Public Sector Pay 2024-25

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Robert. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) for securing this important debate, and for her excellent speech.

Many public sector workers have, as a last resort, had to take industrial action over their pay, pensions and job security. I have been proud to stand on the picket lines in Liverpool with teachers, nurses, doctors, junior doctors, civil servants and many other public servants. The Government should not have put the workers in this position. The wave of strike action follows pay offers that amounted to real-terms pay cuts, and comes at the same time as high inflation and the worst cost of living crisis that many of us have ever known. Since 2009, the value of the average public sector worker’s wage has declined by 25%, and the total cash value lost as a result of wages failing to keep pace with inflation is £65,000. That figure is staggering. Just imagine the difference that £65,000 could have made to people’s lives, and their local economies.

The Government’s brutal and unrelenting austerity has cut our vital services to the bone, and declining real wages have forced many who deliver those services into poverty. Let us be clear: austerity was a political choice; it was the wrong one, and so it will always be. Analysis by Feeding Liverpool shows that one in three people in my great city are experiencing food insecurity and hunger, and I know from speaking to many constituents that this includes teachers, nurses, civil servants and many more public sector workers.

On civil servants specifically, a PCS union survey of its members found that 35% had skipped meals because they had no food, 18% had to miss work because they could not afford transport or fuel to get there, 85% said the cost of living crisis had affected their physical and mental health, and 52% were worried about losing their home. What we are putting them through is staggering.

Declining public sector pay and conditions have also created a recruitment and retention crisis. It is utterly heartbreaking to hear from public sector workers in West Derby, such as teachers and nurses, who feel that they have no choice but to leave the career they have worked in their whole life, and care so much about, because of a combination of low pay, poor conditions, funding cuts, staff shortages and huge workloads.

Recent polling shows that two thirds of the public want the Government to invest any fiscal headroom in public services, such as schools and hospitals, and the people who serve in them. People have had enough of the Tory austerity programme. I completely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley, who described so well the three key things that the Government must do next. First, there must be greater transparency around pay review bodies, along with greater collective bargaining arrangements in the trade union movement. Secondly, the upcoming pay settlement must deliver at least an inflation-proof pay rise. Thirdly, the Government must commit to a principle of pay restoration, and put right a decade of real-terms pay decline for public sector workers. They deserve nothing less, and our communities deserve nothing less.