Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Chris Stephens Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP) [V]]

The key challenge the Government have is to use public money to help rebuild the economy. I want to use my time to discuss public sector pay, and in particular pay for civil servants.

The civil service has risen to the challenge, whether that is employees in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs who have processed furlough payments to ensure that money goes into workers’ pockets, or those in the Department for Work and Pensions who have processed millions of universal credit claims to ensure that the vulnerable and those who need help the most get it. It is frankly baffling, therefore, that the Chancellor intends a pay freeze in this Budget. This means that the Cabinet Office advice is for a 0% pay remit that will contain for the first time ever no additional funding to support the lowest paid. The House should be aware that 19 MPs from six political parties, representing constituencies across the whole United Kingdom, wrote to the Chancellor twice asking him to reconsider. It beggars belief that he has not responded to either of those letters.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day—a chance to highlight the lack of pay coherence across the civil service, which creates huge inequality. The average pay for women in the civil service in 2020 was £28,650, whereas for men it was £30,880. That gap increases with part-time work, with women working part time at higher rates in all age bands. Delegated bargaining has been a disaster. It is wholly unacceptable that workers doing the same job at broadly the same grade suffer huge disparities in pay. The delegated system is costly, time-consuming and inefficient. It is simply unacceptable that there are 200 separate pay negotiations across UK Government Departments; that is a ludicrous situation.

There is a clear economic illiteracy to a public sector pay freeze. Public sector workers and civil servants spend their wages in the private sector economy. They do not hide their wages in a shoebox under the bed. They spend that money in the retail sector, the hospitality sector and the like. Civil servants should be given a proper reward, and we should end the pay disparities and reduce the number of pay negotiations. Public sector workers deserve better than this Budget from this Chancellor.