NHS Staff Pay
Debate between Helen Whately and Jack Dromey(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Helen Whately
We have delivered on the commitments in the multi-year pay deal for “Agenda for Change” staff, including nurses. That includes the 12% pay rise for newly qualified nurses, bringing the starting salary for a new nurse to almost £25,000. We are now going into a new pay settlement for the forthcoming year. As part of the spending review, the Budget will set the envelope to cover pay costs for that pay settlement, but there are extra pay costs for the growing number of staff as we increase our staff in the NHS, particularly nurses—as I said, we are on track to have 50,000 more nurses in the NHS by the end of this Parliament.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab) [V]
Together with my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), I met nurses—members of the Royal College of Nursing—in the west midlands, and Catherine, a young intensive care nurse told, with tears in her eyes, how she had worked for months to save lives. She told how she went off for a week’s holiday because she was exhausted, and when she came back, three of the four people she had been caring for had died and a member of staff had died. Does the Minister not begin to understand the dismay and despair on the part of tens of thousands of nurses like Catherine that, having endured purgatory to save lives, their reward now is effectively a pay cut?