Cheap labour is being used to replace civil service jobs and undermine pay rates in sensitive benefit services. Private sector workers being recruited to work alongside professional civil servants to handle tax credit claims at HM Revenue and Customs call centres are to be paid up to £3,300 a year less, advertisements placed by one of the winning contractors, Teleperformance UK, reveal.
They are also being recruited for “permanent” jobs, according to the adverts, despite Government claims that the scheme is only being run on a “trial” basis.
The scheme to bring in private companies to handle sensitive public sector work has already provoked one-day strikes and walkouts by furious civil servants who believe ministers have secret plans to phase out their work and privatise the service.
Some 20,000 of the union’s 56,000 members in HMRC have already walked out in opposition to the trial using private staff at two contact centres in Bathgate, Scotland, and Lillyhall, Cumbria. The privately-employed workers will handle enquiries about tax credits and have access to sensitive data about the people entitled to claim them.
Now it is becoming clear that the new staff will be paid at a lower grade – between £14,000 and £16,500, nearly all at the lowest rate – than proper civil servants doing the same job. HMRC has faced 30,000 job cuts since its merger in 2005 – and the Government plans to cut a further 10,000 jobs.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, which is organising the action, said: “Our members in tax offices just want to do a good job and provide the best help they can to taxpayers. But their task is being made harder by the fact there are ever fewer of them working in fewer offices as a result of the Government’s cuts. Instead of cutting and handing public money to private companies who are scandalously undercutting civil service pay rates, ministers should be investing in their own staff.”
A spokeswoman for Teleperformance UK would only say: “We are unable to comment.”
HMRC said: “The amount the companies involved pay their staff is a matter for the company concerned, not HMRC. The trial will not involve losing, outsourcing or seeking to replace any HMRC jobs – this is simply an exercise to see what we can learn to help us improve. In line with the principles of transparency, we intend to publish a summary of the trial and our evaluation once it is complete. HMRC ran an open and transparent tender for the trial, and priority is to make sure that those private sector staff taking part adhere to the same rules and customer standards as those employed by the department.
“The integrity and confidentiality of customer information is – as ever – an absolute priority. HMRC will do nothing that compromises the department’s data security standards.”
