Babcock agreement: “Better results for members is the ultimate goal”

Prospect Negotiations Officer Leon Walton explains the significance of the agreement in principle with Babcock that will see the union and the company engage on specific issues at a corporate, group-wide level.

Why is this group-wide approach needed, and what difference do you think it will make?

There are a few things that often get decided centrally, and they often forego the negotiation process. This is to try and get ahead of that.

What’s central to this is the pensions discussions. Babcock used to have a Defined Benefits Pension Scheme that’s largely been phased out, and we have tried for many years to get some movement on the pension scheme. This is our way of trying to do that.

What we’ve done is organise every branch so that we negotiate as one cohesive unit and agree on one pension plan across the board.

How easy has the process been trying to get all the branches across the Babcock Group to work together?

Initially, there was a little hesitation about going forward with it, especially when pay was mentioned as a central negotiation topic, but we’ve now opted out of that. We want to keep some negotiations local and keep them where they belong at the branch level, such as on pay.

They have all agreed on a ‘do no harm’ policy.

So, those that came off the DB schemes and got an improvement – we’ll remove them from the equation and say we’re negotiating the baseline pension only because we’ve agreed that do no harm process. Nobody should lose from this, or we simply won’t accept the outcome.

So, after we agreed about doing no harm, it’s been quite easy because we’ve done it through Prospect’s Babcock Coalition group which we have used to organise around.

You mentioned the Prospect Coalition at Babcock, which already meets quarterly to discuss topics of general and shared interest across the organisation. Going forward, would that be the forum that’s used to engage with the company?

Yes. We want to use the Babcock Coalition as a vehicle to democratically elect people to go to these meetings, so that the right person is always there. The person elected by their peers, you’re qualified and suitable to go down and have these negotiations and discussions on whatever the topic might be. We hope that this becomes a long-lasting arrangement.

What have the discussions been like with the company?

We’re quite fortunate in that Babcock are a business that respects the role that trade unions have to play and they negotiate with us quite well.

They tend to be quite open to discussion. When the Failure to Agree letter went in, they responded pretty quickly.

Was that Failure to Agree letter a tactical shot to kickstart these discussions?

It was. I think the plan from the beginning was that we would organise all the branches. We told everybody to put in the same pensions claim in your pay claim this year, and to get it in by April. Everybody had the same pensions ask which was for a one and a half times contribution rate.

We knew that the company wouldn’t engage, and we knew that the local level didn’t have the power to negotiate.

So, it was a strategic play. When every single branch came back and they said ‘we can’t discuss pensions’, then we sent in the Failure to Agree with the weight of every branch behind it. The message was clear, “No, we want to discuss this.”

Do you think this directly led to them to agreeing in principle with this new group-wide approach?

I think what often happens in a business structure is that those at the top, don’t know the minutiae of what’s going on down at the lower levels of the business.

I believe if we had gotten time with David Lockwood [Babcock International Group CEO], he may have agreed to talk to us on it anyway, but this was a way of showing, “Look, this is a genuine ask. There is weight behind this, and this something that we’re taking very seriously.”

Will this agreement make your job easier, as the Prospect officer that looks after Babcock?

It’s not about easy. It should help us get better results for our members, which is the ultimate goal.

This sounds extremely positive. It could become a model that other Prospect branches within large corporate groups might be interested in.

I agree, and if other people are interested in wanting to replicate what we’re doing, then I’d be happy to assist in any way that I can.