females.

Over the past couple of days, Jacqui Smith (now ex-home secretary), Hazel Blears (now former communnities secretary), and 'Blair Babes' Beverly Hughes (now the ex-children's minister) and Patricia Hewitt (a former health secretary) all quit the government for a variety of reasons from being caught up in the expenses scandal to wanting to spend more time with their families.

Details of the re-shuffle have been emerging all day, but it is not yet clear how many women will make up the final cabinet team.

Fawcett said it was watching closely to ensure that women were represented in Brown's new government 'of all the talents'.

Director Katherine Rake said: "Having lost two senior women from cabinet, eyes are on Brown today to ensure that he does not backslide on women's representation. We await with anticipation the full results of the reshuffle to find out what the balance will look like."

Before leaving office Blair had eight women in his cabinet of 23, making it 35% women.