Tony Lloyd
Main Page: Tony Lloyd (Labour - Rochdale)Department Debates - View all Tony Lloyd's debates with the HM Treasury
(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend’s great expertise as a former nurse is shown by the detailed question she has asked. We need to make sure that we reform public services and give people the opportunity to progress and be trained in the roles they fill. One of the roles of the pay review body is to look at such structures, as well as at rates of pay. During the processes they go through, those bodies certainly take evidence from frontline workers, unions and experts in the area, and I hope that they will take such issues into consideration.
Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)
The Chief Secretary referred to productivity increases in the public sector. We recently saw firefighters racing into Grenfell Tower, paramedics and police racing into the Manchester Arena after the bomb, and doctors, nurses and other medical professionals working around the clock to save people’s lives. What advice would she give to her hon. Friends on the Government Benches about productivity increases by those people, who have served the people of this country?
Elizabeth Truss
Those firefighters, police and others in the emergency services have done a tremendous job, and I am sure we are all extremely grateful to them for regularly putting themselves on the line of danger. The hon. Gentleman is right to point that out.
What does productivity mean? I talked earlier about empowering people on the frontline to be able to make decisions and do things more quickly. When I talk to nurses and teachers, they sometimes say that they want less bureaucracy so that they can get on with the real jobs that they have been employed to do, and that is why more police are spending more time on the frontline. Productivity means giving people more job satisfaction—spending more of their time doing the job that they have come in to public services to do—and that is why we are reforming public services and seeing improvements.