Nurses pay rise

1%

Shocking.

In fairness there are a lot of people in this country who would like 100% of their pay, let alone a pay rise.

In fairness there are a lot of people in this country who would like 100% of their pay, let alone a pay rise.

Yes and many of them are getting it whilst they sit at home watching daytime TV

It's a difficult one, from personal experience I saw how some hard working nurses didn't get a pay rise for 7 years. It is an easy stick to beat the government with but the argument is more nuanced given the state of the national debt and affordability.

I think the general attitude of the public is when asked what are important to them they say healthcare, education system etc but in the same breath when asked if they'd pay more tax, they say no. There is no magic money tree.

Having seen the increase in income taxes at the budget I think I'd feel happier paying it if I saw nurses pay increasing rather than the massive spend on in effective projects (has Dido Harding resigned yet?) and sweetheart contracts awarded to those close to government without proper procurement procedures.

The thought that even a penny of my taxes would go to the payoff for Philip Rutnam following bullying allegations against PPatel is abhorrent.

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Average salary for nurses in the UK is between 33 & 35k, as recently estimated by the RCN..

I agree, it's above political point-scoring, it's patently clear to anyone with a bit of humanity that given all that's been asked of them this past year, a bit more than 1% is well deserved.. yes I know there are a lot of nurses and that it all adds up, and that it's all from the public purse and so on, but it pails in comparison to a lot of the other fluff and vanity projects that get funded, and it would have been a nice touch, IMO. Also a lot of the other healthcare workers alongside the nurses, the support staff, cleaners etc will likely earn less than that, to boot.

My sister is a nurse in GRH, on dirty wards since it all began. She gets 1%. And occasionally bitten, punched, vomited on, not to mention all the dead people.
I earn nearly 3 times that average from the comfort of my MacBook in non-essential IT Consultancy in Financial Services and have just got 3%, backdated to January, with news of this year's bonus payout yet to come.

I've never felt humility when accepting (hard earned) performance related pay before, but with this news, it does leave me feeling cheap.

I wondered if there would be a societal change in the way we value and reward key workers as a result of this pandemic, but it looks like we are, in the most part set to fall back into the ways of old. Shame.

In fairness there are a lot of people in this country who would like 100% of their pay, let alone a pay rise.

Yes and many of them are getting it whilst they sit at home watching daytime TV

Indeed so, but still having to manage on 80% of what is quite likely considerably less than a nurse's wage. Also, particularly those in the hospitality industry, will likely as not, get a rise of any sort. That's if they've got a job to go back to.

Not for a minute do I want to denigrate the magnificent and heroic efforts they have gone through over the past year and in an ideal world would get a fantastic rise, however we don't live in that utopia. A touch of reality needed I feel.

Call me old fashioned, but I don't consider someone who earns more than half as much again as me, badly paid, however hard they work.

I think nurses and other NHS workers get yearly incremental rises on top of a National rise. Someone out there will know.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... LE__4_.pdf
Worth reading the "Our Overall Conclusions" section which follows the Exec Summary aswell as the rest of the report.

These agreements increased pay for all AfC staff in all four nations. The only Staff Survey covering pay satisfaction was for England and this showed that the proportion of staff satisfied with pay increased from 29% in 2017, before the pay agreement, to 36% in 2019. While other substantial elements of the agreements have been enacted, there are elements which have not been concluded or for which the evidence will follow.

The nursing profession as a stand alone, from other non nursing NHS staff have had pay settlements in the recent past - that may have caught up their pay from years where it stood still.

There are some harsh realities however, given covid and it's financial impact. The Gov's tax revenue has been greatly reduced and needs to recover, in this context anyone in the public sector getting a pay rise is fortunate. There are some in the public sector who haven't had any pay rise, inflationary or incremental in the last 12 months.

Nurses still have a job too. Unemployment has risen due to covid (albeit it's still lower today than when Labour left Gov in 2010).

Regarding the procurement contracts - it's clear that Gov went to the people they knew, connected with and those people have benefitted financially. However the flip side is that the UK Gov needed to act fast, bypass long procurement process's and secure equipment as quickly as possible. Other Governments were doing the same. If the UK Gov had stuck to the rules but missed out on PPE for example they'd be criticised for not acting fast enough. So it's not ideal and they'll be accused of nepotism but at least they were first in the queue.

I would add, the Government's Dept's are now tracking back through the contracts to see if / where they were misled in anyway and to establish is the providers honoured or breached their contracts in anyway.

They might have needed to act quickly, they could still have opened the process to tender and curtailed the bureaucratic process (as they did with approving the vaccines). Often the recipients of the government's largesse then had to organise all the sub contracting because they weren't experts in the field. It was straightforward nepotism.