Baroness Keeley
Main Page: Baroness Keeley (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Keeley's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate with you in the Chair, Mr Hosie, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) on securing it.
We are all, rightly, incredibly grateful for the work that NHS staff have done over the last year. They have consistently gone above and beyond to cope with surges of demand in hospitals, to care for people with covid and to support family members who could not visit those patients. Now, the NHS is running the largest vaccination drive we have ever seen. As a reward for this, the Government have proposed a miserly 1% pay rise. With inflation set to rise over the next year, that will mean that NHS staff who have done so much will actually receive a real-terms pay cut. That is shameful and insulting. Ministers should have recommended a real-terms pay rise for NHS staff.
The pay proposal for NHS staff manages to be both wrong and unpopular. More than two thirds of those surveyed, including nearly 60% of Conservative voters, think that a 1% pay rise is less than our NHS staff deserve—but some NHS staff are even more underpaid. Last week, I met healthcare assistants from the north-west to listen to them talk about their roles and their pay. Band 2 healthcare assistants are among the lowest paid NHS staff. In theory, they carry out personal care tasks for patients, such as feeding, bathing and dressing. However, many healthcare assistants are in fact carrying out more wide-ranging and demanding tasks, such as casting broken bones, washing and sealing wounds, and carrying out observations or cannulations—tasks that should be carried out by a band 3 healthcare assistant, who would be paid nearly £2,000 a year more.
In one NHS trust in Greater Manchester, 98% of the healthcare assistants are employed on band 2, compared with a regional average of only 55%. That is straightforwardly keeping costs down by employing staff on one band and asking them to do the work of a higher-paid band. They are being systematically underpaid for the work they do. It is not acceptable. All NHS staff deserve to be fairly paid. When the Minister sums up, can she confirm that Ministers will ensure that all trusts have the funding they need to pay healthcare assistants fairly for the work that they are doing?
Finally, I want to come back to the 1%. For a healthcare assistant I talked to last week, who earns £9.80 an hour, the 1% increase will mean 9p an hour extra. A better pay rise is needed if we want NHS staff to stay in their vital roles in the vaccine roll-out, on covid wards and in handling the big backlog of elective surgery, screening and routine services. A better pay rise is deserved by NHS staff, who went above and beyond in the pandemic, who risked their lives and those of their families, and whom we applauded week in, week out. Clapping does not pay the bills. NHS staff are worth more than the miserly 1% on offer, and the public overwhelmingly agree.