Public Sector Pay 2024-25

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Robert. I too pay tribute to our colleague Sir Tony Lloyd, the hon. Member for Rochdale, who has sadly passed away. He will be remembered for his kindness, and his tireless commitment to his community and the Labour movement. My thoughts go out to his loved ones. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) on securing this important debate. Our NHS, our schools and all our public services are the backbone of our society. It is those 6 million workers, from hospital porters to teaching assistants, who keep services running. They keep the country running.

Public sector pay has been slashed in real terms since 2008. While costs have soared, wages have failed to keep up, leaving workers in Coventry South and across the country struggling to makes ends meet. Recent research by Unison shows that the average public sector worker’s wage in 2023 was worth £12,000 less than it was in 2009. The work of teachers, nurses, firefighters and social workers has not got easier in that time. In fact, workload, stress and burnout have only shot up. Why is a teacher today paid a quarter less than they were in 2010? Why have social workers, paramedics, housing officers and so many others had their pay slashed by more than 25%?

For more than a decade, the failure to pay public sector workers properly has pushed staff to breaking point. It has created workforce crises, dangerous understaffing and a wasteful reliance on agency staff. Last year, public sector increases of around 6% were eventually secured in most sectors, but with inflation still sky high, those once again amounted to real-terms cuts that have left workers worse off. It has to be stressed that those pay rises were not handed to workers by the Government; they were won by trade unions who campaigned tirelessly for many months, and who were forced to take days of industrial action to claw back pay in the face of huge real-terms cuts.

It does not have be like this. The Government could choose to remunerate workers fairly. They could commit to increasing pay, at least in line with inflation, for 2024-25. They could plan to restore pay to 2009 levels, so that all public sector workers can enjoy the same standard of living today, and tomorrow, as they did in the past. In the past decade, Britain’s billionaires have seen their wealth go up threefold. It now stands at an eye-watering £684 billion, so we know that there is enough wealth to go around, to fund our public services and to give workers a decent wage. Let us tax the rich. Let us get the very wealthiest to pay their fair share. Let us invest in our public services and give the public sector workers who we rely on the fair, inflation-proof pay rises that they rightly deserve.