Public Sector Pay 2024-25

Chris Stephens Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Robert. Like other Members, may I start by paying tribute to the great Tony Lloyd? He was a good friend, a great man and one of the characters of this place. We will all miss him. I am sure that in the coming days we will all be paying fuller tributes to a great man and a friend to many.

I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly to my position as chair of the PCS parliamentary group and as a member of the City of Glasgow branch of Unison, of which I am a former treasurer. Indeed, in the old days I was the one responsible for signing the many strike pay cheques to workers at Glasgow City Council.

This has been an excellent debate. We are all waiting with great anticipation to hear the Minister’s response, but I am sure some of us could write his lines for him. I hope we will not be subjected to this notion that it is pay rises that contribute to inflation, when we know that it is prices. I am sure that we will not be told about the huge cost to the taxpayer from pay rises, as if there is some notion that public sector workers put their pay rises in a shoebox and hide them under the bed.

As the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) correctly said, there is a good economic impact when we give public sector workers a pay rise. Before the pandemic, about 70p in every £1 of public money ended up in the private sector economy. If we give public sector workers a good pay rise, what do they do? They spend it, and they spend it in the private sector economy. I would have thought that the Government would welcome such behaviour by consumers.

Many Members, including the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum), have mentioned the PCS report. I have a copy in front of me; I know that I am not allowed to use props in this place, as Mr Speaker reminded us earlier today, but I have a copy for the Minister that he can read at his leisure. I have to say that it is a devastating report about the staffing crisis in the Department for Work and Pensions and how low the pay is for staff. The fact that huge numbers of staff in the Government Department that looks after social security have to rely on the very benefits of that system is something that the Government need to look at.

In this debate on public sector bodies, I hope the Minister will explain why there are so many bargaining units across Departments in the Westminster Government. There are 200 separate pay negotiations for the UK civil service. That is a completely and utterly ludicrous position. I would have thought that perhaps the party of small government would have one set of negotiations for civil servants across UK Government Departments. Can the Minister also explain why staff at the Pensions Regulator are currently taking industrial action? The Pensions Regulator is not complying with the Government’s own pay remit: it is offering less than the remit says.

Mercifully, there is a different story to tell for public sector workers in Scotland. We need only look at figures for the past year. Rail workers in Scotland are getting a pay rise of between 7% and 9%; in England, it is 4% to 6%. In the national health service last year, there was a 4% pay rise in England; in Scotland, it was anywhere between 7.5% and 11%. That is perhaps because we have a Government in Scotland who recognise Scotland’s values, recognise that public sector workers should be looked after during the cost of living crisis, and recognise that we should be thanking those workers in the public sector who kept the country’s wheels turning during the pandemic. I hope that the UK Government will respond positively to the many points that hon. Members have made this afternoon.