SSCL update Jan 2018

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NPS Shared Services Centre (SSCL) failings and the Impact on staff – 23 January 2018

A briefing for the JUFCPG from Napo, the Trade Union and Professional Association for Probation and Family Court Staff

Since its creation in 2014 the National Probation Service (NPS) has been subject to major HR service failures. These are all linked by two related flaws:

  • A shared service system that does not adequately and safely account for the different terms and conditions of NPS staff, built into the system by the National Staff Transfer Agreement and TUPE protections.
  • Particular structural flaws linked to two competing pension schemes which undermine the core ‘basic assumptions’ that the shared service model rely upon.

Staff and the unions were promised that a new single operating system (aka SOP) introduced by the Shared Service Centre (SSCL) in February would address all of the weaknesses up to this point. The reality has been tragic. The SOP has increased the problems and amplified the depth and danger of the key structural and systematic flaw.

Examples of NPS service failures in 2016-17 include:

Pay and Tax

  • Hundreds of incorrect payment of wages, particularly where there had been any change to normal monthly payments (e.g. sick pay, changes in hours, etc.)
  • Several hundred new employees going several months without being paid at all – some having to also meet additional phone bills from having to sort out problems using the SSCL helpline, which charges at premium rates!
  • Continuing failure to include holiday pay in wage and pension calculations for sessional staff.
  • Non-payment of pro-rata pay awards to staff who’d left the service mid-year, leading to pension and tax readjustments – the NPS struggling to address this as they’d not tasked anyone to keep a list of leavers.
  • Pay and tax errors being repeated and increased by automatic adjustments being made by the SSCL computer which were not correct. The computer then seeks to correct its error, but makes wrong assumptions again, thus creating a new error, and perpetuating the misery.
  • Retention payments to avoid leapfrogging where higher starting pay is required not being paid, thus undermining efforts to recruit and retain staff.
  • Possible failures to pay contractual progression, as pay data shared with  unions shows too many staff at or near the minima of their band for the numbers known to have been recruited. The unions are trying to verify these concerns but poor HR records mean this is challenging – one member being asked to produce every pay slip for the past 6 years!
  • These failings mean that accurate P60’s have not and cannot be issued to most staff in the NPS.

Pensions

  • Failure to collect pension contributions from any staff who have ‘atypical’ or changes to their monthly pay since the introduction of SOP (see more below).
  • Continued miscalculation of contributions arising from additional work since 2014.
  • Failures to engage with IHER applications in legacy cases for CRCs.
  • Regular miscalculations of length of service.
  • Current concerns about potential failure to auto-enroll recent new starters in the LGPS.
  • These failures mean the pension provider cannot issue annual pension statements with any confidence. Staff approaching retirement are also not being issued with estimates or quotes until after their leave date, giving rise to challenges where any details are disputed.

Contracts

  • Staff working alongside Prison service employees being issued NOMS contracts containing the wrong terms and conditions e.g. LGPS but NOMS leave; the wrong pay bands; etc.
  • Line managers being advised wrongly on compensation payments, leading to errors in payments or delays in processing exit payments, including in cases of long term work related stress – thus giving rise to legal challenges around injury at work.
  • Failure to apply statutory shared parental leave provisions until May 2017
  • The wrong maternity leave being paid to NPS staff until harmonisation of terms in May 2017. Subsequently, no pension contributions have been taken from those on maternity leave.
  • Staff re-entering probation after a break in service being told ‘they don’t exist’ and being refused contracts by the SSCL computer due to a loss of their previous records.

Reasonable Adjustments

  • Assisted technology users have had a nightmare as the processes were not matched and occupational health recommendations are routinely unmet.

These problems are increased by the less than open senior management response. In early 2017 Napo wrote to the Minister about the concerns only for him to write back saying that the SOP system had sorted the problems out – clearly he had been misinformed.

The latest discovery around the failure to collect pension contributions prompt two questions that undermine any confidence or trust in the SSCL system. Either the SOP system wasn’t tested against the requirements of the LGPS as unions, staff and Ministers were promised or they were tested at surface levels and the inherent conflict between the two pension schemes is the cause of the on-going failings.

However, we fear that the problem is more deep routed. The PCSPS is unique. It is an unfunded scheme run by a government and lacks the usual constraints and accountabilities on funded schemes. The language of pensions bleeds into many aspects of HR process that could not happen if the scheme was funded – for example contractual payments to staff leaving on capability grounds who do not qualify for early ill health retirement are based upon ‘reckonable service’. Redundancy payments are obviously separate from pension schemes in most circumstances but successive governments have run the PCSPS on Maxwellian principles.

This means the core basic assumptions, and the language triggers that the SSCL processes work from are intrinsically linked to the assumptions of the PCSPS. Where these then don’t match the systems become confused. The risk is that SOP, as a form of artificial intelligence, tries to correct these ‘errors’ and so amplifies them. It assumes it cannot be wrong and the information it received must have been incorrect when in fact the basic assumptions it is working from are flawed and incorrect. It not only keeps digging but starts tunnelling in circles until the whole floor risks collapse.

We have seen this tendency repeatedly with incorrect payments. When an NPS employee received a new payment that didn’t correlate to a Prison service pay point the computer seems to have autocorrected the ‘error’ when in fact it was the assumption it was using that was incorrect. This appears to have been at the root of many of the over and under payment problems. The computer has then ‘autocorrected’ the amount needed to correct the mistake, again using formulas that have been learned from previous prison service mistakes but the NPS has different pay scales so these ‘auto-corrections’ are random.   Confused it then re-adjusts, even when there has been an attempted manual override and the problem starts again. When a PAYE issue arose in London it took over 12 months to stop this cycle.

If SOP is now making this problem with pensions – the only logical explanation beyond their senior leaders having lied to NPS senior leaders, unions and Ministers - it is impossible to see how the problem can be rectified until the NPS is withdrawn from the SSCL process. This could easily be achieved by deeming the NPS to be a Next-Steps Agency (the same status afforded Cafcass by the MoJ - largely because it too is aligned to the LGPS). However, politicians within the MoJ are resistant to this as it would embarrass them by exposing the nudity of the HMPPS.

The alternative escape would be terminating the SSCL contract. However, Napo’s understanding is that SSCL is partly owned by the Cabinet Office and so the economic and political stakes seem to make this unlikely.