The States has set out its case as it tries to fights off claims that changes it made to its employees’ final salary pension scheme a decade ago went beyond its powers.
It yesterday responded to the cases being made in front of an Industrial Disputes Tribunal by The Guernsey Police Association, representing some 53 people, and a group known as the G50 which includes a range of civil servants and is made up of 209 people.
The States moved away from the final salary pension scheme in 2016 in a bid to make pension arrangements more affordable to the public purse.
The States case was set out by Advocate Alison Ozanne.
It was in starkly different terms to the two applicants, which had argued pension benefits were part of employment contracts.
She said that the GPA and G50 were asking the tribunal to construe the employment contracts in a certain way to give the complainants certain rights, which in due course were breached by the States therefore giving them the right to sue through the Royal Court for breach of contract.
But they were, she argued, relying on implied terms in the employment contracts – they had never been able to point to express terms.
“It’s not the contracts that are being varied, it’s the rules that are being varied,” she said.
“They are completely different things.”
The States was not arguing that there was an implied term to amend the contract, as its opponents had suggested earlier in the proceedings, she said, its focus was on the rules.
And these rules were ambulatory, essentially as they change so does the contract.
“What the claimants are doing is asking for convoluted implied terms to be incorporated into the contract,” she said.
In the Royal Court, if you were contending for implied terms, you have to spell out what they are.
She stressed that it was not the job of the tribunal to fix a contract, but simply to interpret its terms.
“What has been varied and changed are the rules to the pension scheme. These are changes that have been made entirely legitimately by the States of Guernsey following sufficient consultation with the PCC.”
While they knew there was a dispute, the job of the tribunal was to identify what it was and the claimants needed to tell the panel what their claim was and what they want it to do about it.
“What I haven’t heard clearly from my friends is what their claim is.”
The parties have spent some time on whether the pension rules were subordinate legislation or not.
If they are, the States has power to amend them as they would any law subject to following a fair process.
Advocate Ozanne is today taking the tribunal through the relevant evidence before concluding her arguments.
There is then a period for all those involved to make rebuttals.