As those of you who keep abreast of select committee calendars will be aware, the Public Administration Select Committee is currently holding an evidence session on the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. Those of you with some time to kill may wish to watch the session here.

I shall be watching with interest as I’m meeting with Bernard Jenkin MP, chair of the committee, tomorrow and will be keen to find out his opinion on the likelihood of a negotiated settlement.

There is one thing which should be paramount in both union leaders’ and ministers’ minds through these negotiations – the need for a quick resolution to provide some degree of certainty at a very uncertain time. Certainty for departments, who need to know what redundancies will cost them if they are to plan finances effectively; and certainty for employees facing the possibility of a very changed workplace in the next few years.

One of the key messages at a recent CSW conference on Workforce Performance and Reward in the Civil Service was that civil servants need to know what to expect from their jobs in the future.  In a session on building an engaged workforce, Dean Morley, deputy HR director at the Pension, Disability and Carers Service, said: “We're going through a degree of pain now, and we need to be better at  articulating: What will it be like in three to five years time? Why is it worth sticking around as a public servant over the next three to five years, what's the bright new tomorrow?”

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude also attended the conference, and shared his vision for the future. He spoke of a civil service which will be smaller, but also flatter, less hierarchical, and with more scope for entrepreneurial employees to set up mutuals or co-operatives which would, he said help to relieve the “huge amount of pent up frustration out in our public services: people who see how things could be done better and feel frustrated that they can't get things done better in the way that they would like them to be done”.

There should be more recognition for professional streams, said Maude, to give them “the clout that they should have in a modern organisation”. To a room full of HR professionals, his comments that line management needs to improve in “much of the civil service” to counteract “a tendency for senior people to think that line management is what HR does” was  well-judged: it picked up on many other presentations which talked about the importance of line managers in leading staff through times of change.

But I don’t think this big picture talking –  or the “seductive” (as one CSW colleague had it) rhetoric of Big Society being hammered home by almost all ministers at the moment – is enough to counteract the uncertainty and falling morale in the public sector.

In the session on engaging employees, Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the FDA, said people need to know not just the ‘why’ behind reforms, but the details of the new deal for them in the future. It will be the details of pay, pensions and conditions that matter to many people in the public sector, and the quicker these details are known the better.

You may well be busy wrapping up projects before the ministers dash off for recess, but if you find time to watch the session do let us know what you thought – are the signs positive for a quick agreement over redundancy pay?  Are you happy with how the unions are representing you? And what might this all mean for other reforms on pay and pensions which we expect in due course? Comment below, and do let me know if you have any questions for Bernard Jenkin tomorrow.