Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint
Debate between Catherine McKinnell and George Howarth(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Catherine McKinnell
My right hon. Friend puts his point very succinctly and absolutely correctly.
Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
I hesitate to interrupt my hon. Friend, because she is making such a good case, but does she agree, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) said, that agency working, which is very expensive, is really a false economy? If nurses leave full-time employment in the NHS to work for agencies, they cost the NHS two or perhaps three times more, so there are no savings whatsoever.
Catherine McKinnell
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is also a false economy to lose professionals, given all the money that has been invested to make them a well-trained, well-performing workforce.
As hon. Members will be aware, Agenda for Change was introduced in 2004 as a system of pay, terms and conditions, and it applies to more than 1 million directly employed clinical and non-clinical NHS staff, with the exception of doctors, dentists and some very senior managers. It was designed with the intention of delivering fair, transparent pay that is better linked to career progression, skills and competencies. Agenda for Change is based on the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. According to NHS Employers, the system allows NHS organisations to
“design jobs around the needs of patients rather than around grading definitions”
and individual NHS employers are better able to define the skills and knowledge that they want the staff in those jobs to develop.
Importantly, in relation to this debate, Agenda for Change was also designed to enable employers to address more local recruitment and retention difficulties. However, as with hundreds of thousands of people who work in the public sector, all Agenda for Change staff have been affected by the previous and current Governments’ imposition of pay restraint.