Civil Service Pay

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) for securing this important debate and for so evocatively laying bare in her opening remarks the scale of the crisis facing the civil service.

In recent days, Conservative Members have dedicated much of their energy contriving to impugn the conduct of the former second permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office. However, I have noticed with interest the lengths to which many of them have gone to make clear, regardless of their views of Sue Gray, the high esteem in which they hold the civil service. As the Paymaster General himself echoed in his remarks to the House yesterday, this nation’s civil servants are diligent and hard-working, and display the utmost integrity in the exercise of their duty. The question facing Conservative Members, and which I hope the Minister will address in a moment’s time, is: why should civil servants be denied the fair and long-overdue pay rise that will allow them to keep their heads above water during the most precipitous collapse in living standards in a generation?

The Government are impotent without the civil service, and nowhere was that more clearly demonstrated than during the height of the pandemic. That global health crisis necessitated the most radical expansion of state involvement in the lives of ordinary people since at least the second world war. Furloughed workers needed to get paid, businesses needed financial support, and the health service required additional resources on an unprecedented scale.

Notwithstanding the Government’s many failings during those dark days, not a single one of our successes in the fight against covid—including the vaccine roll-out—would ever have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the civil service. And yet, in November last year, those same workers were told by the Government that they deserved a measly pay rise of just 2% during a period of record inflation, when food prices have risen by more than 16% and October’s mini-Budget catastrophe sent mortgage rates and rents soaring. That is an insult. All of that comes after over a decade in which a public sector squeeze has seen pay fall at every grade of the civil service by between 12% and 23% in real terms.

Let us be very clear about what that squeeze has meant for those working in the civil service. Of all PCS members surveyed, 85% said that the cost of living crisis has impacted their physical and mental health, over half are worried about losing their homes, and nearly one in 10 have been forced to resort to food bank use. One constituent recently wrote to me to say that they felt at their wits’ end. Another asked for assistance in dealing with the payday lenders they had been forced to turn to in order to make ends meet, while another said that the challenge of keeping up with mortgage payments had left them feeling like a prisoner in their own home. We should not be surprised that a third of all respondents to the PCS survey said they were looking to leave the civil service entirely, and that a career change would do good for their mental health.

Next week, as the Chancellor delivers his Budget, more than 100,000 PCS members will be on picket lines across the country to tell this Government that enough is enough. I will be proud to stand with them as they do so. It is time for this Government to realise that this country cannot survive without its public servants, and those public servants cannot survive on warm words alone. In the national interest, I urge the Minister to get around the table and negotiate the fair pay rise that our civil servants so rightly deserve.