Public Sector Pay Cap

Lord Cashman Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I join my voice to those who are calling for the public sector pay cap of 1% to be lifted. I apologise in advance to my noble friend Lord Haskel in that I think that I will generate heat rather than shed light. I have read the debates in another place and elsewhere, and I find it infuriating to read time and again praise rightly heaped on our public service workers, only to be followed by myriad excuses for not paying them properly or rewarding them even adequately for the work that they do on our behalf. As Shakespeare rightly wrote in King Lear,

“Nothing will come of nothing”.


My fear is that we will continue to drive people away from working in our public services, we will exhaust their good will and their vocational qualities, and we will witness public services suffering as a result. The people who work in all our public services are the weave and fibre that hold our society and our different communities together. In extremis, we rightly recognise and applaud them, but let us remember, too, that they undertake their work day in, day out, often unseen, unnoticed and unrecognised, and sometimes pilloried by a judgmental press when things and matters go awry—never more so in the case of social workers, the brunt of tabloid attacks, stereotyping and misrepresentation. Social workers are often called upon to weave the fabric of society back together.

Public sector workers operate in extremely difficult circumstances and often with diminishing departmental budgets. They work unsociable hours and carry out unsociable work that many others would not undertake. Sadly, I have witnessed at first hand when the workforce feels unrewarded, unnoticed and demotivated, when that public service crumbles into dysfunctionality.

So I call on the Government to be magnanimous and lift the 1% pay cap. We can afford it, and we can find the means, as my noble friend Lord Haskel said—and if we cannot, we must ask ourselves why. Why do we demand world-class, vital public services and expect them on the cheap? We must step up to the plate and reward our public service workers instead of relying on their good will, good faith and sense of public duty. That means a commitment to fair pay rises, too. We must no longer try and do things on the cheap. Failure to take action now, and to signal that we will match praise with financial commitment, will inflict long-lasting damage on our public services across the board.