---

Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. It is a particular pleasure to follow the excellent contribution from the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell). She set out the compelling case for why the pay regime for nurses, midwives and associated health service professionals across our health services is becoming increasingly exploitative.

The hon. Lady spoke of the particular experience in England; I obviously speak from the experience of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, the Administration in Northern Ireland have chosen to void the clear recommendations from an independent pay review body, as in England, and have not taken the more constructive approach followed in Scotland to pay recommendations and to meeting the proper pay needs and aspirations of hardworking professional staff. As other hon. Members have said, those staff provide such a valuable service day in, day out. They work long hours with huge responsibilities, but with less and less of a sense of reward and with ever more inadequate remuneration.

We now have the situation in which many things have been brought forward. People were promised that Agenda for Change would ensure greater equity and transparency on pay, that they would see salary paths improving naturally—with more than just token increments—and that it would reward people’s sense of vocation. Of course, it does nothing of the sort, because people have found themselves locked into highly contested bands. Certainly in Northern Ireland, people doing the exact same work in different trusts are paid differently, which is causing huge frustration and a grave sense of grievance and injustice for many people.

The health and social care system in Northern Ireland is supposed to be operating increasingly as a single employer, with the commissioning role of Health and Social Care Board moving to the Department and the Minister. However, we have the bizarre situation in which people who are doing the same job and delivering on the same targets set by Ministers and the Executive are supposedly employed by different trusts and are paid differently—not because their working terms are different, but because the terminology on their contracts might be different here or there. The slightest difference in terminology in job descriptions is being used to keep people in lower pay bands than their counterparts in a neighbouring trust who are doing the exact same job. Of course, not being able to address those issues absolutely suffocates people with frustration.

This has happened in the context of those staff being locked into the 1% pay rise cap that has endured for a number of years. It is one thing to ask people to take a pay freeze in the name of austerity and managing public financial pressures for a year or two, but it is another to be locked into such a pay freeze while seeing other people, including on the public sector payroll, being able to escape those constraints. Again, it adds to the sense of injustice.