FYLDE civil servants will strike again this week over a pay dispute that has been running since last summer.

Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union members will picket Norcross, Warbreck and Lytham St Annes civil service sites today and tomorrow (Thursday and Friday). It will be their third two-day strike this year, underlining their rejection of the 2003 pay offer from employer, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Around 3,000 civil servants could down tools for the strike.

It coincides with the damning result of a nationwide PCS ballot asking members if they had confidence in DWP senior management. Across the nation, 753 voted 'yes', while 31,872 voted a resounding 'no'.

Martin Jones, chairman of PCS' Fylde Coast, Preston and Filestores branch, said: "We had a below inflation pay offer of 2.6 per cent. But a bigger bone of contention than that is the pay progression - unlike members of Parliament we have to start on a band minimum and it could take 13 years to reach band maximum."

A new appraisal scheme - the performance and development system (PDS) - has also caused unrest, Mr Jones said. "Staff are scored not according to how well they have done but they are compared to their colleagues and pre-determined quotas. The union doesn't accept this type of appraisal anyway, nor does it accept it linked to pay."

He did not rule out the possibility of further strikes including longer strikes concentrated in different areas each time.

"We want to tell the government it can't keep cheating public servants as if they were something that came up out of the pavements.

"They are entitled to reasonable rates of pay for the work they do and to be treated with a reasonable amount of respect."

A DWP spokeswoman said: "We needed to introduce a single system because we had seven systems, many inherited from organisations that were brought together to form DWP.

"The PDS is designed to help us identify and reward the people who contribute the most to the business. We are doing this by assessing people's performance against their peers, ranking them and then grouping them into four categories.

"The distribution system ensures staff are marked fairly and managers can't mark up people's performance."