Introduced in boom-time Celtic Tiger Ireland to control the runaway levels of prison officer overtime, annualised hours were put in place over a decade ago. According to a new report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) Séamus McCarthy, the arrangement has been an abject failure in delivering anywhere near the cost savings the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition claimed at the time.
On the government side, a very clear effort to put manners on the jailers was led by the then minister for justice Michael McDowell.
He and his officials believed some prison officers were taking advantage of the generous sums of money available through the overtime regime at a time when the crime rate was growing, but the prisons were full and under immense pressure.
It was said some officers would ring in sick when they were not ill so colleagues who were rostered off would be called in to work their shift on double time, only for the “favour” to be repaid later.
Of the total overtime bill – which topped out at €59 million in 2002 and 2003 – it was estimated 15 per cent was used to cover sick leave. It must be noted that despite the abuses, most of that was genuine.
Some officers were working all the hours they could and making €120,000 per year – more than double their annual salaries at the time.
Out of hand
The official line from the government and the Irish Prison Service was that the overtime culture had gotten so out of hand and so much money was being diverted into it, that elements of the prison service were suffering as a result.
Visiting hours were restricted in some jails and workshops for inmates were cancelled or postponed. The plan was to do away with overtime and introduce a system of annualised pay.
Under the deal, prison officers would sign up to set number over hours per year – from zero hours to a maximum of 360 hours per year. They would be paid a set fee for those hours and that fee would be paid in full even if they were not needed to work all of the hours they agreed. Every prison officer would be paid a one-off sum of €13,750 to sweeten the arrangement.
The government said annual saving would be €32 million. But 10 years on, it seems little has changed. The average pay – regular pay plus monies for extra hours – is almost exactly the same as 10 years ago; just under €64,000.
The annualised hours system has achieved savings of €5.5 million – about one-sixth of the promised sum. When the one-off payments are factored in, however, total savings from 2006 to 2014 were €8 million.
Wrong projections
The savings have not materialised because the government’s projections for prison officer overtime in the absence of annualised hours were wrong.
Introducing the new arrangement became so protracted – the Government, and McDowell in particular, locking horns with the robust body that is the Prison Officers’ Association – that overtime had peaked and was falling by the time the payments were scrapped.
The Government’s projected savings were based on the assumption overtime would continue to increase.
But its baseline for determining the number of regular man hours and overtime hours needed to operate the prison system was based on a 2001 study that has never been updated.
The other major mistake was to sign up so many prison officers to the deal at the maximum end of the annualised hours scale; some 85 per cent of officers agreeing to work the maximum of 360 hours per year.
This simply created so many hours for management to call on that a huge number of them were wasted, or written off; meaning they were never worked but were paid for.
Numbers signing up to work the highest band of annualised hours have now fallen to 70 per cent of officers. An average of 15 per cent of hours paid for under the annualised hours system are still wasted, or written off.
But that figure was as high was 30 per cent in 2008. And though there is now less waste, there is still a huge difference in the number of hours each prison in the system writes off.
Staff in Cloverhill Prison worked 95 per cent of the extra hours they signed up for, compared to 48 per cent of the hours being worked in Shelton Abbey open prison in Co Wicklow.
The C&AG has recommended a concerted drive by the prison service to establish where it can cut back on the number of annualised hours it is purchasing.