Public sector pay talks ‘fraught’

Someone in the middle of the public sector pension negotiations just described things as “fraught” in a text to me. But there were signs earlier that some of the disputes could be drawing to a close, even if the sense of grievance is not.

Ministers always thought they could peel off some of the unions and leave Mark Serwotka and PCS isolated. The government was pushing for “heads of agreement” on different sector deals by 3pm today, ready for an announcement in the Commons tomorrow by Danny Alexander.

That 3pm today deadline is already looking like slipping for some unions. What is certainly slipping away is the chance of a repetition of 30 November when 29 unions came together to strike over public sector pensions.

Elsewhere in the Whitehall jungle today, less tenterhook excitement around the much-trailed government acceptance “in full” of the Vickers report on banking reforms. A banking source tells me how “in full” leaves “a lot of wriggle room” given that the details that’ll be in the green paper, white paper and final bill would exceed almost every human being’s grasp of technical detail.

On Vickers, I hear that one of David Cameron’s aides in Number 10 wrote a memo a few months back suggesting that Vickers be dropped altogether. The memo had Lib Dems and even some Tories who saw it spluttering. Steve Hilton isn’t the only figure in Number 10 prone to “clear blue sky outside the box” memos, it would appear.

Get Gary Gibbon’s latest blog alerts via Twitter