Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint Debate
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Andrew Smith
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Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint
Andrew Smith Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Catherine McKinnell
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is also a false economy to lose professionals, given all the money that has been invested to make them a well-trained, well-performing workforce.
As hon. Members will be aware, Agenda for Change was introduced in 2004 as a system of pay, terms and conditions, and it applies to more than 1 million directly employed clinical and non-clinical NHS staff, with the exception of doctors, dentists and some very senior managers. It was designed with the intention of delivering fair, transparent pay that is better linked to career progression, skills and competencies. Agenda for Change is based on the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. According to NHS Employers, the system allows NHS organisations to
“design jobs around the needs of patients rather than around grading definitions”
and individual NHS employers are better able to define the skills and knowledge that they want the staff in those jobs to develop.
Importantly, in relation to this debate, Agenda for Change was also designed to enable employers to address more local recruitment and retention difficulties. However, as with hundreds of thousands of people who work in the public sector, all Agenda for Change staff have been affected by the previous and current Governments’ imposition of pay restraint.
Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Is it not perverse that the Conservative party seems to favour the introduction of all sorts of markets in the NHS apart from a labour market? The devolution of responsibility to trusts that it often heralds is completely inconsistent with a centralised, state-imposed pay freeze.
Catherine McKinnell
My right hon. Friend makes an important point. There was a two-year pay freeze from 2011-12 and a 1% increase in 2013-14 and 2014-15, followed by confirmation in the Budget of summer 2015 that the Government would fund an average public sector pay award of only 1% for the four years from 2016-17. As has been pointed out, the Government decided to reject the independent NHS Pay Review Body’s recommendation of a further 1% uplift to all pay scales from 2014-15, stating that there would be an annual increase of at least 1% for Agenda for Change staff in England through either contractual incremental pay or a non-consolidated payment.