Olivia Blake
Main Page: Olivia Blake (Labour - Sheffield, Hallam)Department Debates - View all Olivia Blake's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab) [V]
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) on securing this debate and on standing up for the millions of NHS workers who have put their lives on the line during the covid crisis.
NHS workers need a pay rise not just because they have worked hard for the last year, but because they have had repeated real-terms pay cuts for the past 10 years. The pandemic has shone a light on the fact that for more than a decade, we have failed to value the work done by people in the NHS and care sectors. That has had real consequences.
We have all read the stories about empty Nightingale hospitals. Some of those hospitals were never used because we did not have the workers to staff them. It was a misunderstanding of the long-term crisis in recruitment and retention in the NHS—a crisis with no mystery, as successive pay freezes have had serious consequences on our ability to recruit to the NHS.
For example, pay rates for nurses in the UK are extremely uncompetitive internationally. As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I have heard evidence that Australian nurses are paid double the amount paid to those in the UK and that those in the US are paid one third more. Experts have even warned of a brain drain abroad. That is disgraceful when the cost of giving our NHS workers a pay rise is so low.
Based on the Treasury’s own figures, London Economics calculated that the net cost of the RCN’s proposal of a 12.5% pay rise is only £0.82 billion. Given that £37 billion has been found to fund Test and Trace for two years, when the annual NHS wage bill has been estimated to be £34 billion, questions should rightly be asked about what can and cannot be afforded.
Instead of investing in staff, the Government’s offer of 1% is only enough to buy NHS workers an extra cup of coffee a week. That is not valuing the work they do, and it does not make up for a decade of pay stagnation. It is no wonder that there are tens of thousands of nursing and other vacancies in the NHS. Instead of investing billions into underwriting profits for private companies, Ministers should be investing in our NHS and the workers who keep it running. The pandemic has shown us what happens when we do not do that.
It is time to end pay stagnation, to back the calls from the RCN, Unison, my own union the GMB and campaigns such as “NHS workers say no to public sector pay inequality”, and to give our NHS workers the pay rise they deserve, which can be achieved with the right goals.