To wonder about the impact of regional pay on pensions

[jinsei]

I understand the arguments in favour of regional pay. Obviously it costs more to live in some parts of the country, and civil servants in the south east are comparatively worse off. But when people retire, those with higher salaries in the SE will presumably have higher pensions, but will be free to move to a cheaper part of the country & therefore be much better off than their local counterparts.

Or would public sector pensions be adjusted according to your postcode?

It's all spin anyway.

What will happen when a vacancy arises for, say, a nuclear scientist in an area of relatively low pay. That's not a vacancy that can be readily filled - a highly qualified specailist is required and those specailists tend to congregate in the South.

In order to fill that vacancy they will need to coerce a Southern-based specialist to move to the poorer area. Theyll either do it through the carrot of promotion (which leads to grade devalue and even higher wage when he returns to another job in the South) or they will pay a Recruitment and Retention Allowance to make up his salary while he's in the poorer paid area.

And it will start with them doing this for specailists, but before long they'll be doing it for all vacancies.

Regional pay objective achieved? - Tick.

Salary Bill Reduced? - work in progress.

True, wet. I am not a civil servant but did relocate from the SE to the midlands for my current job. I wouldn't have bothered for a much lower salary. So perhaps this will all backfire.

It's going to backfire spectacularly.

The 3 groups that will ahve it implemented first are:

DWP - they are pretty militant and won't take this lying down

Borders Agency - they just need to organise their strike action at the start of the Oylmpics for maximum effect

DVLA

Light the blue touch paper

But presumably, some civil servants in London may support these proposals, perhaps mistakenly because they think it will lead to better pay for themselves instead of just worse pay for everyone else? So do you think the unions will definitely vote for strike action?

London Civil servants don't have anything to worry about - they're on the highest level nationally when you include their London Weighting. But they will not support regional pay as they know that if they have to move they would 'mark time' i.e. no pay increase at all.

South West area civil servants are also reasonably OK as they too are in area of higher pay.

Civil servants in Wales and the NE should be really concerned.

Yes, the PCS will definitely strike over this.

In the past few years we've had:

2 year pay freeze
significant reduction in our redundancy terms - just before announcing the redundancies
pension uprates changed to lower CPI rather than RPI
privitisation looming

.. and a recruitment freeze - so we're all doing at least 2 people's work