NHS Staff Pay

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 21st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care if he will make a statement on NHS pay.

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

The whole House will want to pay tribute to the hard work of NHS staff up and down the country during one of the most difficult winters in living memory. Today’s agreement on a new pay deal reflects public appreciation for just how much they have done and continue to do, but it is much more than that. The agreement that NHS trade unions have recommended to their members today is a something for something deal that brings in profound changes in productivity in exchange for significant rises in pay.

The deal will ensure better value for money from the £36 billion NHS pay bill, with some of the most important changes to working practices in a decade, including a commitment to work together to improve the health and wellbeing of NHS staff to bring sickness absence in line with the best in the public sector. We know that NHS sickness rates are around a third higher than the public sector average, and reducing sickness absence by just 1% in the NHS will save around £280 million. The deal will put appraisal and personal development at the heart of pay progression, with often automatic incremental pay replaced by larger, less frequent pay increases based on the achievement of agreed professional milestones. It includes a significantly higher boost to lower-paid staff, to boost recruitment in a period when we know the NHS needs a significant increase in staffing to deal with the pressures of an ageing population. Pay rises range from 6.5% to 29% over three years, with much higher rises targeted on those on the lowest and starting rates of pay.

As part of the deal, the lowest starting salary in the NHS will increase by more than £2,500, from £15,404 this year to £18,040 in 2020-21, and a newly qualified nurse will receive starting pay 12.6%—nearly £3,000—higher in 2020-21 than this year. But this deal is about retention as well as recruitment. It makes many other changes that NHS staff have been asking for—such as shared parental leave and the ability to buy extra or sell back annual leave—so they can better manage their work and family lives, work flexibly and balance caring commitments.

The additional funding that Chancellor announced in the Budget to cover this deal—an estimated £4.2 billion over three years—cements the Government’s commitment to protecting services for NHS patients, while recognising the work of NHS staff up and down the country. This is only possible because of the balanced approach we are taking—investing in our public services and helping families with the cost of living, while getting our debt falling. Rarely has a pay rise been so well deserved for NHS staff, who have never worked harder.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The Secretary of State has finally given the lowest-paid NHS staff a pay rise. Staff, royal colleges, trade unions and the Labour party have today been vindicated in saying that a pay rise is long overdue. But when we have seen nurses, paramedics and midwives losing thousands of pounds from the value of their pay, heard stories of NHS staff turning to food banks, have 100,000 vacancies across the service, seen more nurses leaving the profession than entering and seen trusts spending billions of pounds on agency staff, this pay cap should have been scrapped years ago.

In the general election, Ministers said that scrapping the pay cap was nonsensical. When a nurse pleaded with the Prime Minister for a pay rise on national television, she was told that there was no magic money tree. Can the Secretary of State tell us how this pay rise will be paid for? Have the Prime Minister’s horticultural skills grown said magic money tree? We have heard that there will be additional money. When will trusts get the allocations, and if the money is additional, will it be paid for by extra borrowing or extra taxation? Public servants deserve reassurances that the Government will not give with one hand and take with the other.

Given the projections for inflation, can the Secretary of State guarantee that staff will not face a real-terms pay cut in any single year of the deal? We note that he has backed down on docking a day’s holiday. Will he commit to not tabling that proposal again? We also note that he will not block the transfer of hospital staff to wholly owned subsidiary companies. Will he at least guarantee that all staff employed by such companies will be covered by “Agenda for Change” terms? Can he tell us when the rest of the public sector will get a pay deal?

NHS pay has been held back for the best part of a decade. Today is a first step, but the NHS remains underfunded and understaffed. We urgently need a plan to give the NHS the funding it needs for the future.

[Mr Hunt]

If the hon. Gentleman wants a plan to give the NHS the funding it needs, can he explain why Labour in Wales has deprived the NHS of £1 billion of funding that it would have had if funding had increased at the same rate as in England? Far from Labour being vindicated, the House will remember that the pay restraint in the NHS for the past eight years was caused by the worst financial recession since the second world war, caused by a catastrophic loss of control of public finances.

The hon. Gentleman asks for some details. Today’s pay deal means that someone starting work in the NHS as a healthcare assistant will see their rate of pay over the next three years go up by 26%, nearly £4,000. A nurse with three years’ experience will see a 25% increase, which is more than £6,000 over three years. A band 6 paramedic with four years’ experience will see a £4,000 rise. On top of that, we are putting in a huge number of things that NHS staff will welcome, including, for example, statutory child bereavement leave and shared parental leave. Yes, we are asking for important productivity changes in return, but this is about the modernisation of NHS staff terms and conditions, which is good for them and good for taxpayers.

The hon. Gentleman asks where the money is coming from: it is additional funding from the Treasury for the NHS. It is not coming from extra borrowing. If he had been listening to the autumn statement, he would have heard that debt as a proportion of GDP is starting to fall this year for the first time. That is possible because we have taken very difficult decisions over the past eight years—they were opposed by the Labour party—that have meant 3 million more jobs and have transformed our economy out of recession into growth. None of that would have been possible if we did what his party is now advocating, which is to lose control of public finances by increasing borrowing by £350 billion. Let us just remind ourselves that countries that lose control of their finances do not put more money into their health services—they put less. In Portugal, the amount is down 17%, and in Greece, it is down 39%. The reason that we can announce today’s deal is very simple: this country is led by a Government who know that only a strong economy gives us a strong NHS.