29 April 2005
The Department of Health is to try to broker a deal in a long-running row over private firms' refusal to offer Agenda for Change to their staff working in the NHS, Public Finance has learned.
Officials at the ministry are to convene a top-level working party after next week's general election to try to thrash out an agreement on the issue.
PF understands that the group will comprise senior officials from Unison, Amicus, and the GMB trade unions, top managers from the major NHS contractors and the CBI.
The DoH's move is an attempt to defuse an increasingly heated dispute, which centres on the pay and conditions of up to 100,000 support staff such as cleaners and porters, who work in hospitals but provide services that have been contracted out to private companies.
Trade unions argue it is discriminatory that they are missing out on the double-digit pay rises being given to the lowest-paid NHS staff, and have lodged formal claims for full implementation of Agenda for Change with all NHS contractors.
But private contractors say their contracts with the NHS will not fund these rates of pay and claim they cannot afford them, estimating it could cost up to £100m.
Norman Rose, director general of the Business Services Association, which counts many NHS contractors among its members, told PF that the DoH's intervention to try to hammer out a national agreement was a 'major breakthrough'.
But he warned that additional government money would have to be found to make a deal a realistic prospect.
Colin Meech, Unison's national officer for private contractors, told PF that firms had statutory obligations to employees. He added that ballots for strike action were in the pipeline at several NHS trusts and said that unions would use all means necessary to win a deal.
'We can understand contractors' concerns that our members' claims for Agenda for Change have not been funded in the contracts. But that does not mean they are exempt from providing no less favourable terms and conditions and discrimination-proof pay systems.'
A DoH spokesman told PF: 'Any decisions taken will be a matter for an incoming government.'
PFapr2005
