NHS workers given below-inflation pay rise

19 July 2022 Steve Brown

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The government accepted the recommendations in full from the NHS pay review bodies. All staff on the agenda for change pay scheme, including nurses and non-medical staff, will receive a pay rise of at least £1,400, backdated to April. This has been enhanced for the top of band 6 and band 7 so it is equal to a 4% uplift.

For the lowest earners, including porters and cleaners, the consolidated sum translates into a 9.3% increase in basic pay. The average basic pay for a nurse will increase from around £35,600 to around £37,000, the Department of Health and Social Care said – an increase of just 4%. However basic pay for newly qualified nurses will rise by 5.5%.steve.Barclay L

Dentists and doctors have been awarded a 4.5% increase, with the government again accepting the Review Body for Doctors’ and Dentists Remuneration recommendations in full. There will be no further increase for junior doctors, who are in the final year of a multi-year deal that has increased pay by 8.2% over the period.

The government also accepted the recommendations of the Senior Salaries Review Body, which will see very senior managers’ pay rise by 3%. A further 0.5% has been awarded to ‘ameliorate the erosion of the differential with the top of AfC band 9’, which was exacerbated last year when senior managers received no increase. However, it does mean this year that senior managers above the AfC bands will receive an increase at double the level of those on band 9, where a £1,400 increase equates to a rise of just 1.5%.

Health and social care secretary Steve Barclay (pictured) said this year’s pay rise of £1,400 for more than one million workers came on top of the 3% last year, when pay rises were temporarily paused in the wider public sector. ‘We want a fair deal for staff,’ he said. ‘Very high inflation-driven settlements would have a worse impact on pay packets in the long run than proportionate and balanced increases now, and it is welcome that the pay review bodies agree with this approach.’

The Royal College of Nursing said the pay award represented a ‘grave misstep’ by ministers and that, with the retail price index standing at 11.7%, the government had misjudged the mood of nursing staff and the public. ‘There are tens of thousands of unfilled nursing jobs and today ministers have taken the NHS even further from safe patient care,’ said the union’s chief executive Pat Cullen. ‘Living costs are rising and yet they have enforced another real-terms pay cut on nursing staff. It will push more nurses and nursing support workers out of the profession.’

Miriam Deakin, interim deputy chief executive of NHS Providers said that the announcement showed some movement towards a higher pay award for some staff groups. ‘But for many, it still falls well short of acknowledging the increased cost of living, which means NHS staff face real hardship,’ she added.

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, part of the NHS Confederation, said an increase beyond the 3% originally budgeted for was welcome. ‘However, NHS and public health leaders cannot be put into the impossible position of having to choose which services they will cut back on in order to fund the additional rise,’ he said.

NHS England said recently that fair pay rises for NHS staff were ‘operationally necessary’ but warned that every 1% above the budgeted 3% for pay in the settlement for this year would cost between £800m and £1bn. According to the report by the NHS Pay Review Body, its recommendations will increase the overall AfC pay bill by an average of 4.8% across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

‘NHS employers have only been allocated enough money to award staff a 3% rise, so unless the extra increase is funded by the Treasury, very worryingly, this will have to be drawn from existing budgets and will mean an estimated unplanned £1.8 billion shortfall,’ Mr Mortimer said.’ With the NHS already carrying 105,000 vacancies, if the government truly intends to support the NHS as it recovers from the pandemic and as it continues to tackle huge waiting lists, then it must reconsider and commit to fully covering these much needed pay rises for staff.’

The confederation welcomed the decision to target additional support for the lowest paid staff.  But it warned that this now needed to be mirrored ‘as a matter of urgency’ for the social care sector with a funded national minimum wage for care workers.Pat Cullen l

The RCN’s Ms Cullen (pictured) added her voice to calls for the award to be fully funded. ‘There can be no question of money being taken out of existing NHS budgets,’ she said. And Nigel Edwards, Nuffield Trust chief executive warned that failure to fully fund the award would risk blowing the health service budget even further this year.

‘Even without finding additional cash for pay, the NHS was already staring down an impossible task of finding £5.5bn worth of savings within its budget,’ he said. ‘It is pointless to pretend that these levels of efficiencies can be made in a year without detrimental effects such as possible cuts to staffing numbers.’

He highlighted pressures of trying to increase activity and coping with a reduction in dedicated Covid funding, despite substantial costs remaining. ‘Without increases to the budget to ease this pressure and fund the higher than anticipated pay rise, the government will have to realise there will be knock-on implications for how much resource the service can throw at tackling record waiting lists,’ he said.