Hi all, after waiting 3 years for my AFC banding, and then having to fill in a JAQ form that was submitted last July I still haven’t had the result. Are there any other techs still waiting for a banding or am I alone?
Question: - do I have grounds for a grievance due to the time taken?

Thanks for listening
Andy

Hope you get it sorted mate. Give HR a ring and try probe them to see what can be done.

I have a grievence against my trust for not giving me my pay incriement grr

I don't think that you need to take out a grievance just yet. Assuming that you haven't already accepted an AFC deal, you will be able to backdate the final offer to Oct 2004. If you get a lower grade than present then you have the option of NOT backdating. We have just got to the JAQ stage ourselves. Good luck with your claim.

Just received my banding mto3 to band 6. Losing £54 a month (no pay protection) Next pay increment in October will bring my pay up above the £54 loss. What is the policy on paying back any money owed for the past few years?

Now all you have to wait for now is first for your payroll section to put you on your correct band and then work out your backpay until Oct 2004. Taking your banding has taken this long how long do you think they'll take to do that then!

You should also check out that no pay protection thing, perhaps someone else might want to clarify it but my understanding was everybody got pay protection. It might not be down as pay protection since in some situations it was better to pay it as recruitment and retention instead

Sorry inserted in wrong place
Contacted my salaries dept today and they say £54 will come out this month and I owe £54 per month for the last year and I presume I owe money for 2007,2006,2005, as my salaries dept informs me that pay protection was only until 2005. What is the procedure for paying back money? Can it be removed in one go? Have you to be asked to pay back? or tell them to get stuffed?

OK, Pay protection runs until 2011 (2009 for early implementers). The relevant section of the "Agenda for Change: NHS Terms And Conditions Handbook" is copied below

"46.25 The period of protection will end when the total level of payments under the new system exceeds the level of protected pay, or when the protected person changes job voluntarily, or at the latest on 30 September 2009 for staff in early implementer sites and 31 March 2011 for staff in national roll-out. For protection arrangements in NHS Scotland please refer to the pay protection section of the pay and modernisation website:
www.show.scot.nhs.uk/sehd/paymodernisation/afc.htm"


Edit: Just noticed that you are getting increments still, so how can you lose money, and be on pay protection, as you must assimilate to the next highest point on the scale? (R&R would not apply since there are increments you can use instead)I notice that your increment is in October so presumably you were at the top of the MTO 3 scale?

Kaiser,

If you are assimilating across to AFC then the following applies:

"46.12 The following rules apply for assimilating staff into the new pay bands:
• Where basic pay before assimilation is between the new minimum and
maximum of the new pay band, staff will assimilate into the next equal or
higher pay point in the new pay band."

This is taken directly from the AFC handbook. Your new salary should br equal or higher than the old one. The only way that you coluld owe the trust is if you have worked a lot of overtime on Sundays. Sunday used to be paid at double time but under AFC it is only time and a half. In this case you may have to pay back the half-time that you earned back to Oct 2004.

Can't work out why you owe £54 per a month, unless you work the same hours every Sunday every week, I would have thought that if this over payment was due to the difference between double time and time and a half it wouldn't be so finite as this. (unless they've worked out you own them so much and this is a monthly repayment scheme?)

I don't have a copy of the Whitley pay scales for Apr 2004, but the top of the MTO3 band on April 05 was £27,808, whereas the top of Band 6 on Oct 2004 was 29,302. Taking into account that Whitley pay scales have not overtaken AFC, you could not progress beyond the top spine point of the MTO3 without re-banding, I would assume that this £54 was actually a mistake. If anything I'd ask for a clear break down from the salaries department of this over payment.

The only time I've known someone being asked to pay back money was when a appeal was upheld but pay protection was still paid after they were placed on the correct band. Since the salaries department had already cottoned onto this when I was re-banded I don't know if they had to pay back what was basically the trusts mistake?

I think and i believe the general concensus is that Band 6 is the correct result for MTO 3. (this is what i am after initially getting band 5). I can't understand though how you lose out been as the top of Band 6 was much more than top of MTO 3 (brownie points included i recall). Anyway you most definately are not required to pay back anything, in fact try working if you are due any back pay. Look at 01/10/04, calculate the difference between your actual pay on that day and the next closest point on Band 6 at the time. Convert this to a monthly sum and multiply by the number of months since then. Bear in mind uplifts to the bandings along the way and to the MTO scale up until it finished. Assuming a positive difference between the two, you shall be paid that sum. If as you state you had a pay cut then this sum is negative but you are not required to pay this back. You would however be entitled to Protection up until the loss is rectified by the next pay event/uplift/increment.
Topper

This may seem a bit confused. I was an MTO2 in 2004 but had started a grievance procedure to be upgraded to MTO3 well before AFC was even heard off. The upgrade proceeded alongside AFC. I was given the upgrade in late 2004 but the salaries dept has looked at my pay in 2004 when I was an MTO2 and moved me across to the nearest assimilation point for band6. Because this assimilation point on band 6 in 2004 was higher than my MTO2 pay I don’t get pay protection. However the increments at MTO3 which I have received over the last number of years are bigger than AFC increments so salaries state that I will lose £54 per month starting this month. I appreciate that I have come out a lot better than some other outcomes but losing £54 is a bit of a sickner.

This reminds me of that old ad, "somewhere someones pulling your pilsner!"

Right if you had logged a greavance before agenda for change had even been heard of and was sucessfull, your subsequent rebanding would be back dated to the date you filled the greavance. Since your salaries department had placed you on band 6 late in 2004 and you have subsequently been banded to band 6 which should be backdated to Oct 2004 you should be on the right salary. The same uplifts were applied to the Whitley grades as AFC grades so there shouldn't be any difference.

1) As Chris says, because you had a whitley grading appeal in place before AFC the outcome of this appeal must be backdated to the date it was filed. Therefore in October 2004 it should be the mto3 band that is used to move across to band 6. This still won't result in pay protection but may shift you up an increment or so.

2)From the Q&A of the NHS employers website

"Do staff continue to receive pay increments on their Whitley basic pay past 1 October and 1 December 2004 and until they are assimilated to Agenda for Change pay?

Section 46, paragraph 9
Yes - and the basic pay on the effective assimilation date is to be calculated as in paragraph 46.9."

Section 46 paragraph 9 is :-

"An employee’s current pay for the purpose of assimilation to the new pay spines and bands, referred to below as “basic pay before assimilation”, is their annual full-time equivalent basic pay on the effective assimilation date plus the annual value of any job evaluation related allowances (see Annex Q) plus the average value of any bonus payments under schemes which are discontinued (see paragraph 46.42 below)."

Now here is where it gets confusing: the "effective date" in the handbook is stated as being October 2004 BUT both the handbook and the Q&A infer that the "effective date" is the "actual" assimilation date and any increments earned on whitley should be taken into account. The Clincher on this argument is section 46 paragraph 20:-

"The level of pay before assimilation for the purpose of this calculation will be the average level of the payments in the left-hand column of Table 7 above over a reference period of twelve weeks or three months ending at the assimilation date except:
- where this period includes the annual pay award due in April 2005 or an annual increment, the protected amount should be adjusted as if that award or increment had applied throughout the reference period;"

Which shows that the assimilation date is NOT October 2004 but the ACTUAL date since it refers to 12 weeks including April 2005 (my handbook was written in January 2005 and expected afc assimilation to be finished by end of 2005 )

Now if you take this paragraph to the extreme you can argue that your current MTO3 increment must be used to work out your pay band in October 2004 and then work on from there

3) For protection purposes the date referred to is "assimilation date" NOT the "effective assimilation date" so I would argue strongly that protection starts at the date you are actually assimilated i.e. NOW and therefore if all the above fail you should still be on protected pay until October.

If you're in a Union make them earn their dues (ps if it's one of the 7 that accepted the pay deal after getting an overwhelming No vote from their members ask them WHY?)

A quick p.s. to my previous post

Since you had the mto2 to mto3 appeal going which you won, not only should your MTO3 pay be backdated to the appeal start date and used for assimilation to AFC, but, you will also get a nice new incremental date of the anniversary of the appeal date. Since that is when you left the top of MTO2 and started getting increments again.

E.G. If by some chance you lodged the appeal on 2/10/03 that would mean that you assimilate on the 1/10/04 and go up an increment on the 2nd

Lo and Behold there is a God.
Contacted my salaries dept this am and they have now admitted that they have "made a mistake" and in fact had started me on the wrong increment and had not noticed my upgrade to MTO3 in 2004. To late to do anything about the £54 coming out this month but I should get it back next month along with any back pay

Well done Kaiser!
Some of our guys were given erroneous AFC deals which took months to sort out. I would urge every one out there to check their AFC letters and make sure that you are not losing out. I think we also need to encourage any MTO3's who were given band 5 to challenge their banding, it is obvious that MTO3 equates to band 6.

Obvious to quite a few it might seem that MTO3 equates to band 6 but unfortunately not to those that count, it seems it depends on which profile was used. Personannly I would make the medical technician profile the only usable profile for our jobs, since it's clear that someone's just renamed the Biomedical scientist profile and then called it generic!

Excuse my ignorance but why should the Medical Technician profile be used? Is it not more beneficial to be matched onto the healthcare scientist profile as you require less points to get onto the band 6?

You'd think so wouldn't you, but it doesn't seem to work like that, you can't just add up points and say someone should be on a certain band because their job has so many points and a profile has so many minimum. There's a whole book written on matching with all the rules and regulations and quite a lot of memorandums you only get to see when you put in an appeal.

The first and most important step in Job Evaluation as explained by our ex AFC Project Manager at the time is to match the post to the most relevant Job Statement, this overides everything else, even the Factors. This is what got all our initially low bandings corrected along with regional comparisons revealing we were below par despite being a uniquely specialized department as far as Technicians go.
Topper

Any formula for question below?
If your mto3 pay was 20,474 in 04 what should it be in 08 after afc?

Assuming that under AfC you had straight assimilation across that would put you on Band 5 at pay Point 23 (£21,044).
For 08/09 you would normally have progressed to Pay Point 27 (£28,141 with the 2.75% uplift), but this is above the top of Band 5 which stops at Pay Point 25 (£26,123).

But if assimilation was to band 6 you would get to Pay Point 27 which was the above £28,141 with the new pay scale.

Actually you would only progress to point 26 by now - 23 on 1/10/04 - 24 on 1/10/05 - 25 on 1/10/06 and 26 on 1/10/07

although on another point since you got an MTO 2-3 appeal through you would get a new incremental date of whenever you started the appeal. So assuming that was March 04 then you would receive AFC increments in March rather than October and so would now be on point 27


EDIT Just checked with the T&C handbook and 20,474 would put you across onto point 22 the top transitional point on band 6 paying £20,778 at the time. Applying this to the above means you should now be on point 25 (or 26 with increment in March)

i.e. 25 - £26123 26 - £27191

HTH Paul

I worked it out the same as Paul. Pay point 25 until your incermental date then 26.

Yes, looking at it again the previously stated £21,044 for band 5 (or 20,778 for band 6) in Oct 2004 wasn't point 23 but 22. So that would make it 25 and 26 the coming incremental date.

If Kaiser wants to check they could always work it out from the payscales in Annex B of the Terms and conditions of service handbook

Thanks for all your helpful answers. I had my upgrade to MTO3 in July 04.

Ok so you should be on point 25 and go up to 26 sometime this month