Olivia Blake
Main Page: Olivia Blake (Labour - Sheffield, Hallam)Department Debates - View all Olivia Blake's debates with the HM Treasury
Public Sector Pay 2024-25
Olivia Blake Excerpts(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) for securing this debate. It is always brilliant to hear her talking about the important issue of low pay. I echo her comments about Tony Lloyd. He was a very principled public servant, not only as an MP for many years, but as a police and crime commissioner. My thoughts are with his family. He will be sadly missed.
The statistics on public sector pay and the associated graphs and figures all starkly outline the dire state of pay for those who dutifully work to serve our communities, but nothing paints a better picture than the experience of frontline workers themselves. I want to read an anonymised quote from a DWP worker. When they were asked about the conditions in their workplace, they said:
“Every day felt like drowning, getting upwards of 60 messages from claimants to deal with, on top of all the other work. I’ve been in my role for several years and this was the worst it has gotten. It worsened my mental health to the point of severe burnout, with constant headaches when I am at work and bad anxiety. At its worst, it pushed me to self–harm and heavy contemplation of suicide.”
That worker is not alone in those feelings. PCS recently published first-hand testimony from the workforce in the DWP. The reports in that document are shocking, and they almost all point to low pay as the source of the recruitment crisis in the DWP. No one wants to work for an employer that they feel undervalues them and the skilled job they do. It is ironic that we hear a lot about competition in the private sector, and yet do not see competitive pay in the public sector.
The link between poor recruitment and pay is also abundantly clear in the health service. Nursing, which has already been mentioned, has a vacancy rate of 10.36%. The number of district nurses has decreased by 44.4%. School nurses are down by 32.6%, learning disability nurses by 46%, and health visitors by 31.1%. Just the other day, I was in the Chamber debating provision and funding for special educational needs and disabilities. All the nursing staff I have listed are critical to delivering that service, so it is no wonder that SEND provision in the UK is broken. Pay is at the core of a lot of these recruitment crises.
It is the same story again and again. Last year, the TUC found that one in three public sector workers—1.8 million workers—has attempted to leave their profession and get a job in another field. As alluded to earlier, the crisis in health and social care is even worse; there, the proportion rises to 50%. Of all the workers the TUC asked, 52% cited low pay as a cause of their wanting to leave the sector.
The pay for our public servants reflects the esteem in which we hold our public services, and the value we place on supporting some of the most vulnerable members of our community. Given the Government’s measures on public services, those have clearly hit rock bottom. We should all reflect on that.