Gorst confirms compulsory redundancies are coming

Wednesday 16 September 2015

States workers will be forced to take redundancy to help balance the books, says Chief Minister Ian Gorst.

He has confirmed for the first time that public sector staff will be forced to take pay-offs to leave their jobs as part of ministers’ programme of reforms to solve the £145 million black hole.

The new Treasury Minister, Senator Alan Maclean, has already announced that 104 applications for voluntary redundancy have been accepted, that up to 100 jobs could also be cut by not replacing some departing staff, and that more money will be saved through a pay freeze.

But those proposals have already led to confrontation with unions, who are threatening industrial action – Unite, Jersey’s biggest union, are balloting members about how to fight the proposals, and professional/management union Unison have voted overwhelmingly for industrial action.

Senator Gorst now says that to meet the £70 million target for reducing the States’ paybill, some States workers are going to have to be told that they’re no longer needed.

He said: “In some areas there will need to be compulsory redundancies.

“We said all along that we would go through voluntary redundancy and reorganisation and that we would have pay restraint, and then we would consider whether compulsory redundancies were necessary and we thought that they probably would be.

“But we need to go back. There are a number of people who applied for voluntary redundancy who were older and therefore did not fit within the payback period, so we did not accept them.

“We are now devising a scheme for those who are older and nearer to retirement with a smaller payback amount.

“There are a number of pieces of work that have got to be undertaken prior to getting to that point.”