Martin Tracey: Questions for Oral Answer — Questions to MinistersText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Questions for Oral Answer — Questions to Ministers[Sitting date: 05 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16319. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]1.TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First) to theMinister responsible for Novopay: Does he stand by his statement of 11 February 2014 “education payroll is the most complex in New Zealand and more work remains to be done to simplify the business processes to ensure it runs as smoothly as possible each year”?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister)on behalf of theMinister responsible for Novopay: Yes the ministerial inquiry found that the school payroll system is hugely complex particularly for end-of-year and start-of-year pays. For instance at the start of the year 80 percent of all staff on the payroll have adjustments to their pay. There are currently around 80 separate allowances for teachers and 99 allowances for principals. That is 99 different allowances applying to different principals under several different collective agreements and those can change at any time depending for instance on the number of staff who are employed in the school. Teachers who have changes made at the start of the year may have had their allowances expire they might be on fixed-term contracts or they might be on contracts that go from one term to the next. All of these have to be restarted at the beginning of each year and it is not surprising that there is the odd error when 80 percent of all teachers have changes to the payroll at the start of the year.Tracey Martin: Can he confirm that the education payroll is no more complex than when it was under the previous payroll providers Multi Serve and Datacom?Hon BILL ENGLISH: That is likely but under those systems there were considerable errors. In fact for many reasons it would be a good idea to simplify the payment of teachers so for instance there are not 99 separate allowances payable to school principals. I think a lot of teachers and a lot of the people responsible for data entry in the schools would like to see a simpler way of paying teachers so that there are no errors.Tracey Martin: Is he aware that under Novopay many teachers cannot match a single payslip from the last 15 months to deposits in their bank accounts and are unable to identify the cause of the problem in order to rectify it; if so what confidence can he have in the error reports that he is currently receiving?Hon BILL ENGLISH: The Crown and the Minister of Education must meet their obligations to pay teachers. There is no choice about that. If teachers believe they have not been paid the right amount then there is now a fairly comprehensive process set up to ensure they are paid correctly because that is a legal obligation of the Crown. I would say though that it will be less expensive for the Crown more certain for teachers and certainly less costly for the payroll system if we could negotiate collective agreements that are significantly less complex than the ones that currently apply. Large amounts of resource were spent under the previous administrative system correcting continuous errors in pay.Tracey Martin: Can he confirm that the 2013 payroll error reports are now overdue to schools and that as many of the 2012 reports themselves were incorrect they now require double-checking by schools?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I cannot confirm that. What I can confirm though is that the complexity of the payroll which was previously buried in an expensive system run by Datacom is now obvious to every school. In the long run all our interests will be better served by negotiating a collective agreement that does not have 99 different changeable allowances for school principals.Chris Hipkins: Did he state last year when he became Minister responsible for Novopay: “I want to see within three months the situation where as much as possible workloads for administrators are back to where they were before this thing started”; if so is he satisfied that he has delivered on that promise?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Yes. The error rates on this massive complex payroll are now well under 1 percent and the Minister is satisfied that he has delivered on undertakings. It can be improved now only by making the underlying collective agreements less complicated than they are.Tracey Martin: Is he aware of a school in Rodney that has lost $29000 out of its operations grant following the failure of Novopay’s debt collection arm to collect overpayments from support staff some of whom were non - New Zealanders and have subsequently left the country?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I am not aware of that particular case but the Minister is certainly aware of the problem of overpayments and debt collection and considerable effort has been applied to try to resolve that on behalf of schools. Again the pay arrangements for teachers are more complicated than for almost anyone except the police. In both cases we would get better results for everybody with much less complicated collective agreements.Tracey Martin: Can we take from his answers that the National Party believes in flexibility inside of education for everybody apart from teachers and their payroll?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No. The Government believes it needs to meet its legal obligations to pay people who work hard who educate our children and who contribute much to New Zealand’s economic and social development and we will do everything we can to meet those obligations—in fact more than what we can; we actually have to meet the obligations. I am simply making the point that in the longer run teachers would be better off the Government would be better off and the system would be much less expensive if we could simplify the arrangements. There is simply no justification for 99 separate allowances for school principals. That is nuts and we should try to change it.