Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Lady Hermon

Monday 30th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

It is an honour to serve under you, Mr Evans.

We seem to have been in this place before. We had a lot of debate about the nursing bursary, and these things are connected, because it comes down to how we are treating people and valuing them, as has been said. In Scotland, we also have a pay cap of 1%, but one difference is that that is being paid each year, whereas for three of the last six years, nurses in England have faced a freeze—an award of 0%. What they are told is, “Well, your increment gives you a rise.” The increment is how people move through the Agenda for Change structure, so if they are not getting any cost of living rise, the increment structure of Agenda for Change is being undermined.

The Scottish Government are a real living-wage employer and are recognised and registered as such, so people earning less than £22,000 get £400 to keep them above the real living wage. Starting in the next financial year, 2018-19, those in the lower bands in England will fall below the national minimum wage; they do not come anywhere close to a proper living wage. We know the Government’s living wage as “the pretendy living wage”, because people cannot actually live on it. That term should not be used because it is confusing. The result is that at band 1 or 2, a nurse or healthcare assistant in Scotland will earn £881 more than their equivalent in England. The common band for a nurse graduate is band 5, and at the top of that band, the nurse in Scotland will earn £284 more than the nurse in England.

Scotland has had no compulsory redundancies since the crash. In England, there have been 20,000. That seems bizarre when we are short of nurses. The vacancy rate in England is 9.5%; in Scotland it is 3.5%. We get what we pay for. If we treat people badly, eventually they go away, or, if they are approaching retiral, they do not go on working; they finish, because frankly they are burnt out. Nursing is a hard, heavy and stressful job. Nurses in Scotland feel stressed because of the gap caused by vacancies, the increased demand, the ageing population and the complexity of the cases they look after, so we can only imagine what it must be like in hospitals in England, with almost 10% of places not being filled and having to be covered by agency staff, which, as we have heard, is just a circular, self-defeating argument.

[Lady Hermon]

On the hon. Lady’s point about how difficult and wearisome the work of a nurse is—it is hard work—those nurses born in the 1950s who are affected negatively by the Government’s pension policy cannot now retire until they are 65, 66 or, indeed, 67. Has there not been a double whammy for those nurses who want, for the love of the job, for the love of the patients and for the love of service of the community, to stay in post? The Government have an opportunity to recognise that contribution. If they will not do something on pensions—I hope that they will change their mind on that—they could at least remove the pay freeze.

[Dr Whitford]

The whole message that is sent by nurses, particularly those who are in their late 50s and approaching 60, is that they are burnt out; they do not feel valued. When they have to work hours and hours beyond their shifts, doing what is frankly heavy labour—coming from that background, I can vouch for its being heavy physical work—they will of course leave as soon as they can manage to do so. The problem is that that exacerbates the pressure on all their colleagues, and that is what we are seeing with the huge shortage of thousands of nursing posts across England.

We have to recognise that we will face more increased demand and more complexity as our population ages. When patients in their early 70s were coming to me with breast cancer, they had multiple morbidities. By that stage, they had had a heart attack, were type 2 diabetic, had a bit of kidney failure and were severely immobile from arthritis, obesity or one of the many other conditions that people are getting. The nurses were trying to deal with all those things. Going forward, we will face more cases of dementia and Alzheimer’s, which is a particularly challenging morbidity for patients and the staff looking after them. Working in that environment, where everyone around them is having a bad day at the same time that they are having a bad day, means that people do not enjoy going to work. If there is any chance to get out, they are going to take it.

We need to attract more nurses to deal with demand. As was mentioned earlier, approximately a third of nurses are due to retire within the next 10 years, and we need to prepare for that. Some of that relates to the expansion that we had under Labour; when there is a big expansion in a profession, a whole lot will tend to retire at the same time. Unless succession planning is ongoing and established, we will reach an absolute crisis.

That brings us to the other difference: the nursing bursary. In Scotland, we still pay a nursing bursary of more than £6,500. We also have free tuition, which is equivalent to £27,000. We have additional funding for nurse trainees with additional support needs. They tend to be older—they are around their late 20s and early 30s —so they get more than £2,000 for childcare, a dependency allowance if they have either an adult or children dependent on them and a single-parent allowance.

The Scottish Government know that we have a challenge to recruit and retain nurses to grow the nursing profession, and they are putting that money in. They are not putting it in by giving high pay awards each year, but they are the only Government that actually accepted the independent review body’s recommendation of 1% on top of any steps within Agenda for Change. What is the point in doing all the work around a review body, if the Government do not bother listening to it?

I suggest that the Government need to show nurses that they are valued. They need to look at the decision to get rid of the nursing bursary, because we already know from NHS England that there has been a decrease of 20% to 25% in applications, so it is having exactly the opposite effect than the Government talked about. We know from the Nursing & Midwifery Council that registrations from the EU have dropped by 90% since last July. That means that whole source is drying up, regardless of rules, because people do not want to take the risk of moving here. We cannot shut down every possible source for having enough nurses. A lot of this is about calling on the Government to change their attitude and realise that this is a difficult job. We need to attract people into it and we need to retain people for as long as we can. Nurses are worth every penny they are not being paid.