The Branch Responds to the FCA’s Pay Announcement.
The organisation has shared its pay outcomes for 2025 and in this post we break down how they compare to member’s pay asks.
Unite Branch Officers – 30 January 2025
Next week we will ballot members on whether they accept or reject the FCA’s pay award. This will be their opportunity to feed back on the pay award and have their say on what we do next as a Branch.
Whilst engagement from the FCA has resulted in some gained ground on specific asks, the outcome will fall short of inflation for most staff and appears to have been impacted by the NI increases despite assurances otherwise. It will be a disappointing result for many of us who have seen real and actual pay cuts year after year.
The Staff Representative Group did fantastic work surveying staff, investing significant time in reading and collating all the responses, and feeding that into the engagement. Your responses gave that strength. Unfortunately the engagement didn’t amount to a meaningful consultation, since key information – including the actual pay package – was not provided to the SCC. We, alongside the SRG are disappointed to see that the assurances that were provided by the organisation on pay and NI were not honoured. We did our best to raise our concerns by pushing for a slot at PeopleCo, with no results.
Without trade union recognition, the FCA is able to maintain the weakest form of staff representation legally allowable and set pay as it wishes without engaging in the collective bargaining or negotiation almost every other public sector employer in the UK carries out with its staff on pay.
This year’s award demonstrates why we need Trade Union recognition to ensure collective bargaining and negotiation over pay, terms and conditions.
What can members do next?
- Vote to accept or reject the pay outcome in favour of further talks or action in our upcoming members ballot.
- Come and share your views with us on pay at our stalls on the 15th Floor, Leeds and Edinburgh in February.
- Make this is the last year that the FCA dictates your pay by supporting and advocating trade union recognition when we make the case this year.
Break Down of the Pay Award
Key improvements:
- Simpler flexible benefits calculation with a ‘no-one worse off’ rule.
- Graduates and Apprentices see significant above-average improvements to their pay.
- Any staff member currently paid below their pay band minimum and achieves a performance grade ‘3’ can be uplifted to their pay band minimum regardless of the size of increase.
- Pay differences between performance grades 2, 3 and 4 have been improved so they are not as strongly weighted towards punishment.
- Those currently paid above their pay band will still benefit from some performance-related pay increase.
- The FCA will consider establishing an out of cycle anomalies pot to address identified pay discrepancies.
Key issues:
- The headline average 3.6% increase in pay is 0.1% above RPI inflation currently at 3.5% and is biased up by outlier increases meaning most of us will not see the advertised 3.6% increase, most of us will not keep up with inflation and 15% of staff stand no chance of doing so.
- In effect it appears that pay this year has been impacted by the NI increases which the organisation assured staff reps it would absorb.
- ExCo have again chosen to effectively abolish base pay increases, relying instead on entirely performance-related pay still weighted slightly more towards punishment rather than reward. These weighings differ according to where you are in the payband.
- By continuing to entirely award pay based on a discriminatory performance grading system, the FCA is on track to knowingly discriminate against ethnic minority staff and staff with disabilities in this performance round (based on persistent and consistent analysis of the last three years of performance grade data).
|
Our Ask |
RAG |
Outcome |
|---|---|---|
|
Ensure all staff receive a base pay uplift at least in line with RPI inflation (currently 2.7%) independent of performance. |
A |
Another year where effective base pay uplifts have been abolished in favour of entirely performance-based pay. Average headline pay just about meets inflation however this is weighted up by significant outlier increases to a few. 15% of staff will not receive anything close to inflation. |
|
Address indirect discrimination crystalised in performance related pay. |
R |
Possibility of an anomalies pot to rectify discriminatory outcomes. However, approach to pay compounds the impact of a highly discriminatory performance grading system. |
|
Reward performance instead of engaging in punishment. |
A |
Performance pay matrix still weighted towards greater punishment for perceived ‘poor’ performance over reward for good performance, however, not as strongly. |
|
Uplift all staff to at least the minimum of their pay band. |
A |
All staff still below their pay band minimum and who achieve a performance grade ‘3’ this year can reach pay band minimum regardless of the pre-existing gap. We still advocate that all staff should be paid at least their pay band minimum. |
|
Bridge the gap between Corporate and Regulatory pay bands. |
R |
No action taken. |
|
Graduates get paid at least the minimum their previous cohort did in real and absolute terms when progressing to the second year of their scheme. |
G |
Graduates receive significant pay uplifts. Ask delivered. |
|
Bridge the gap between Graduate and Apprentice pay bands and that of their Associate colleagues. |
G |
Graduates and apprentices receive significant pay uplifts. Ask delivered. |
|
Longer-term investment in staff to re-value their roles and work. |
R |
No action yet taken. |
|
Clearer comms on pay. |
A |
Improvements made to comms and consulted on with the SCC. However, headline average figure is misleading and the comparison to CPI instead of RPI inflation is biased. |
For more details on each of these asks including a summary of the economic conditions faced by staff, benchmarking, and an assessment of the employers ability to pay, see our Pay Ask document.
It is worth highlighting that staff at the FCA and PSR are among the few public-sector employees in the entire country without the ability to engage in negotiation or collective bargaining on pay, terms and conditions through a recognised trade union.
This means ‘we get what we’re given’ which has in practice led to a 20-25% decline in our real and absolute take-home pay in just 4 years.
In light of the new Employment Rights Bill, we look forward to discussing how that will change in 2025.
