14 January 2011
Health trade unions have rejected a proposal for a two-year freeze on pay increments in return for no compulsory redundancies for lower-paid staff.
Unison, the Royal College of Nursing and the British Medical Association all said yesterday that the proposed freeze was unacceptable.
NHS managers had offered in return no compulsory redundancies for staff who earn less than £30,460 and also said they would ‘seek to avoid’ compulsory job losses among higher paid staff and maintain training for dentists and junior doctors.
Staff paid more than £34,200 would thus have had their increments withheld but with no redundancy guarantee.
BMA chair Hamish Meldrum said: ‘At a time of rising inflation, [NHS staff] pay has been frozen for two years, and this latest proposal would amount to a further, severe, real-terms cut.
‘While bankers are to be allowed to continue to receive massive bonuses, it is absolutely perverse to penalise the dedicated and hard-working staff who keep the NHS running.’
Mike Jackson, Unison’s senior national officer for health, said the union could not support a further pay freeze.
‘The funding gap in the NHS is so great that members were sceptical that trusts would abide by a no compulsory redundancy agreement for two years,’ he added.
RCN chief executive Peter Carter called the idea a ‘divisive and an unwarranted attack upon hard-working nurses’, which he said would be ‘even more galling when every single day nurses see massive waste and inefficiency in the NHS – poor purchasing contracts, massive management consultancy spend, and huge waste on drugs and equipment’.
An NHS Employers spokesman said: ‘We are disappointed that individual union executive bodies have rejected this proposal without allowing full consideration locally.
‘This proposal is still on the table. We hope the unions will reflect collectively on its value and the fact that their decision to reject it will result in more redundancies and job losses than would otherwise be the case.’
