State to reduce registration fee for social workers to €100 a year

In a further Government incentive aimed at encouraging support for the renegotiated Croke Park agreement, the cost of statutory registration for social workers and other health professionals will be reduced from €295 a year to €100 a year until 2016.

Details of the move are set out in a further “side letter” between the Government and unions to emerge since the Labour Relations Commission produced proposals for a new Croke Park deal last week.

Trade union Impact had previously advised qualified social workers not to sign up to the new statutory social workers’ register on the basis the proposed fee was too high.

In the letter sent to trade unions in recent days, the secretary general of the Department of Health, Ambrose McLoughlin, said if the deal was ratified arrangements would be made between the Department of Health and Coru (the umbrella body for the statutory regulation of health and social care professionals) “such that the effective amount payable for registration by health and social care professionals will be no greater than €100 per annum to the end of 2016”.

Talks with Coru

“The department will engage directly with Coru at that time to review the matter.”

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has said letters to clarify points of understanding between sectoral management and unions that are specific to one group or sector are “a common and long-standing feature of industrial relations collective agreements”.

However, it has declined to publish these side letters or even to say how many of them have been issued.

Separately, the executive of the Unite trade union is to recommend to members that they reject the proposed renegotiated Croke Park deal. Unite national co-ordinator Walter Cullen described the proposed deal as “a sugar-coated poison pill”.

The national executive council of Siptu, the State’s largest union, considered the proposals for a new Croke Park deal yesterday but, as expected, did not make a decision on whether to make a recommendation.

The Siptu executive council will reconvene next week to consider the issue further.

Speaking after the meeting, Siptu president Jack O’Connor said the proposals for a renegotiated Croke Park agreement represented the best that could be obtained through negotiation at this point.

“I think there would be a view here that a single, centralised agreement covering all public service workers is by far the best for every single person who works in the public service. The issue is whether another strategy would produce a better single, centralised public service agreement or not.”

Pay cuts

Mr Cullen said Unite believed that pay cuts were the wrong thing to do. He said the net savings would be minuscule compared to the misery the cuts would impose on public service staff. “The sacrifices being asked of public servants will not achieve what the Government wants to achieve in terms of returning the economy to growth.”

Mr Cullen said Unite would not be bound by any decision in relation to accepting the deal other than the decision of its members in its own ballot.

“We will ballot our members and work with other unions that want to reject this agreement as well, and then we will decide on the basis of the outcome of the ballot in terms of the unions on what we will do at that stage.

“We do not consider ourselves to be bound by any decision other than the decision of our own members.”

Unite has about 6,500 members across the public service.