Jacob723

Many Happy Returns To Me

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by

Jacob723
in

Dear colleagues

Today is not actually my birthday, though if anyone wants to buy me cake, I will have no objection. But it’s a day to remember for me, as it marks exactly one year since I was elected Unite convenor for St Mungo’s.

Today also marks one full year in which I have been asking the St Mungo’s Leadership Team for detailed information about St Mungo’s finances, including management accounts. So far, these reasonable requests have been met with refusals, and promises that a rational explanation for the refusal will be provided at some unspecified point in the future.

It’s fair to say that the leadership of St Mungo’s is keen to keep financial information secret from its own employees as far as possible, blanking requests for the most straightforward information.

It took your Unite reps six months to get an answer to the question ‘How much does it cost to rent the HQ at Thomas More Square?’

We have asked how much the switch to Office 365 will cost, but the only reply we have received is that it will be a big improvement (maybe, but we still want to know how much it will cost).

We have asked how much the Cx Rents system cost to buy, and received no answer. We have asked how much was lost in rental income as a result of the Cx system’s poor performance, and we’ve had some very blank looks. (It may be that the honest answer to this question is ‘sorry, no idea.’)

Fortunately, the law requires that some information is put into the public domain in an annual report and financial statement which must be provided to Companies House every year. The most recent annual report covers the financial year ending 31 March 2022, but was published in September 2022.This report includes a statement from Joanna Killian, Chair of St Mungo’s Board of Trustees, which says:“As a charity cash is our primary financial indicator, at £22.5m it is above the Trustee set range of £14m -£18m”St Mungo’s leadership may regret having been so forthright about the relatively positive financial position, because they have been trying to backtrack ever since. At first they said that cash was not really an important indicator after all; the important figure to look at was the amount of unrestricted reserves. That didn’t really help their case – the accounts showed that unrestricted reserves were at the top end of their target range.

Now, they’re trying a new tack. ‘The figures Unite is referring to in its communications are almost a year old,’ says Emma Haddad, in an email to workers this week. That’s because this is the most recent publicly available data – and note that when St Mungo’s published that data in September 2022, the entire 51-page report contained no mention of any drastic change since the end of the reporting period.The organisation’s cash balance changes through the course of the financial year, as Emma points out. ‘A year ago it was £22.5m but at the end of December last year it was £14.9m.’But this is not comparing like with like. As St Mungo’s Directors have acknowledged, 31 March tends to be a high point for the cash balance, because Local Authorities prefer to pay off debts they have incurred during the financial year (including debts to St Mungo’s) before the end of that financial year, so they aim to get outstanding invoices paid by the end of March. It is also possible to manipulate the end-of-year cash balance by delaying the issue of invoices but it seems that last March, no-one knew that they would soon be desperately trying to claim that the organisation was out of money.When the target range of £14-18m cash for 31 March was set by St Mungo’s trustees on the advice of their accountants, it had to take account of the fact that cash balances would be likely to fall somewhat during the financial year – otherwise the accountants would not have been doing their jobs.We are comparing the actual balance on 31 March 2022 with the target for the same date, and that is the right comparison to make. It is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.Another point Emma fails to mention: a large part of the reason St Mungo’s, and some similar organisations, had an unexpectedly high cash balance on 31 March 2022 was that the pay rise that had been budgeted for did not occur. Against the objections of all the trade unions present, a miserable 1.75% pay rise was imposed. St Mungo’s, like the Local Authorities whose payscales are also linked to the NJC, has been shielded from the impact of inflation, using its employees as human shields. That has left many workers struggling to keep up with rent and utilities.We knew that St Mungo’s Leadership Team were going to claim there was no money available – although the annual report, once lodged with Companies House, cannot be withdrawn. We knew because we have heard it before. We were told there was no money available in our pay dispute in 2014, just before we won a big pay rise.Shelter workers were told there was no money available last December, just before they won a big pay rise.Over the past year, Unite members all over the country have won hundreds of millions of pounds in pay increases. Almost all of them were told there was no money available, right before they won pay rises that they had been reasonably entitled to all along. A partial list of those recent wins is copied below.The truth is that St Mungo’s Unite has not demanded anything excessive. All we are asking for is a correction for inflation, so that our wages are worth as much as they were two years ago. And two years ago we were not, by any stretch of the imagination, overpaid.The real-terms pay cuts have had an impact on St Mungo’s operations at every level. Workers are demoralised when their efforts are unappreciated, and vacancies in their teams cannot be filled. Managers asking for help with recruitment are being told they will have to wait because even the recruitment team is short-staffed.In a statement last year, Emma Haddad welcomed the Government’s decision to provide for rises in many benefit rates in line with inflation – exactly the support that she has refused to St Mungo’s workers. Emma then added:‘we do have concerns that people who are currently employed in low-wage jobs may be put at greater risk as many of the support packages announced will not be accessible to them. And there is no additional help for those facing rising rents.

’

Was Emma even aware that the group of people she was talking about includes many of her own employees?

If St Mungo’s bosses are serious about helping people out of homelessness, they need to respect the workers across the organisation – office employees and client-facing staff alike – whose skill and dedication make that possible. They need to pay wages which enable workers to pay their rent, and which allow empty posts to be filled within a reasonable time. It’s in everyone’s interests, and it’s the right thing to do.

Best wishes

Jacob

Jacob Sanders

Unite Convenor, St Mungo’s

  • If you don’t want more emails from the St Mungo’s Unite shop, you can let me know by reply to this email.
  • If you can forward this email to someone you know at St Mungo’s who might not have received it, that would be great.
  • You can follow your shop on Twitter @SMUnite.

They were all told there was no money available:

https://www.unitetheunion.org/campaigns/unite-for-a-workers-economy-campaign/unite-workplace-wins

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