NHS Pay

Taiwo Owatemi Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) for securing this important debate. As a former NHS worker and a current member of the Select Committee on Health and Social Care, it is undeniable that I feel passionately about this issue. I know that my constituents in Coventry North West share my strength of feeling towards this subject, as expressed by the hundreds of emails I have received and the thousands of rainbows still dotted in the windows of homes across Coventry.

The last year as been the toughest year in the NHS’s 72-year history. NHS workers have been pushed to the limit and stretched beyond our wildest imagination. They have worked 1 million hours of unpaid overtime and sacrificed more than should ever have been asked of them. They have done this to keep us, the public, safe. In the last year, at least 230 NHS workers have tragically paid the ultimate sacrifice and lost their lives to covid while serving others. My thoughts are with their families, their communities and the colleagues they have left behind.

After a year of intense sacrifices and unprecedented pressures, it is clear that NHS workers deserve better than the real-terms pay cut proposed. Indeed, our NHS heroes deserve a pay rise. The nation, including members of this Government, clapped on their doorsteps every Thursday to applaud the work of our NHS covid frontline workers. As has been touched on today, however, claps will not pay NHS workers’ rent or bills and cannot be exchanged for weekly food shops.

It must also be emphasised that the ramifications of this pay cut are not just confined to the household finances of our NHS workers. It will exert further pressures on our local high streets at an already precarious time for our local and regional economies. A proper pay rise for the staff of University Hospital Coventry would feed directly into the shops and businesses in my constituency. I have heard at first hand from small business owners that high streets such as Jardine Crescent, Holbrook Lane and Wolseley Avenue would warmly welcome the rise in local spending power to ameliorate the conditions of the last year.

In addition to the impact on our local high streets, I feel compelled to touch on the staff vacancies crisis that our NHS faces. It is alarming but unsurprising that the mental and physical toll of being overworked and underpaid is driving too many NHS workers out of the profession. The extent of this crisis is vast, with an estimated 100,000 staff vacancies, and it is clear that we must act quickly to retain current NHS workers and recruit many more to reduce the significant over-reliance on expensive bank and agency workers. No clearer message can be sent to current and prospective NHS workers about their value than fair remuneration.

Finally, I want to highlight the inequalities that this pay cut will exacerbate. The effect of the pay cut will be heavily skewed against women. Some 76% of workers—nearly 1 million NHS staff—affected by this Government pay cut are women. Surely this is not the message we want to send about the worth that our society places on the work of women. A pay rise will not begin to cover the personal sacrifices made by NHS workers while caring for strangers at a time of need. It is incumbent on the Government to ensure that NHS key workers are paid fairly.