At last months Napo AGM, a series of Emergency Motions were debated. One of these called upon Napo General Secretary Ian Lawrence to write to Jacky Tiotto the Chief Executive Officer of Cafcass to seek a meeting as a matter of urgency to discuss the continuing unsustainable high workloads in Cafcass.
Since our AGM took place, it has come to Napo’s attention that the Chief Executive has been quoted in a recent article in the publication: ‘Children and Young People Now’, which stated: “Tiotto said she is unsure what measures were needed to tackle the retention issue”.
Unless Ms. Tiotto has been misquoted, this report has caused considerable concern among Cafcass members as Napo and UNISON have regularly discussed the growing retention issues within the organisation where Napo has consistently raised solutions that would be needed to tackle it.
The letter from Napo references the above and seeks a discussion with the Cafcass CEO to further explore Napo’s ideas about how to reduce workloads and improve recruitment and retention. One of these measures, as the AGM motion instructed us to propose, is for the CEO to seek authority to increase all salary points by £2000 per annum from 1st January 2024.
At the time of writing, we have yet to receive any response to the letter dated 16th November.
A letter has now been received from the Employer and is being considered by the Cafcass Section Executive. We will update members a soon as we can.