Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Mark Durkan

Monday 30th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. It is a particular pleasure to follow the excellent contribution from the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell). She set out the compelling case for why the pay regime for nurses, midwives and associated health service professionals across our health services is becoming increasingly exploitative.

The hon. Lady spoke of the particular experience in England; I obviously speak from the experience of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, the Administration in Northern Ireland have chosen to void the clear recommendations from an independent pay review body, as in England, and have not taken the more constructive approach followed in Scotland to pay recommendations and to meeting the proper pay needs and aspirations of hardworking professional staff. As other hon. Members have said, those staff provide such a valuable service day in, day out. They work long hours with huge responsibilities, but with less and less of a sense of reward and with ever more inadequate remuneration.

We now have the situation in which many things have been brought forward. People were promised that Agenda for Change would ensure greater equity and transparency on pay, that they would see salary paths improving naturally—with more than just token increments—and that it would reward people’s sense of vocation. Of course, it does nothing of the sort, because people have found themselves locked into highly contested bands. Certainly in Northern Ireland, people doing the exact same work in different trusts are paid differently, which is causing huge frustration and a grave sense of grievance and injustice for many people.

The health and social care system in Northern Ireland is supposed to be operating increasingly as a single employer, with the commissioning role of Health and Social Care Board moving to the Department and the Minister. However, we have the bizarre situation in which people who are doing the same job and delivering on the same targets set by Ministers and the Executive are supposedly employed by different trusts and are paid differently—not because their working terms are different, but because the terminology on their contracts might be different here or there. The slightest difference in terminology in job descriptions is being used to keep people in lower pay bands than their counterparts in a neighbouring trust who are doing the exact same job. Of course, not being able to address those issues absolutely suffocates people with frustration.

This has happened in the context of those staff being locked into the 1% pay rise cap that has endured for a number of years. It is one thing to ask people to take a pay freeze in the name of austerity and managing public financial pressures for a year or two, but it is another to be locked into such a pay freeze while seeing other people, including on the public sector payroll, being able to escape those constraints. Again, it adds to the sense of injustice.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

On the pay freeze, over the past five or six years it has worked out to roughly the equivalent of between a 6% and 8% wage cut. That is the reality that those people face. The Government say they value people in the health service, but the only way to demonstrate that is through their wage packets at the end of the day. The other issue, which will certainly affect mature students who want to be either a nurse or a midwife, is that the education maintenance grant has also been cut. So much for valuing people who work in the national health service.

[Mark Durkan]

I agree with all of the hon. Gentleman’s points; they touch on points made in interventions by other hon. Members. Let us be clear: the long-standing freeze is, in essence, a long-term pay cut in real terms. People are left feeling frustrated and aggrieved by that. People are leaving the profession; they feel they are being driven out—we heard references to the number of people who are switching to agency roles, but many people do not want to do that, and their sense of vocation is being exploited in a way that now probably more than borders on the cynical. A better response is needed.

I have made points particularly on Northern Ireland. On Agenda for Change, we know, as other hon. Members have mentioned, that pay in the lower bands actually falls below living wage standards. One appalling vista—which will bite this year in Northern Ireland, where these adjustments are being made—is that the money for that 1% pay rise will be used to bring people in the lower wage bands up to the living wage. In other words, if the 1% envelope is to be used to cover that, other people will lose out; there will be a trade-off between nurses and health service professionals in different grades, with that 1% being prioritised towards bringing people up to the living wage. Nobody should be asked to endure inadequacy as the price of affording a micro-concession to equality for those who are locked into the lower bands that pay below the living wage. That is going to bite in Northern Ireland this year.

It should not, because as part of the Stormont House agreement and other things, Northern Ireland has a voluntary exit scheme that was meant to reduce the cost of the public service payroll. If that overall voluntary exit scheme saves money on the public service payroll, my party made the point that, rather than those savings being used to pay for a cut in corporation tax in future years, they should be used for restorative pay measures—starting first in the national health service for those staff who have suffered as a result of freezes and who are stuck on inadequate and unfair pay bands under Agenda for Change. Their case could be met because public sector payroll savings are on the way.

Health service staff in Northern Ireland will be asked to manage yet more change. People already work long hours in heavy-demand services, but more structural changes will be made to health services following the Bengoa review and others. If people are being asked to manage all of those changes and keep those services going during those transitions, the one thing they are entitled to is some long overdue consideration of the inadequate pay they have been asked to endure.