NHS pay cuts proposed

[Emoo]

NHS Employers are proposing to freeze incremental pay progression for all staff groups, see here, and are in negotiation with the unions, see here and here. In return NHS staff would get "a commitment to provide a guarantee of 'no compulsory redundancies' for as many staff as possible".

This is in fact a pay CUT, with the burden preferentially falling upon those lowest on their salary scales. This would include nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, pretty much everyone working in the NHS. The only people unaffected are those already sitting comfortably on the top of their salary scales.

This comes on top of the 2-year cost-of-living freeze already imposed, representing a 3.3% per annum cut in real terms (using most recent inflation estimate).

Details of the proposal are not readily available, and the information below is based on an interpretation of the sketchy information provided.

For those of you who don't know how NHS pay works, here's an example. A newly qualified nurse gets £21,176. Over 8 years, their salary would gradually step up in annual increments to £27,534, reflecting their increased experience in the role. They would then remain on this salary unless they took on a different role with significant additional responsibilities. The recent proposals would mean that the nurse would earn £21,176 for an additional 2 years, and be 2 points behind on the payscale thereafter.

For a typical nurse, this would mean a cut of ~4% (compared to expected pay) in the first year, then ~7% thereafter until they reached the top of their scale.

I should point out that these increments are currently written into the contracts of NHS staff; they are not 'bonuses', and employees will have based their long-term financial planning on the expectation of getting them.

For newly qualified doctors and midwives, the situation could be even worse; midwives generally start on £21,176 and doctors on £22,523. Their second year pay would normally be ~20% higher, reflecting the transition from supervised to independent practice.

To me, it seems unfair and immoral that:

1. a pay cut is being termed a "freeze".
2. it preferentially affects those who earn the least.

What do others think?

I think if they still have a job, they should be thankful. Many, many people will be made redundant in the next year and would jump at the chance of a 20 odd thousand a year salary.

Time for me to join the BMA, I think.

Bilbo - are you for real? The public should be thankful the doctors, nurses, midwives etc still have a job, don't you think?

with pay freezes and the pension review, a lot of people with see the advantage of locuming, which will cost money in the long term.

Yes, I am for real. The country is in a mess. We all need to take responsibility. Doctors, midwives, nurses etc will still have jobs. Yes, they should be thankful. They are in a much better position than many thousands of people in the country right now.

I think that working for less/static money is preferable to having no job at all and I think that the likelihood of pay cuts and freezes in the public sector has been very well-flagged for at least the last year. It should come as no surprise to anyone in the public sector. I know several people in the NHS who have seen the writing on the wall and who have already decided to find alternative employment. This situation will be replicated across all publicly funded bodies.

"They are in a much better position than many thousands of people in the country right now." Who would be in an even worse position when they are ill and there's staff shortages and they won't be treated etc. Same answer to you Chil1234 (BTW are you a tory activist or something, you only appear to gloat on these kind of threads.)

So what do people leaving the NHS do? All working for the breast augmentation industry?

Dsis has just lost her job in the cuts as her department has been cut. Three of the businesses that used to employ me have gone bust halving my income. You are going to find very little sympathy for a 3.3% cut from us.

Why will there be staff shortages? Are all of the nurses going to walk out of their jobs because their pay is frozen - I think not.

Take a pay cut or don't have a job - I know which I would choose, if I actually had a choice.

Oh well, leaving the thread. Very bitter and hardened attitudes starting to crop up. Big Society, my arse. Dog eats dog is what it's coming to.

Take your violins and sad face with you then and try for some sympathy at your nearest job centre. Doubt you'll get any there either.

In our NHS they have frozen posts, so staff are doing more and more work, working longer hours just so patients still get a service. Alot of psychology services have been axed.

Wont be long until NHS pension is revised and services are privatised for cheaper more competitive care.

NHS staff are already under paid IMHO and this is just insulting.

Can we have some civilised discussion, please?

My point, perhaps not well made, was that we are clearly NOT "all in this together".

The proposals will hit people randomly, according to where they happen to be on their salary scale. These "incremental freezes" are pay cuts, unfairly distributed, leaving senior managers and senior consultants unscathed.

If the government/NHS employers need to impose NHS pay cuts, they should at least have the balls to say so, and implement them evenly over all NHS employees. To target them at the lowest paid, and term them "freezes" is political cowardice of the worst kind.

given that there's been no amendment to the very generous pension settlement NHS workers receive i dont think this appears harsh at all.

As a seperate argument i dont believe in automatic pay progression purely on years of service - it should be based evidenced improvements in capability.

I work in the NHS and tbh I'd prefer a pay freeze/cut than to lose my job. However, they should be fairly administrated. For example, when the national pay freeze was announced earlier this year, our executive board members announced that they'd be sacrificing their cost of living increase this year - bully for them - the way it was presented suggested that they were somehow exempt from the pay freeze so this was their token gesture to show solidarity. Except they're all on c. £100k a year. I was appalled they even get a cost of living payment on that kind of income.

I'm not a Tory activist and do not understand why I'm being accused of 'gloating'. Simply pointing out that we get the public services we can afford and are prepared to pay for. It's been heralded for a long time that cuts will be made... and that was from all parties pre-election btw. Efforts are being made to cut waste & inefficiencies but with personnel being a big chunk of NHS spending it was always clear that redundancies, pay freezes or pay cuts were on the cards. Anyone anticipating anything else is being naive. If the changes in pay are affecting some employees disproportionately badly then that's clearly something for NHS managers and union representatives to work on.

Very hard to feel any sympathy for those in the NHS. They are still getting very generous final salary pensions ... exactly the type of unsustainble pension liabilities that have the UK into the mess it's in. This is worth a huge amount to these people over the defined contribution pensions they would get in the private sector.

I agree that the fat cats need a good hard chop though. And all those GPs who screwed the government (meaning we the tax payers) over that new contract a couple of years ago when they all stopped providing out of hours services and bought themselves a new mercedes (yes - we did notice).

I don't mean to be mean but when everyone gets their violins out for poor hard working nurses and doctors they seem to be implying that those of us in the private sector are a bunch of lazy, morally vacant wasters. We work hard too, and without us there would be no health service.

Now I sound like a tory activist.

I agree with the OP, the way they are going about this is sneaky and wrong.

I support alot of the cuts this government is making, to HB, closing libraries, surestrt and the rest of it, but I am fully opposed to any cuts at all being made to the NHS. Make savings, yes, but not cuts. And that is effectively what this is.

I'm not getting the violins out because of the poor doctors and nurses, it's not their bank accounts that worry me, this shouldn't turn into a public sector v private sector arguement. Every single person in this country relies on the NHS at some point in their lives, for the most important thing they have (their health) and that is why it's workers should be protected.

NHS staff are already under paid IMHO

GPs aren't, as Trice notes. My DH did a back-of-envelope calculation and figured that if we could claw back the cost of those renegotiated contracts (which he said 'were just to get GPs doing their jobs properly anyway') then the money would be sufficient to scrap tuition fees. I didn't quite believe him but his numbers seemed to add up. Puts it in perspective a bit.

For those of us who work in the public sector, many are at the notion of automatic increments. DH works as a consultant (academia not NHS), they were doing next years budgets for postdocs and he was a bit suprised to see the salary bill increasing. 'But I thought you had pay freezes?' 'Oh yes, our pay is frozen, that's for the increments'.

Sorry, I only get an 'increment' if I've demonstrably earned a promotion, not just for longevity.

I work in NHS - and understand that we all have to take our share of the cuts. What bothers me is the underhanded way this Govt is going about it. They constantly go on about how NHS is protected, that front line services won't be affected etc. Well sorry - but they will. Lots of NHS services are not "core" and are provided via alternative routes of funding - lots of these will be stopping. Our Board has put in place strict vacancy control procedures - so although no blanket "freeze" on jobs its as good as.

Why does this need to be done. Cameron said in the spending review that the NHS would be untouched by cuts. Are the NHS just taking the piss by using this as an excuse to save money. I think its shit.

Its in my contract that I get an annual increment until at the top of Band 6 so can they stop it even though its in my contract??

How can anybody justify a pay increase purely on longevity? It seems that they need to cut salary bands every year just to keep pay frozen.

The problem is that nobody should have promised to the keep NHS ringfenced. Why is health more important to this country than education or defence? It was a purely political move to get votes from ageing baby boomers. Surely nobody actually believed them. How can you believe they can ringfence the largest area of funding?

I remember my DH told me straight after the election that nurse's pay would be cut in December. This has been on the agenda since then.