THOUSANDS of pounds in ‘retention payments’ – additional sums paid to attract and retain public-sector workers – are regularly being made by the government, a freedom-of-information request has revealed.
States Employment Board vice-chair Constable Andy Jehan said he had not been aware of the payments – which sit outside the scope of the government’s pay scales and do not form part of ordinary salaries – and that the board had not been asked to approve those set out in the government’s FoI response.
However, he added that he was aware of recruitment challenges in some departments, such as Treasury and Health.
‘If you are looking for an accountant, for example, you are competing with the finance industry and you may have to pay a premium,’ Mr Jehan said, adding that the government tried to make prospective employees aware of the package, including pension entitlement, offered by the public sector.
According to the FoI response, such payments are made ‘where market pressures would otherwise prevent the Government of Jersey from being able to recruit or retain staff in sufficient numbers at the salary for jobs of that grade’.
Such payments were made to civil servants in five departments in April this year, the highest being £4,833 to an officer in the Treasury and Exchequer Department.
Under the authorisation process explained in the government’s response, the responsible officer must authorise the payments, and consult the chief people and transformation officer.
If the total remuneration (including any additional payments) is above £100,000, a formal request must be submitted to, and approved by, the States Employment Board under the published protocols.
Last year, around 60 civil servants and 26 manual workers benefited from these payments, which the government said were typically for between one and three years, although one-off payments were made ‘by exception’.
The largest number of these – 33 – were paid to staff in the Children, Young People, Education and Skills Department.
The government claimed it ‘did not hold information’ about the average monthly or annual payments, and said it was not required under the FoI law ‘to create new data sets specifically for this purpose’.
However, it said that the highest monthly payments made in April this year to officers in the Chief Operating Office, the Economy Department, Health and Community Service, and Strategic Policy, Planning and Performance were, respectively, £1,100, £833, £1,763 and £833.
‘Fewer than five’ officers were recipients in each of those departments, while six received payments in the Treasury, including the largest payout of £4,833.
The government said such payments were ‘deemed suitable’ when: ‘The post has been advertised on one or more occasions and a suitable applicant could not be recruited; a pay benchmarking exercise shows that other similar organisations offer a recruitment and retention allowance or a higher salary for the same role; there is a national or local skills shortage where we are competing with several other employers for these roles; the post is highly specialised with a limited number of potential applicants.’
The earliest record held of a ‘retention allowance’ payment is November 2017, ‘although it is likely they may have been used in various forms before the centralised records [that are] currently held,’ it said.
Deputy Lyndsay Feltham, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said that retention payments were not something that she was aware of.
‘It has not been something that PAC has looked at so far, but, depending on the FoI response that is published, it may be something that I would want to put on an agenda for future discussion,’ she said.
