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?

"If you choose to dismiss this opinion as jealous, ignorant, victimising and Inconsiderate then that is your perogative."

Well why don't you answer if you either:

A) Are unaware that a 20% pay cut will "have a serious impact on their family lifestyle"

or

B) Don't care that a 20% pay cut will "have a serious impact on their family lifestyle"

I presume that it's B, and to me that's very wrong.

So if you earn £25k your family lifestyle must be protected, where as if you earn £100k it's not and in a vain attempt at social engineering you'll affect their family as much as you like and with no remorse.

So when does it become OK to throw someone's lifestyle on the bonfire of your social justice? How much can someone earn and still have their lifestyle respected and protected?

I thought it was the people who were trying to widen the gap between rich and poor who were fond of making the world into an "us and them" type of place?

And that "us and them" attitude is not how I believe the wealth gap in this country will be challenged.

And of course I trust that you're also aware that cutting the salary of every public worked who earns £100k by even 50% will not affect the poverty figures in this country one single bit? The median salary will still remain the same and the percentage tagged with the politically derived label of "living in poverty" will remain right where it is?

You can't overcome "us and them", unfairness and division with "us and them", unfairness and division.

Dear FattyArbuckle

Most consultants don't have CEAs or do private work. To suggest that they are all earning at least £100k + is just wrong. Dh certainly doesn't (just in case any RL friends think we burn tenners on the fire in the cold snap ).

Regarding unionisation, "if you don't stand up for yourself who the heck is going to stand up for you?"

You'll notice that the only real remaining unions are in the public sector where there is an effective monopoly.

Union's in the private sector failed in their responsibility to protect the workers and by ignoring changes in technology and the economic situation destroyed many businesses and therefore jobs.

The public sector cannot be allowed to go bankrupt or to be destroyed by its inefficiencies and is it a surprise that that is therefore the last stronghold of the unions?

Fatty - £70k is the basic starting point for consultants, on a 10PA job

10PAs= Mon-Fri normal week.

Since most consultants do on-call, their basic 10-PA salary is supplemented by 3,5 or 8%, depending on how arduous, and how frequent, the on-call is. If you do fairly frequent on call (say a 1 in 6), you are also supplemented by an extra PA.

Extra duties/sub-specialisation are then supplemented.

If your work diary is especially busy - for example if you have very busy clinics - then you may be awarded an extra PA; but more commonly you are given time off in-lieu. Consultants rarely take their time off in lieu.

Taking my DH as an example:

basic cardiology, 1 in 4 busy on-call; 2 sub-speicalties (trans-oesophogeal echo and angioplasty), very busy clinics, head of angioplasty, has 1 CEA. He has been job planned at 13.2 PAs, the trust can only afford 12PAs plus an afternoon off/week. He takes the afternoon off for childcare and fills in that afternoon's admin out of hours, cos it needs to be done.

His salary is £100k, but he is job planned every year so it's not fixed (more likely to go down).

In terms of salary, the rate-limiting factor for nurse consultants is that they still do a shift pattern, whereas doctor consultants tag on their out of hours work onto the normal working week.

The public and private sectors have always been very different. It seems people only want them to be comparable during the bad times.

Public sector jobs usually have much lower salaries than equivalent private sector jobs. However, the benefits were job security and a good pension. Public sector work is also no frills. I've always worked in the NHS. My university friends out in the private sector always got lovely facilities, lunches out with their boss, lavish xmas parties with taxis home etc. In the good times they also got pay rises and bonuses. I got below inflation pay rises (to keep inflation down). Materialistically, i could have had a much better time using my academic achievements to get a job in law or banking or accountancy.

The payback in the public sector should be that in the bad times we still carry on, nothing extravagant but steady reliable work and pay.

When private sector pay is soaring, public sector workers are expected to take freezes as a way to control inflation. When private sector pay drops or jobs are lost people want the public sector to share the pain. Would be nice if they had wanted us to share in the good times too.

"The payback in the public sector should be that in the bad times we still carry on, nothing extravagant but steady reliable work and pay."

The "issue" with public sector spending, or more generally with Government spending, is that it's much too high. Even in the good times the Government was borrowing money to pay the bills, now times are bad it's become so much worse.

The Government has been living beyond it's means for years now, and things appear to have finally come to a head.

Quite simply the Government has got to spend less, the current situation is unsustainable.

So a response to that is to bring the public sector wage bill back to a level that can be afforded, and that can either be done by sacking people or reducing the wage bill. That reduction can either be done with actual cuts or just wage freezes that will in time provide an effective cut.

Maybe it's wrong to tackle the cost of wages, maybe there should be more genuine cuts.

However remember the root cause of all of this, it's nothing to do with making things comparable, it's to do with getting the Government to finally accept that living off of credit cards is not a good thing to be doing and that it needs to live within it's means.

Badgers Paws, clearly most people would say that losing £20k of income when your income is £100k plus should not leave you "struggling to manage" on £80k. Obviously I accept that some people earning this amount have high levels of financial commitments which are difficult and painful to reduce.

However, there are lots of people who are struggling just to get by and families on £100k or £80k income are just not in that category.

"So when does it become OK to throw someone's lifestyle on the bonfire of your social justice?" - when there are so many faimiles and individuals who are really struggling in our society and a growing underclass of the disenfranchised which gives rise to so many social ills including crime from which the rich are not immune.

Our society is divided into haves and have nots - it is a society that champions greed.

"clearly most people would say that losing £20k of income when your income is £100k plus should not leave you "struggling to manage" on £80k. Obviously I accept that some people earning this amount have high levels of financial commitments which are difficult and painful to reduce."

I think that anyone that stops and seriously considers what loosing 20% of your income actually means to people would see that it's going to have a very serious impact on people's lives and families.

People live to their means, so people have budgeted, planned and accounted for that income.

But those lives and plans mean nothing to you, somehow those families are not worth caring about, those families can take as serious an impact as you like without a second thought.

That's wrong.

My question "So when does it become OK to throw someone's lifestyle on the bonfire of your social justice?" was asking how much do you have to earn before the impact to you and your family stops being considered.

At £25k a 10% cut is, in your eyes, considered unreasonable.

At £100k you're absolutely fine with the impact that a 20% cut would have upon a family.

Where is the line in between?

Whose families can be impacted and whose families are worthy of protection?

What this boils down to is that this is nothing to do with the impact on people's lives. This is just about clobbering those who you see as being high earners and somehow worthy of punishment.

And as said if you go ahead and do that to people on £100k but you won't take one single family out of the politically calculated "poverty" bracket, not one.

Double you seem to have forgotten the stonking great pensions that you get which the rest of us don't get and are paying for.

What I think is wrong is that some people are paid so very much much more than other people.

Bankers are not worth the hundreds of thousands of pounds they receive, there are many who have the ability to do the same job well and who would be happy with much less money for it.

You seem to be very happy to continue with the status quo of haves and have nots as clearly you perceive yourself to be on the winning end of things and want to defend your lifestyle regardless. A wide gap between rich and poor is not the mark of a civilised society in my view.

Clearly paying 1 consultant £10k less is the same in terms of saving as paying 10 nurses £1k less each, the money is saved in either scenario so I am not sure what point you are trying to make.

"I want I want" seems to be the tone of your posting tbh. I think this finacial crisis could be a good wake up call for us to review how we really want our society to work in the future. Are we really happy that bakers working for a state owned bank earn so much? Should the efforts of one consultant really be valued equivalently to the efforts of four nurses?

"Bankers are not worth the hundreds of thousands of pounds they receive, there are many who have the ability to do the same job well and who would be happy with much less money for it."

When there is a private company there's really not much you can do about trying to control how it sets it's wages.

And in the end the goal of a private company is to make money, so if there were ways of paying people less I'm sure that they would find a way. The private sector has been far more aggressive with pay freezes and cuts than the public sector.

"You seem to be very happy to continue with the status quo of haves and have nots as clearly you perceive yourself to be on the winning end of things and want to defend your lifestyle regardless."

Another attempt to dismiss disagreements with you as being self interest or "I want I want"? Well again you're wrong. I don't earn anywhere near that much money and as said don't work in the public sector anyway, so this doesn't directly affect me, other than how it shapes the society we make. And to be frank I'm not happy to live in a society that thinks that a family on a certain amount of money, more than I'll ever earn by the way, deserve a good kicking and the impact of a 20% cut in wages upon them can be ignored.

Just a point to mention, we in the NHS pay for our pensions too you know. There seems to be a feeling that they are given to us as a perk - they are not, we choose to pay a percentage of our salary into the pension scheme, same as anyone else paying into a salary in the private sector.

And like anyone else, I feel mighty annoyed that I have been paying for something which is now going to be changed. (They are changing to the RPI from the CPI, or the other way round - never can remember- and likely to change again way before I can claim it I would think).

It's like buying a car on hire purchase, spending years and years paying towards it each month, and then going to collect it only to find they substituted it for a bicyle because they decided a car was too expensive. So much for being told how important it is to pay into a pension for old age.

And yes, we do get good sick pay and 27 days holiday. As others have said, it's in lieu of higher salaries. I retrained as an OT when I was 30, and lots of OTs retrained from previous careers, and everyone I know took a drop in pay when they joined the NHS compared to their previous private sector salary.

"Just a point to mention, we in the NHS pay for our pensions too you know. There seems to be a feeling that they are given to us as a perk - they are not, we choose to pay a percentage of our salary into the pension scheme, same as anyone else paying into a salary in the private sector."

In the private sector final salary pensions schemes are disappearing because companies cannot afford to run them.

In the state sector final salary pensions seem to still be pretty common and any financial shortfall in them will be met by the tax payer.

So that is the impression that people are getting, generous pensions that where not financially viable are bailed out by tax payers money.

We in the NHS are also taxpayers.

(Although we probably pay less than lots of people in the private sector, since we earn less taxable income over the course of our career.....)

"most consultants and gps earn over £200000- fact"

WTF??

Complete rubbish.

Most gps earn about £80,000 and they have had massive pay cuts for last 3 years. Dh has had a 20% fall in income as a partner. (but that doesn't make the daily mail does it)

Salaried gps (not partners) earn about 60-70,000.

The odd partner will earn over 110000 but they often run other practices/ let out premises etc. And it is going down every year.

"We in the NHS are also taxpayers."

Of course you are, but you give the Government (through NI and PAYE) less than you get back (through your salary).

Such a position is only viable because other people in the private sector pay the Government more than they receive back from it.

And in no way is that a criticism, funding a public sector is one of the things that a Government should be doing.

"we in the NHS pay for our pensions too you know. There seems to be a feeling that they are given to us as a perk - they are not, we choose to pay a percentage of our salary into the pension scheme, same as anyone else paying into a salary in the private sector."

But if you were paying the same amount into a private sector pension, the pension you would receive at the end would be both far smaller and you would have no guarantee about the amount at all.

You get a defined benefit, us in the private sector get only a defined contribution

"As others have said, it's in lieu of higher salaries. I retrained as an OT when I was 30, and lots of OTs retrained from previous careers, and everyone I know took a drop in pay when they joined the NHS compared to their previous private sector salary."

Not everyone in the private sector earns a lot, y'know.

"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."

Yes that is exactly what we are doing. I went to the US 3 months ago. Eight of my colleagues from the NHS are on their way to Australia and others have started the paperwork. We are registered Nurses.

The conditions for registered nurses on NHS wards have been dire even before the pay freezes were considered.

It was normal be scheduled to work a 12 hour day and have to stay over 2 or 3 hours unpaid and keep working to avoid being held responsible for harm to patients.

They deduct over an hours worth of pay in a 12 hour shift for breaks. Yet you will often find yourself as the only RN for a large group of patients. Therefore you are unable to take a break without risking patient safety. Even when I was pregnant I worked 14 hour days without a break to avoid harming patients. IF I took a break and something happened (like a missed order etc) I would have been liable, not the hospital for short staffing the place.

I still had to pay childminders to watch my kids for all of those hours I worked but didn't get paid for.

IF you are a registered nurse on an NHS ward family friendly hours are out. Full stop. Care assistants, ward clerks and domestics etc have less responsibility and no legal accountability so they can get better hours.

The safest maximum load of patients for an RN to take is 4-6 patients. In the NHS staff nurses take 10+ patients each on many wards.

The NHS is already making a ton of money off of abusing staff nurses before the pay freezes start. Our unions are worthless since RNs cannot strike.

My husband works in the private sector and he works 8 hour days and gets a lunchbreak everyday. Must be fucking nice I used to say.

Now that I am in the United States I have a fantastic salary, private health insurance for myself, husband and kids all paid for by my employer-a non for profit hospital. I have set hours (no swtiching between days and nights constantly as we did in the NHS) and a lower cost of living. And I never have to care for more than 6 patients at once which means I can actually care for them properly.

NHS Nurses: Australia and the USA have many states in their countries that are passing Nurse to patient ratio legislation. This means that they are hiring. Go for it.

Oh and I have to say that having worked as a Nurse in the private and public sector.......Private sector is a MUCH better deal.

I think that the problem isnt just NHS staff leaving to go to private sector jobs, but also that the uncertain future re pay is encouraging people to retire.

Everyone that I know who works in the NHS and is at an age where they could retire is leaving now. In the past there have been people who have stayed on longer, because they enjoyed their job.

I dont know if this is just the people that I know, of is this is happening in other areas, but it means a loss of some very experienced people from the service. Yes, because of their long service they might be getting paid more than the average staff member, but you could argue that they contribute more to the service too.

You also have to remember that their have been recruitment and hiring freezes on in the NHS for years for Staff Nurses.

Over the last few years many,many new nurses have been unable to find jobs. The NHS has NOT been replacing Nurses who leave and when they finally do all the new staff will be green.

I have never seen anything so horrific as the poor patient to RN ratios on the wards in the NHS. I won't ever go back and take all that abuse from patients and relatives over the fact that I cannot give 20 people one to one care and attention. Fuck that.

"their have been recruitment " Sorry. I meant to type there has been..... I am holding my new puppy and can't type.

I'm sure I read somewhere the other day that there is more money been paid into the NHS pension scheme every year than there is been taken out of it. The article was saying it was a good deal for the govt who basicly had a huge, interest free loan from people paying in their pensions. Its in profit. So no, you're not paying for my pension.