Turning Point has broken all links with external organisations that had an influence on employee pay levels, and established a “Turning Point-owned approach to annual pay reviews”.

Just as pay within the voluntary sector is coming under intense scrutiny from MPs and parts of the press, Turning Point has revealed in its latest accounts that it has “delinked” from organisations including the National Joint Council for local government and Agenda for Change, the NHS system that allocates posts to set pay bands.

The decision to take unilateral control of its pay review process is one of several changes the charity made to its terms and conditions of employment when it sacked all its staff earlier this year and rehired them on new contracts.

Three hundred staff have lodged a claim with the Employment Tribunal but Unite the union told civilsociety.co.uk yesterday that it was still waiting for a hearing date.

Project Swan

The charity’s annual report went into some detail about Project Swan, the changes described by Turning Point as essential to “remain competitive and continue delivering value for money”.

It said the downturn in the economy had created a difficult trading environment for all voluntary sector health and social care providers, and public sector funding cuts have “hit much harder and more quickly than we anticipated”.

In response, in November 2012 the charity kicked off negotiations with Unite the union on a set of proposals to change the terms and conditions of employment for staff.  An invitation to employees to provide feedback elicited 448 separate responses including 151 suggestions for how the charity could alter the proposals or make other savings.

After the consultation with Unite, Turning Point terminated contracts for all employees and re-engaged them on new contracts which also featured the following elements:

• No longer paying enhancement to hourly rates for most ‘unsocial’ hours worked, except for four bank holidays
• No more overtime rates
• New rates for ‘out of hours’ management
• Reducing redundancy terms to statutory entitlement for all employees
• Offering casual workers new zero-hours contracts

The charity said it tried to compensate for the loss of terms and conditions by ensuring that base pay was comparable with competitors, and that this resulted in some of the lowest-paid employees receiving a pay increase.

It concluded that as a result of these “necessary changes”, Turning Point will realise cost savings of £2.65m per annum. “This serves to ensure we remain competitive in a difficult market and can continue to provide value for money and support for services users,” the report said.

Income up by 1 per cent

Turning Point’s total income grew by 1 per cent to just over £80m in the year to March 2013, fuelled mainly by a growth in new business, mainly in the learning disability sector.

However, the charity admitted that the overall growth masked variances across the different sectors. Substance misuse income fell, due mainly to the closure of some services, but it won new contracts in this area too.

Average full-time equivalent staff numbers across the group increased by 263 to 2,347.

Turnign Point ended the year with a £50,000 deficit.

Programme Eden

Turning Point also used its annual report to relate the progress of Programme Eden, its major finance transformation project. Programme Eden updated the finance structures, processes and systems across the whole business to ensure they were “fit for purpose, scalable and flexible”.  

More than 100 services staff were affected by the programme, with 86 moved to new roles, 16 made redundant and six leaving of their own accord. It was one of the biggest change programmes ever undertaken by Turning Point and was delivered on time and under budget - £800,000 vs £1m. Going forward, Programme Eden will deliver cost-savings of around £300,000 per annum.