i see today IDS is trying to make out he’s a good gut telling osborne to stay out of his universal credit plans ?

How many lives could have been saved if that money had been paid out in social security – as opposed to syphoning the money away via sanctions.

Seems as though they’re keeping money which should have gone towards benefits. Now isn’t this just a bit dishonest? Is IDS taking a cut? I think we should be tole!

This is criminal how can they do this whilst people need food banks, they are pure evil the lot of them, I’m OK Joe, they should all be put on trial.

The Department for Work and Pension’s pre-determined bonus pot is top sliced off the Department’s salary budget and a major source of grievance within the Department, given that the way in which bonuses are awarded is very subjective, being a decision for one’s line manager. I say pre-determined, because a fixed proportion of staff must not receive a bonus in order that the scheme be seen as ‘fair’ and the total amount of the bonuses not exceed the size of the Treasury determined pot. As a consequence, one’s line manager may find their judgment disputed, if they have awarded too many bonuses by number or by amount.

Crucially, it is not possible for one’s line manager to say, at the start of the performance year, if you do Y and Z or persecute X number of clients that you will definitely qualify for a bonus of this amount. Consequently, it was rare, in my experience to find any that took the bonus scheme into account when undertaking their duties. And, any way, given that there were so few bonus bands, one quite often found colleagues who had been coasting all year, receiving the same amount as others who had been performing over and above the norm. Unsurprisingly, such results did precious little for morale.

There is, therefore, little connection between the bonus scheme and the behaviour of staff towards, for example, DWP’s clients as individuals or groups. Some DWP staff do not like the people whom they are meant to serve and have never needed a bonus scheme to adopt that attitude. I never needed a bonus to dislike some of the employers (and external partners) with whom I had to work. I just did my best, mostly successfully, to hide it and do my job to the best of my ability (and in line with my Socialist principles and take on the public service ethos).

Bonus amounts are calculated by grade. The higher up the pay scale you are, the greater amount of the bonus you receive. Again, this is a further reason for disaffection with the scheme as, the further one is away from public facing roles, the greater one’s potential bonus. Moreover, although one pays tax and NI on the bonuses, because they are non-consolidated, they do not count towards the calculation of one’s Civil Service Pension on retirement.

PCS has, quite rightly, always been opposed to this bonus scheme and previous iterations as a matter of principle, but to no avail. However, they were scrapped for a brief while, when the Chief Executive Office of the Yorkshire Bank became CEO of Jobcentre Plus. He felt they were incompatible with efforts to encourage people to work as teams. Seemingly, he had not got the management consultant’s memo that they were an excellent motivational tool. There is also not one shred of empirical evidence that bonuses actually increase productivity in any sustainable way. Although they may be one of the factors behind the mis-selling of, say, financial products like payment protection insurance.

One should not, of course, forget that part of DWP’s staffing cadre are solely involved with pension take up and administration as well as other areas of activity wholly un-associated with the administration of benefits, claimed by working age clients and subject to conditionality. And, of course, assessments for entitlement to Employment and Support Allowance and Personal Independence Payment are outsourced to companies whose staff are not on DWP’s payroll.

To be concise, few in DWP want the bonus scheme. In addition, some people do not need a bonus to behave vindicatively towards DWP’s clients. They were doing so, to my knowledge, before any bonus scheme was in place. As an aside, I look forward to a right wing blogger, inspired one suspects by an article in the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph, foaming at the keyboard about bonuses for Civil Servants at the Ministry of Defence. Such displays have become as much part of the calendar as fireworks on November 5th, but a lot less illuminating.

John Turner doesn’t mention whether performance related pay in DWP these days still has the highly motivational feature whereby staff (including quite junior clericals) who are on the top of their pay grade and who qualify for performance related increases don’t get a pay increase but get all their increase in the form of a non-consolidated (i.e. does not go towards the pension) lump swum bonus – usually a few hundred pounds. Headline numbers like these never say if they include these bonuses or not.