Cafcass’ Own Staff Survey Shows Growing Pay, Workloads, and Bullying Concerns

On 11 June, Cafcass published its staff survey results in an online meeting with staff, and the survey showed many positive responses focused around the work itself along with professional pride and strong team connections.

But it highlighted major concerns from hundreds of Cafcass staff around workloads and pay, issues that Napo has been raising as ongoing problems for years. Far too many staff also reported that they have been subjected to bullying or harassment, an issue which we have told Cafcass that they should tackle more seriously.

Workloads

A majority of 1237 social work staff said they need contracted hours to be respected and sustainable (52%) and work-life balance to be maintained (54%). 68% said ‘having the resources to do roles well is a challenge’.

The staff survey came about when workload pressures, particularly in public law, have suddenly risen. But it has been an ongoing issue for years, as Napo’s own workload and TOIL surveys have shown consistently. Every time, our surveys have shown staff work over their hours and are not managing safe workloads. We have asked Cafcass to send out our survey questions, or similar, in their own staff surveys to get a clearer picture, but they have not agreed to this.

We also find it particularly concerning that, in the online staff meeting presenting the staff survey findings, Cafcass CEO Jacky Tiotto reportedly said that she is ‘not sure what the answer is’ to resolve workload pressures.

Napo’s response

We have repeatedly put forward suggested measures that are needed to start tackling unsafe workloads.

Just a few months ago, following Napo’s workload and TOIL survey, we have called on Cafcass to:

• carry out a time-and-motion study for practitioners and management to inform a functionable and realistic workload measurement tool.
• implement a transparent way for staff to record the accruing of TOIL.
• encourage all staff to take their owed TOIL and ask all managers to encourage and ensure the same.
• seek extensive additional funding from the Ministry of Justice to ensure that workloads can be brought down to the levels outlined in this survey that staff consider to be safe.

We also called on the Ministry of Justice, Cabinet Office, and Treasury to ensure Cafcass has the funding necessary to be fully staffed by staff who can work no more than 37 hours a week and hold a safe workload.

Unfortunately, Cafcass responded to these requests only to say that they believe the present TOIL policy is appropriate and proportionate, and that they do not agree to a time-and-motion study.

We presented solutions to reduce workloads, Cafcass ignored these, and now some 600 Cafcass practitioners have said they are concerned about workloads.

Pay

Cafcass’ internal article on the survey results says “Colleagues across all teams have told us that remuneration feels like it has fallen behind Local Authorities and the rising cost of living. Half of social work practitioners told us pay does not feel fair”.

Napo has warned about this for a long time, and after our members decisively rejected last year’s pay offer we went into dispute with Cafcass. Our pay claim this year, like in previous years, details how Cafcass roles have been significantly de-valued, how pay is becoming less competitive versus the local authorities who Cafcass primarily recruits from, and how below-inflation rises are harming our members’ living standards.

Now, Cafcass’ own survey demonstrates that a majority of staff are at least a little angry about their pay. As we have warned over and over, low pay has an impact on the service. If Cafcass can’t pay decent salaries, recruitment and retention becomes more difficult, which has a knock-on effect on workloads.

1 in 20 staff report bullying – and Cafcass CEO makes an unwelcome comment

The third major issue to come out of Cafcass’ survey was that 117 staff, which is 7% of respondents and 1 in 20 staff, reported experiencing bullying and harassment. Half of these staff said they did not know how to raise the issue.

In Cafcass’ article, they say “We are committed to understanding this better and having respectful conversations where these are needed” which does feel like a somewhat lukewarm commitment to over 100 staff reporting workplace bullying.

But even more concerning was the response to the result made by Jacky Tiotto in the live meeting with staff, where she has been quoted as saying:  “in some of those places where we’re managing performance, people are interpreting that as being harassed and bullied”.

Napo members have already written to us to express anger at what they believe is a belittling of bullying and harassment. Napo hold to the principle that Bullying and Harassment should not be even slightly tolerated in the workplace, and neither these dismissive comments by the CEO nor the brief comment in Cafcass’ written article demonstrate a commitment to combat this. Worryingly, half of the staff responding to the survey said they did not know how to raise bullying as an issue, and Napo will be looking to the employer to provide urgent advice or support on how to raise concerns.

Napo advice to members

We encourage all staff to report any concerns they have about bullying and harassment, regardless of whoever it is from, and to whatever degree it is causing you distress.

Tell your line manager -or their manager if your line manager is believed to be causing bullying or harassment-, tell your union, and keep a written record or every incident and when and where it happened. Even if it is something you consider to be minor, we encourage you to make a note of it and let a union rep know.

Please read Cafcass’ Employee Relations Policy on Dignity At Work. The policy itself is helpful, and we think it’s a missed opportunity that Cafcass did not take the opportunity to reinforce their own policy.

Cafcass has declined to make bullying a national priority because it has only been reported in certain areas rather than across the organisation.

In Napo’s view it should be a national priority because this has been reported in six out of nineteen operational service areas and in some corporate/business service teams. To us, that means it not isolated and to treat it as a national issue would help to prevent bullying from occurring elsewhere.

What next?

Napo will take our concerns from these survey results forward to the next Partnership meeting, and use the results in our pay negotiations and attempt to persuade the government to fund Cafcass properly.

We want to hear from all Cafcass staff about your experiences with workloads. You already gave us some ideas through the workloads survey. But we want to hear more than the numbers.

We’re asking you to send Napo a voice clip or a written statement -which can be anonymised if you wish- about how your workload is at the moment.

And again, we encourage you to report any concerns of bullying and harassment. If you’re already a Napo member, please let us know what is going on as soon as possible. If you aren’t in a union yet, join Napo today to make sure you get the support of our reps should anything happen in the future, and to help us build the campaign on workloads and on pay.