$163,000 redundancy payout to Te Pūkenga chief executive triggered by Government disestablishment plan

Former Te Pūkenga chief executive Peter Winder, centre, left the struggling mega-polytech in December with redundancy pay of $163,000. Photo / George Novak

Peter Winder, former chief executive of the mega-polytechnic Te Pūkenga, received a redundancy payment of $163,383, the equivalent of three months’ base salary, when he left the organisation in December.

In his 17 months in the job, both as acting chief executive and chief executive, Winder was paid a salary of $640,000 a year. His fixed-term contract was due to expire in June 2025, but the new Government’s formal notification that it intended to disestablish Te Pūkenga triggered his redundancy payout.

Te Pūkenga refused the Herald’s Official Information Act request in February for public disclosure of the size of the payment. It released the information only after the Office of the Ombudsman’s intervention.

Winder’s is just the latest in a string of redundancy payments by Te Pūkenga, which it also refused to disclose until the Ombudsman’s involvement.

Including Winder, Te Pūkenga paid out at least $719,000 over the calendar years 2022 and 2023 in golden handshakes for two departing chief executives and four departing deputy chief executives. The latter were made redundant in late 2022.

Te Pūkenga, also known as the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, is a Crown entity and is the semi-merged result of the previous Government’s efforts to combine and centralise the 16 technology institutes and polytechnics and nine Industry Training Organisations.

The current Government intends to break up Te Pūkenga into many of its constituent parts but has yet to announce a plan for doing so.

In 2022, the last year for which financial results were released, Te Pūkenga ran an $80 million deficit. Recently released documents suggest it continued to run a significant deficit in 2023.

Winder’s contract was sufficiently tightly drawn, including key performance indicators that related to consolidation and centralisation, that both he and Te Pūkenga’s governing council agreed the threshold for redundancy was met, given the pending disestablishment.

Winder declined to respond to questions from the Herald. He is currently working for the Hamilton City Council, through his consultancy McGredy Winder and Co, providing advice on water policy.

A council spokesman said his contract began on March 4 and ran until June 30. The cost was capped at $164,900.

Former Te Pūkenga chief executive Stephen Town (centre) left the polytech in 2022 with a golden handshake of nearly $200,0000.

Winder’s predecessor as Te Pūkenga chief executive also received a large payout, in August 2022. Stephen Town left with a $195,075 severance payment “in lieu of notice” and equal to three months of his annual $689,000 salary.

Before his departure, he also received 5½ weeks of paid “discretionary leave”, during which time he was not working and Te Pūkenga was also paying Winder as acting chief executive.

The Herald can also now reveal that Vaughan Payne, a former deputy chief executive, received a $98,250 redundancy payment in late 2022 after his position was disestablished through restructuring. Te Pūkenga previously withheld the information, citing privacy.

The sum represented three months of Payne’s annual $393,000 salary and was paid on December 6, just over two months before he took up another public sector job with the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). His work at Te Pūkenga finished on December 2.

On February 8, 2023, he began work as one of the DIA’s four new water services chief executives, on a salary of $710,000.

A Public Service Commission spokesman declined to comment on Payne’s situation, and whether it constituted double-dipping, but he noted that the Public Service Act 2020, section 88, covered redundancy payments followed by new work in the public sector.

“It reflects a clear intent that public servants offered redundancy to cover a period of unemployment should not cash in and job-hop immediately to another public service agency.

“It is up to individual agencies to take reasonable measures to ensure the act is complied with, both when terminating employment by way of redundancy and when recruiting.”

Te Pūkenga deputy chief executive Vaughan Payne left the organisation in late 2022 with a redundancy payment of nearly $100,000. He took up a new job with the Department of Internal Affairs two months later.

Payne told the Herald his three-year contract with Te Pūkenga contained a redundancy provision, “which stated that, if my employment was brought to an end in a specific timeframe before July 2023, three months’ redundancy was payable. This was considered compensation for the breaking of the contract …”

He said he was appointed to the DIA role in late December, after leaving Te Pūkenga, and the DIA put forward the start date of February 8. “At no time did DIA, as the employing agency, raise any issues about a start date. Nor was I made aware of any issues by Te Pūkenga. Had my start date with DIA been pushed out by three weeks, I would have been fine with that.”

A DIA spokesman told the Herald: “The terms and conditions of severance or redundancy pay received by Mr Payne in relation to his employment prior to his role as Entity B establishment chief executive are primarily a matter for him and his previous employer Te Pūkenga.”

The DIA advised Te Pūkenga in late November that Payne was being considered for the role of a water services chief executive as part of the reference check process.

He said no issues concerning Payne’s remuneration, redundancy or section 88 of the Public Service Act were raised by Te Pūkenga as a result.

However, he added that, given the current context in the public sector, the DIA “is considering whether checks specifically related to section 88 of the Public Service Act 2020 should be part of its recruitment process”.

Gus Gilmore, Te Pūkenga’s current chief executive, told the Herald that, since Payne received his final payment on December 6, “we can advise that Mr Payne was not still being paid by Te Pūkenga …when he commenced work for DIA”.

Payne left the DIA at the end of March. His role was disestablished and he received no redundancy.

Last month’s Budget contained contingency funding to disestablish Te Pūkenga but the total was not disclosed because key decisions, such as a timeline, had not been decided.

Budget documents said “initial Cabinet decisions” were expected “in mid-2024″, and planning and policy work would be undertaken in the second half of 2024.