Over 1,000 passport office staff on strike this month over 'slap-in-the-face' pay offer

Staff at all eight passport processing centres across the UK started five-weeks of strike action on 3 April.

More than 1,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union in Glasgow, Durham, Liverpool, Southport, Peterborough, London, Newport and Belfast passport centres are on a rotating strike, as part of the unions targeted industrial action across the civil service.

Zak Vallely, a passport examiner at the London passport office talked to LFF about the ‘slap-in-the-face’ 2% pay offer and the loss of reputation within civil service jobs.  

“It’s just a real shame that this profession, which used to have this reputation of being a job for life and being protected and having a gold plate of pension, that a lot of people in it right now are struggling,” Vallely said.

“Particulary in this office, the squeeze is really bad with regards to housing and transport and all the costs associated with living in London.”

Civil servants were offered a 2% pay rise, the lowest in the public sector, which Vallely called ‘painfully low’ and a ‘slap-in-the-face’, especially as many civil servants felt they had worked hard throughout the pandemic to keep public services running.

Something Vallely has heard colleagues saying a lot is, ‘I found a better-paying job in the private sector’, or ‘I can’t find a promotion opportunity quick enough, and I just can’t afford the living situation that I’m in.’

He added that the sector is losing good staff who are passionate about public services over low pay.

“There is opportunity to rise in the civil service, but it shouldn’t have to be that way for you to live in the place where your office is.

“For a lot of people, the feeling is that at certain grades in the civil service, you just can’t afford to live in London and you’d have to get a job in the private sector.

“We have hundreds of staff in London at lower grades, and they should be able to afford to live where their work is.”

Figures show 40,000 civil servants are currently using foodbanks whilst 45,000 are claiming benefits, including the people who administer them in job centres.

“Lots of other public sector workers are getting a pay rise at the moment, and we’re so happy to see that, but we’d like to see our members get treated in a similar manner and get a pay rise themselves,” added Vallely.

Passport disruption inevitable

According to a union source, the passport office is seeing a huge amount of applications coming into the system before Easter and in the run up to summer, with not close to enough staff to clear them.

Delays are therefore inevitable they said, as a similar level of demand for passport renewals is expected this year as there was last year, meaning there will be a ‘tremendous impact’ due to strike action.

The source added that the passport office in Glasgow has up to 400 examiners usually, whilst yesterday there were just three, this results in the work being shovelled out to other offices, which are also empty as there is not enough staff to deal with the millions of applications coming in.

It is understood that the Home Office is deploying staff who have previously worked on Passport Offices to mitigate the impact on services, however the union source stressed the importance of having a secure passport service and the impact of outsourcing workers without proper training.

Human trafficking and international espionage were amongst the examples used to emphasise the risks of not providing the right level of training for people being brought in to work in the passport system to cover striking staff.    

Civil servants ‘keep this country going’

Lois Austin, PCS Union Official, on the picket line this morning with striking workers said civil servants make up the ‘social fabric of our society’, and without them, ‘many things just do not work’.

She asserted that their demand for a 10% pay increase is reasonable when members face in-work poverty and have suffered pay cuts and freezes since 2007.

Austin said: “Our message to the government is: value government workers.

“Pay them a proper wage, as without them, our society would grind to a halt. They do all sorts of jobs, they ensure that the food we eat is safe, they ensure the roads we travel on are safe and maintained, they deliver benefits to the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society.

“Let’s have meaningful talks about how we lift government workers out of poverty and pay them a decent wage.”

President of PCS, Fran Heathcote, told LFF yesterday that civil service strike action has the potential to ramp up over summer if the government continue to stonewall the union over pay talks.

Hannah Davenport is trade union reporter at Left Foot Forward

Left Foot Forward’s trade union reporting is supported by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

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