Blog: Keep your mouth shut and we’ll give you a fat wad of cash

How do you fancy a fat pay off?

I bung you, let’s say, £100,000. In exchange you agree not to spill the beans about how incompetent we are, and those incidents of bullying will get forgotten, and you’ll never take us to an employment tribunal.

Oh, and just so we’re all clear on that, here’s a compromise agreement for you to sign which includes a confidentiality clause.

Welcome to the world of the gagging order.

Compromise agreements are nothing unusual. And, used correctly, they serve a purpose for both employer and employee when it’s time to call a day on someone’s employment. If there’s a breakdown of relations, or a worker is leaving under a cloud, they can be a smart way of drawing a line under things and moving on without the perpetual threat of future consequences.

But they can also be used to sweep things under the carpet.

And that’s the suspicion when it comes to their use by the Government of Jersey.

They’ve been used 54 times since 2018 and, so far this year, on average once every 12 days.

At the same time, this year, we know there have been 11 formal complaints against senior managers, accusing them of bullying.

We also know concern was so great about a culture of bullying and harassment in the public sector, that the government proudly announced its “new approach” to such issues at the start of last year.

Anecdotally, and it’s all we really have right now, it would seem the issues persist.

To what scale? I just don’t know.

I’ve, this week, asked for details of just how much the financial settlements added up to for the 54 compromise agreements/pay-offs/gagging orders issued over the past two and a half years.

It may be a few quid. It could be millions.

We know, back in 2015, after the high profile “golden goodbye” for former government chief executive Bill Ogley was revealed to be a cool £546,000, that the sum was more than £2.5million between 2010 and 2015, with a promised crackdown on such financial packages.

Right now, the compromise agreements may be lined with cash. They may not.

They may be in exchange for keeping schtum about sinister stuff going on in the corridors of power. They may not.

It’s why transparency matters… even by presenting these settlements in redacted form to protect the parties’ identities.

But at a time when trust in government is through the floor, and the tendency in recent months and years is for fewer people at the top to hold more power and face less meaningful scrutiny, the jungle drums demanding to know more about these gagging orders and what’s really going on will only get louder.

For my part, I’ll keep asking the questions and keep you posted on whatever it is I eventually learn.