After recent events there is not a pension fund in the country that looks too healthy. The pension industry and the Treasury will be looking very closely at rules governing schemes and these may well change to ease the pressure the funds will be under.

I can’t help thinking now is a very bad time to make long term decisions. We may well end up repenting at our leisure.

Devils Back
 

All the 15 year memorandum relates to is the salary cap as far as I understand it from the information - speak to your union rep for confirmation. The protection for us on the old scheme (by which I mean everyone up until Apr 2009!) is now written in to our permanent contract of employment. This cannot be changed.

As for being re-nationalised, yes, if NATS went bankrupt having taken all measures possible not to, then I agree we would be re-nationalised on the same T's & C's inc Pension as we have currently.

As it stands, if the staff vote to No to basically making the company more financially sound, then we go bankrupt - I still believe we would be re-nationalised, however, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the government would roll over and give us the salary, pension and conditions that we have now. It would all be up in the air again, and with a significantly weakened union trying to negotiate it...

There really is alot more information available than it seems some people are demonstrating a small knowledge of. Sky news is good, however, the information needed in this case to make and EDUCATED decision is a little harder to find... but still there. I have tried and still have more to learn but at least the effort is there...

P.S I dont like the fact that this is happening but want to do everything I can to minimise the impact on me.

If you want to blame somebody blame Gordon Brown, his was his stealth tax raids on pension funds as chancellor that has seen the demise of the Final salary scheme.

I'm not trying to change anyones mind, thats why we vote, just make sure you are voting no for the right reason...

As i said earlier


"How do we know we won't be required to join the new defined contribution scheme (the new one) at a later date or that NATS won't make it a condition of promotion?

The trust of a promise prevents NATS from forcing employees who were members of the scheme at PPP into the new scheme."


from nats own publication

lets not lose sight of the fact that a no vote does not necessarily mean strike action. It gives the union the task of going back to management to seek different terms. Even if this is effectively a done deal at least they could be forced to give us a bung of some kind.As unpalatable as that sounds it may be the best deal we can expect. Anyway have not been to my briefing yet so wont say too much. what abot the union statement about withdrawing overtime until agreement is reached.
Confusing times!

Absolutely right. We have to get things into perspective, and remember we have the upper hand.
I have been off sick for 2 weeks, are we withdrawing AAVA/overtime ?

Where does this gem from LACCATCO come from??

I quote from page 16 of the glossy booklet:
"In addition, employees who were members of CAAPS on or before 26th July 2001 are protected by the trust of a promise. The trust of a promise guarantees that such employees would be afforded the benefits promised by the scheme whilst they remain in NATS or in the event that their employment is transferred to another owner. This is provided that the company is not in severe financial difficulty, in which circumstances the guarantee is only that the company must use it's 'best endeavours' to provide the promised benefits."

That reads to me that so long as NATS can hold their hands up and say "well we tried boys" if it all goes tits up, then none of the benefits will be promised, and certainly doesn't imply that the government would then bail us out on the same T+C's and pension.
Mebbes I'm missing something obvious........:confused:

,


From speaking to my union rep, you are reading this wrongly. The Trust of a Promise ONLY comes into effect if:

1) NATS goes bankrupt
2) NATS is sold and ceases to be NATS, i.e we become part of SERCO.

As I said before, the protection for differential treatment is being written into ALL current employees full time contract and unless you agree to join the new scheme - you keep your current pension. I understand that the document does not make this clear, the best thing to do is speak to your section chair or go to a briefing and ask for clarification there.

I will speak to my section chair tomorrow just to confirm and will post findings.

I believe we are arguing the same point... there are many people saying if we go bankrupt the government will take us back and everything will be roses when we both know this is not the case.

I was trying to say that if we vote through these pension changes - hence being responsible employees by trying to ease NATS financial predicament - and other circumstances conspire and we still go under, the government may be forced to re-nationalise and would be more sympathetic to our cause and hence 'endeavour' to honour our current benefits and conditions.

If however we vote no to this and NATS ups it rate to the required 40% of salary, then we go bust - I'm pretty sure the government would still step in but with a much less sympathetic eye towards the staff...

LACCATCO I claim my £10 for spotting that you're obviously a brown nosing management lackey! ;)

BD

Spoke to my union rep today, he went to the briefing the other day and is yet to be convinced, lots of spin, lots of dire predictions.

This (to my mind) is all about NATS setting itself up to sell of NSL.

Apparantly Barron got his nose bloodied by conceding to the scheme for new entrants that the unions wanted.

At the end of the day, if we don't accept, WE TELL THUNE OINS WHAT WE ARE PREPARED TO ACCEPT and they then go back to Barron and his cronies and negotioate, only after those negotiations do we ballott on industrial action.

I'm not sure if NATS has the ability to close the scheme to new entrants without the consent of the current employees, they may well be able to do so.

I am going down the NO route on this one, no amount of scaremongering wil convince me that these cahnges are for the better

Note to self:

GET TYPING LESSONS

LACCATCO,

The only people that need to be responsible and ease the financial burden on NATS are NATS mangement.

Their continued mismangement of projects and staff have cost this company £MILLIONS and they continue to do so. They seek to cut costs by investing millions in failed projects, projects that do not deliver on time. Commitments to a 2 centre strategy just to piss off the staff in situ and lose them to the sandpit.

Yes I am a responsible employee, responsible for keeping the metal separated, that's where my responsibility and loyalty to NATS ends

The Trust of Promise is a very strange legal device which wasn't understood at the time of PPP and isn't still. I've yet to find anybody who will tell me exactly what it means and if union reps are briefing that it only comes into effect if NATS is badly managed I don't think they know either.

There were two protections at PPP, the protection to the Trust Deed contained in the Transport Act and the Trust of Promise which the Government required all the prospective bidders to agree to before buying their stake in NATS. The first protection stops the pension benefits being changed and the Trust of Promise stops you being forced out of the scheme or the scheme being closed.

Quite how it does this is a mystery and we need to find out exactly how. As it's an agreement between the Government and the buyers it can't be something that only comes into effect if NATS fails. More likely it somehow prevents a sale by the original buyer without a similar agreement to protect the rights of pre 2001 members. It is quite likely that this will lapse if the company goes bust but that needs to be confirmed.

LACCATCO :suspect:

I fail to see how the Government can view us less sympathetically. We have been shafted one little "shaft" at a time, until we are now well and truly.......SHAFTED :mad:

We were a lot happier and better off before we were part privatised:)

Have to agree. The government could never afford to let us go bust. There is no way that the government would allow the company which controls its airspace to fold.

If NATS went bust who would provide the air traffic service in the UK. This wouldn't only effect flights within the UK but nearly all transatlantic traffic as well. The government would be under pressure from airlines and most other governments around the world to avoid this happening.

Slightly off topic but I thought that the pensions negotiations were to be linked to this years (jan 09) pay deal......Where is the paydeal offer? Or is a secret until we show how much we are willing to fight for our pensions then the increments will be sweetened accordingly???

Unless NATS offering us a pay deal for the next few years of greater than RPI + 0.5 % then whats the point of this clause? Our pay rises will still be negotiated in the same way!

They could always offer is (an eminently pensionable) spine point or two each.

And the devil's going to work this morning on a snowmobile.

This also means that even if people vote this sh1te through with a yes vote that there is nothing to stop Barron (or whoever he has sold us to) from saying "Look, we tried with the new pension and the pay cap - but its still not enough. Everyones cash is moving to the new pension" And do you think those members of staff in the new scheme will support us as we try to defend our pension rights then? Will they !!!!!

For those that say there is no alternative - there is. Vote No and send the negotiators back in.

Write to your MP - are the government / MPs fully aware of what the airline group are trying to do to NATS?
Mine wasn't.

Roll over on this and kiss it all goodbye in 5 years time. Along with leave entitlement.

And in these joint briefings don't direct all your fury / questions at the NTUS guys. Management have caused this situation through poor planning. The £48 million they didn't put in could have been covered and more by last years profits.

Don't let Phillip James off the hook. Why isn't Barron coming to defend all this?

The Union guys have plenty to answer for - but in the joint sessions try and keep some sort of a united front. Remember there are union only briefs afterwards when we'll have our chance to get more answers on their actions...

Hear, hear - Just ask your questions and nod sagely during the Joint Briefing. You're not going to get anything other than the agreed party line from the Management/NTUS side.

Now, when the Management leave the room...let this be the time to unleash the full force of OUR opinion to OUR Representitives as to what we feel about this situation.

OUR representitives assured us during privatisation that the pension was safe.

This IS the time to fight - Be under no illusions, if you take a step back on this, there will be no Pension five years down the line.

If we give in to this scam we will be pished on by Barrons boys for ever........this year the pension,next year leave...etc etc etc.....I wonder how our French friends would react to this???...One real puzzle for me is how our Union reps have taken the bait hook line and sinker???.....lets hope we dont see them all taking world cruises and driving Porsches in the not too distant future!!!!!!!

Small Tale.
The North Sea divers and teckies went on strike last year over a 40% wage increase.The oil companies had been d:mad:cking them over for ages,until enough was enough.So the big bad bold oil companies took them on.The strike lasted less than a week,and cost the oil companies millions.They got their money.
We have this power.If we kowtow then there is very little hope left.The good thing here is that in this part of the world,if we strike we will cost the oil companies millions again.
Barron is very small fry,when it comes to pissing off BP,Shell etc.So is NATS.:=

NATS management will try it on, especially if they think we are weak, which employer wouldn't ?
However......... enough is enough, let's take a stand and show them what we are made of :ok:. If we don't ....:{

Vote NO :ok:

Now, I don't profess to be an expert on this, so if i'm getting the wrong end of the stick then I'm happy to be corrected. From my limited experience, here's how I see it:

I like to think I'm a relatively realistic person. As a relatively new member of staff (post ppp) I can see the argument that final salary pension schemes are a huge burden to any company and are becoming rarer because of their associated cost.

BUT, and it's a big but, that doesn't necessarily mean that i'm just gonna put my hand in my pocket and bail Nats out without exploring the options.

Cleverer minds than mine i'm sure will correct me but is Nats not a 'not-for profit' organisation? Have they not posted profits of 10's of millions of pounds over the past few years? What happens to that cash?

If it did come down to me sacrificing some pension rights over the remaining 30-odd years of my career, I'd expect Nats to never post a profit....Ever again! 'Cause if they did then that would just be money that could and should be ploughed straight into the pension fund! And whilst they're at it they could put all the profit that they've recently declared back too.

I'm willing to be reasonable about things, but so far all I see is the 'company' as an entity looking after it's own interests and expecting the staff to pick up the tab!

Plus the whole idea that we can't pass on costs and even need to reduce our charges between 2011 and 2015.... Hold on, pretty much everything I've bought for the past couple of years has increased in price drastically. Do you know why? Because for one reason or another companies' costs are increasing and they're having to 'pass that cost on' to their customers! How come we're excluded from that little party?

Add to that the whole 15 year proposal = sleep now, get shafted later, and mine will be a polite but firm NO, bordering on the shove it! Come back with a better offer/idea and perhaps we'll talk, but until then, keep dreaming!


One final quick question if anyone can answer it:

The defined pension benefits of those in the pre-ppp scheme are protected, right? The new proposals claim not to change the benefits of the pensionable salary.
But by changing the 'pensionable salary' itself are they not simply hiding behind semantics? Can they really get away with that?

INCA9...my sentiments exactly.
People here need to grow a set of brass ones fast and not fall for the Union spin. VOTE NO :ok:

if we are to go down the strike road, am i correct in thinking that all our office chums will be striking aswell?
or will it be operational staff staring down the barrel of the gun and left out in the cold to fight for everyone in the company. i hope not and would like to think that we would all stick together. its just that im kind of thinking the whole ctc mentality (and please correct me if i am wrong) is different from us ops people and they may believe all this company trash spin they are spouting at these meetings?

lets all stand together and tell the company to ram it. if we do not we are royally and truly screwed and baron will be rubbing his hands with glee like the grinch at xmas.

"The Trust of a Promise prevents NATS from forcing employees who were members of the scheme at PPP into the new scheme"

and the rest of us?

"In addition, NATS and NTUS have agreed a 15yr Memorandum of Understanding under which pensionable pay increases are capped and which also guarantees that there will be no pressure of any kind on employees to leave the scheme and join the new one...."

I may be reading this wrong, does this guarantee run out after 15yrs?

I just don't see how we can be expected to trust management to keep any new promises when they can't keep the ones previously made :uhoh:

Whilst it may have been the intention of Parliament to preserve the pensions of NATS staff what the Transport Act actually did was to make it almost impossible for NATS to change the Trust Deed which sets out what those benefits are. What is protected are the benefits as defined in that deed. It appears that those benefits are defined according to pensionable pay but exactly what is pensionable pay doesn't seem to be protected. It may be semantics but that is of course what the law is all about and how lawyers ensure the future of their profession. In NATS the concept on some elements of pay being non pensionable is far from new, over the years bonus parts of the annual pay settlement have been non pensionable and most of the blood money bribes were also non pensionable.

The trust of promise ensures that members of the pension scheme at PPP can remain members as long as they are employed by NATS. Currently there is no protection at all for anybody who joined since PPP although it is to be hoped that their colleagues would take some action to protect them if NATS tried to force them out of the scheme. The 15 year MOU might actually give those people more protection than they currrently have.

NATS can't recover all its costs because the Government decided that as a monopoly it should be regulated. The Government appointed regulator then decided that NERL was too expensive and should be subject to an RPI-x charging regime to encourage efficiencies. That same regulator has indicated that it is not prepared to allow NATS to recover all its pension costs in charging period 3 hence the problem. That regulator is of course appointed by the same Government that some people on this forum think would look after our pensions if we were re-nationalised.

There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding about not for profit. Yes NATS makes a profit but almost all of the profit is ploughed back into the business either by paying off loans or as investment. If you look at the Annual report you'll see that there has been quite significant investment at the same time as reducing the total debt. Only a small amount of the profit has left the business as dividends, 5% of which went to NATS staff. Were NATS to make large profits which were distributed to shareholders the regulator would soon step in and stop it. Indeed it is likely that if NATS was to use the profit to fund pension payments rather than investment the regulator would reduce the amount it can charge accordingly.

This particular office chum won't be taking any industrial action likely to preserve the pensions of operational staff at the expense of my job. The amount I might lose in pension by the RPI cap pales into insignificance compared to the amount lost if I'm not a member of the scheme until retirement.

And with management having won this battle due to a divided workforce, when they come for your job in a future cost cutting exercise, you won't mind if everyone else just looks the other way I guess ??

Maybe you should think about the fact that if there were no operational staff you wouldn't have a job :ugh:

eglnyt :suspect:

Like I said before, the "car park" is empty at weekends when ATC staff are working their b***s off :mad: , earning the company a fortune. The same car park could be empty during the week and the company is still earning a fortune.....you get where I am coming from :=

Some people on this thread very seriously need to consider broadening their somewhat myopic view of their own specialised profession.:rolleyes:

With the likes of Eglynt and Mr.777, it looks as though the company has already won the pensions battle by dividing the workforce.

The people at CTC actually do a lot of work that provides profit for NATS - if we are not allowed to pass through cost in the future, don't you realise how much higher a percentage the non operational staff contribution to profit will become?


Lets face it, how many people here gives a monkeys about other people in the company - we're are all altruistic - we only care for ourselves at the end of the day.

Send NATS to the wall and get re-nationalised - lots of job losses.

Make NATS lose loads of money through indistrial action - lots of job loses.

Yes, us operational staff will be safe in the main, but it p11ses me off when people talk about 'one nats, one pension' and the greater good when they can't see what effect industrial action might have on colleagues.

I have not yet attented a briefing - as it stands, I am not happy with the proposals and therefore tend towards a NO vote.

However, I know that the pension needs a hand - how that happens is what I am interested in. The pension cannot survive in its present state for every member, current and future.

By all means vote NO to this initial proposal, but realise that something needs to be done, to safeguard both the pension, and the jobs of fellow workers!!

Come on people, play nicely :ok: While it may be true that the car park is relatively empty at the weekend, that's because those jobs don't need to be done on an instant basis like the operational controlling. There's a big difference between the admin staff taking the weekend off, compared with just not being there at all.

Let's not kid ourselves that us ATCO's are the only heroes who "work" for the company. After all how many people do you know who aren't ATCO's who have a clear idea of what our job really entails?

We need to stick together across the company, NERC/NSL, Admin/Engineers?ATCO's & ATSA's and anyone else I might have missed out. Divide & conquer is management's usual tactic, let's not make it easy for 'em eh?

"A downtrodden class ... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity" H.G. Wells.

just edited to say...nice to hear some sense being talked by people who obviously type faster than me :ok:

Apart from this paragraph it is an extremely good post and addresses many concerns.

But if you are a member of any of the 3 unions please abide by the democratic decision no matter how unpalatable it may be.

Quote

"Like I said before, the "car park" is empty at weekends when ATC staff are working their b***s off http://static.pprune.org/images/smilies/censored.gif ."

Nice one Air Farce 1 and Mr 777. These constant jibes on here, NATSNET and the like show an ignorance that defies belief.

If you are all working your 'b***s off', how come you aint too tired to go in for some AAVAs at £550 a pop.

How can we fight together if we dont respect each other.

You are. I suggest doing the Barons dirty work for him.

Ahem, there are ATC staff working at CTC, even some operational ones. As I have posted previously just because you don't have visibility of the work the backroom boys and girls do doesn't mean they do nothing. You'd very quickly notice the effect on the systems you use if those CTC staff weren't there to support them. Not to mention how other things get done, like the move of AC and TC to Swanwick, the move of Manch and ScACC shortly to Prestwick Centre. Who set all of the systems up, tested them and got the place ready for occupation by operational staff, magic pixies?
I'd love to work weekends/nights and get paid UHP (and for ATCO's even if they've not held a validation for 20 years they still get NOS) but there is no requirement in my job, so I can't.
Air.Farce.1 your view of the company and work done outside of your tiny little area is myopic, there's an awful lot more involved in an ATC operation than just the bit done sitting in front of a radar screen.

BD

Enough said, rant over. Lets not do managements job for them :}

Lets "all" stick together :)