EBME Forums Forums Management Professional Issues Agenda For Change What's Coming Next?

The Daily Telegraph 16 July 2012
"A leaked document shows a group of NHS managers want to force staff to take pay cuts of up to 5 per cent, end overtime payments for working nights, weekends and bank holidays, reduce holiday and introduce longer shifts."

NHS bosses from 19 organisations have joined together, in what some have dubbed a 'pay cartel', to drive through the changes.

It could mean the end of the national contract called Agenda for Change, which saw the majority of health service staff, including nurses, midwives and porters, moved onto a standardised pay scale.

Doctors are on different contracts and are not affected.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, is thought to be sympathetic to regional pay and conditions as NHS bosses struggle to make £20bn worth of efficiency savings over four years.

Others believe that the NHS terms and conditions are a barrier to private companies taking on patient services and breaking up Agenda for Change would make it more attractive.

The 19 chief executives believe that by acting together they can counter the 'extremely hostile' reaction expected by staff, it has been reported.

The document leaked to the Sunday Times said: "Acting in unison... in a way which has not been undertaken previously demonstrates both the seriousness of the situation and the collective resolve to achieve long-term change."

Hospital staff in Poole, Exeter, Plymouth and Turo are thought to be among the 1.5m who could be affected.

Demonstrations have already been held and it is expected that the unions would put up a strong fight to protect national pay.

Unison has said the plans will "damage patient care and drive down pay".

The document outlines measures such as a sliding scale pay cut with those on more than £21,000 a year set to lose around 5 per cent, reducing sick and stopping unsocial hours payments.

Performance related awards could soften the blow for staff in what the document calls a "sweet and sour" approach.

The 'final option' could be to terminate all contracts and reemploy staff on the new terms although the document said this is likely to result in the NHS being sued.

It said: "Making the potentially radical changes to the terms and conditions of employment of our staff is not without risk in terms of legal challenge, industrial relations unrest, impact on staff morale and reputation management."

It added: "Organisations must appreciate that upon entering into a negotiation, there is a very real need to see it through and to deliver some change."

Two thirds of the NHS budget is spent on staff and it is already thought that thousands of posts have been lost as bosses fail to recruit into vacancies.

Management consultants have suggested that the NHS should lose one in ten of its 1.4m workforce in order to save money.

Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: "A clear sign of the chaos engulfing the NHS is the move by a break-away group to cut pay and break national pay arrangements - in open defiance of a promise by the Deputy Prime Minister to prevent regional pay.

"Labour will force a Commons vote on the Government's NHS betrayal and call on the Treasury to return £700m to the Department of Health to fulfil its election promises.

"On Cameron's watch, we are seeing budget cuts, job losses and a postcode lottery running riot. They inherited a successful NHS and in just two years have reduced it to a demoralised and destabilised service that is fearful of the future."

A Department Of Health spokesman said: "NHS providers have long had the power to employ staff on such terms that they consider appropriate, including under the foundation trust laws passed under the previous government. This means employers are free to negotiate any changes to national agreements directly with staff locally or their representatives.

"We would expect NHS employers and trade unions to work together to ensure the national Agenda for Change pay scheme remains fit for purpose."

This 'tribe' of NHS, so called, managers comprising of South West Hospitals are hoping to reduce wages in a low wage area.

The North-South divide, an expression often used (especially in the North) fails to appreciate that other than London and the South East, the South West (except for Bristol) have the lowest wages with the highest house prices in the country.

This is typical of what I predicted with the introduction of Foundation Trusts and it never ceased to amaze me that colleagues thought this would be a good thing and believed all the propaganda and suggestions that staff could be further rewarded by embracing such a divisive scheme.

Regional pay is what they want, in other words reducing YOUR pay, if they can. The choice will be simple, either accept it or fight it. For those that choose the latter then ensure that you and your collegues support your Trade Union, for those who want to accept it then you have only yourselves to blame.

Unfortunately there will always be the parasites that will not wish to support any Trade Union resistance but, as ever, always happy to take any improvements in their working conditions gained by other people's sacrifices.

It dismayed me to see the lack of the young at the recent demonstrations to fight the pension changes, they seemed quite happy to let older workers (whose pensions are not affected) lose a day's pay in order to fight for the conditions of younger colleagues. You will ALL have to unite to fight this attack on your Terms and Conditions.

What else is left (in the South) ... the bit in the middle ... Hampshire?

Welcome to the Real World, guys. That is, the world of Supply and Demand. Put simply, if folk choose to live and work in "nice" parts of the country, why should they also expect to be paid as much as those toiling away in more "stressful" locations?

Personally, I see nothing much wrong with "regional pay" (just as I saw nothing much wrong with the idea of the so-called "Poll Tax" many years ago).

If folk want to fight the inevitable, no doubt there will be plenty more migrant workers welcomed aboard to take their places.

Hello Geoff, Barney
The principle of regional pay has already been established years ago in the NHS with the so-called London Area weighting allowance; I didn't hear anyone on the receiving end complaining that this was unfair?

In a broader sense if we role out the regional pay principle to other Public Sector employees (including civil servants, Armed Forces, Politicians, Management Consultants), we might get somewhere.

There has to be the rule of fairness, (if the Government could sort out the collection of revenue from those multinationals who resort to "Tax avoidance" schemes perhaps we wouldn't be in such a state).

Inevitably, we have little option in the NHS but to make savings or lose jobs, clear stark choices. No doubt the next step will be if everyone agrees to a pay cut, we will locally protect jobs, (but only up to a certain banding i.e. 5 and below).

Time to wake up and smell the Coffee...

The armed forces are a special case. They can get sent here, there and everywhere. And (in my day at least) local allowances (sometimes seen as a "hardship" allowance) are paid, as are special payments for being on active service, etc., etc..

No special cases Geoff, when you take the Queens shilling; you know what you sign up for.

X-factor payments, covering active service, relocation, deployment etc. are part of the existing Armed Forces pay package and job description.

Local or regional payments i.e. cost of living in a certain area in U.K. should be calculated in the same way as for any other public sector employee.

We are not talking about overseas allowances, but home postings, therefore same proposed regional pay rules should apply to Armed Forces, Emergency Services, Police, Fire Brigade, Hospital worker etc.

If the Government pays your wage, why should anyone be exempt from bearing the share of economic hardship experienced by other Public Sector Workers? That would be divisive!

Fair enough.

Meanwhile, those of us on the "outside, looking in" (as it were) can only dream of such pay and conditions as those enjoyed in general by Public Sector (that is, government) employees.

We can't all be Bankers, or CEO's of the worlds largest security company (for example), after all.

Obviously no-one on the receiving end of additional money above the agreed pay level would complain, but what is proposed is a pay cut below the ageed level. It is ironic that many beneficaries of both the outer and inner London weighting on retirement have sold their more expensive houses and moved to the South West and inflated the price of houses for the locals, who have now been threatened with this pay cut. It is also ironic that in my experience, when working for large national companies (other than the London allowance) there has never been a successful attempt of implementing regional pay.
The call for regional pay has been led by the smaller private companies who pay poorly complaining about not being able to attract the best staff due to the public sector paying more in low pay areas. In my view the main reason why pay has been eroding in these companies is that their staff generally are not represented by Trade Unions, so beware. I read some reference to fairness in the threads, there has never been any consideration to being fair in wage and conditions negotiations by either side, management will pay as little as possible and workers will ask for as much as possible and usually settle in the middle but this government and their public sector managers want the give and take to be that you workers give and we will take.

Regional pay is very strange, on one hand Trusts have been permitted to implement regional pay but on the other hand they are being strongly advised against it via the likes of NHS employers. It's almost as if the Government want to secretly bring it in but instead blame a handful of 'rogue' chief execs.

NHS employers gave a excellent reason why regional pay won't work and that is if you have some neighbouring Trusts that have stayed with National terms and conditions, you'll basically get a migration of the most talented employees to these Trusts. You'll basically end up with premium and second class NHS hospitals.

The other thing is incentivised pay, some of those south west NHS trusts are in such poor financial state that it wouldn't surprise me if these Trusts just didn't pay the incentivised pay at all or put a cap on the number of people who could get it. Thus demotivating staff who could never reach the top of the band or it could promote the migration of staff further to Trusts that did offer it.

If people start to leave they will have to introduce R&R to keep them. Thus scuppering their cost saving plans.
Robert