Fairer ways to cut costs than through increments - Howlin

THERE WERE fairer ways to control the cost of public sector pay than suspending increments because lower paid and frontline staff would be most affected, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin told the Dáil.

He said 14 per cent or 2,665 of 13,000 civil servants were on salaries of €70,000 or more and eligible for increments. But “increments are part of basic pay” and it would be “extremely difficult to pick out any cohort of people and say we going to fundamentally alter the basics of their pay”.

He was open to considering this “but I will not dislodge the fundamental architecture of the Croke Park agreement because it is delivering”. There were fairer ways “to control the cost of public pay given that only a proportion of public servants, in particular lower paid and frontline staff, would be affected by the suspension of increments.”

Mr Howlin said the Labour Court had determined that increments were part of basic pay. They had been part of the basic pay scale of public servants since the foundation of the State, and people knew the range of their pay scale when they joined.

It would be a “very dramatic change to interrupt that” because people who were at the top of the scale would not be touched “only those at the start of the scale”.

The Minister told Fianna Fáil spokesman Sean Fleming that the total full-year cost of increments in various sectors apart from local authorities was an estimated €180 million “and less than half that sum this year”.

The fall was due in part due to reduced recruitment, falling numbers of public servants and more reaching the top level of their pay scale.

Mr Fleming said the 14 per cent figure of 2,665 civil servants on levels above €70,000 meant that 86 per cent of civil servants on increments were on salaries below €70,000.

Raising the issue of increments during Dáil question time, the Laois-Offaly TD said he wanted people to know the facts “including Ministers, who attack the concept of increments and who are perhaps happy to attack 86 per cent of civil servants because they feel they are playing to their own political support base by doing that”.

He called on the Minister to reconsider his approach, which was “to use those low-paid workers as a shield so the issue in regard to high paid workers on increments is not examined”.