Nurses, fire-fighters, midwives and many other hardworking public sector servants have sent the prime minister a powerful message this week. The annual Trade Union Congress has voted to demand an end to seven long years of Conservative-led governments holding down their pay.
Britain’s five million public servants have each lost on average £3,000 from the value of their annual pay since 2010. The public sector pay cap has pushed some nurses into food banks to get by.
This week, rumours abound that ministers are set to announce an end to the 1 per cent cap on pay rises. But only for police and prison officers. It may not yet be the end of the policy, but it could be the beginning of the end.
Trade unions will not accept cherry-picking. Police and prison officers deserve a proper pay rise, but so do nurses, teachers, midwives, and all the backroom staff who make their jobs possible. Every public sector worker is long overdue a proper pay rise.
The cracks are appearing because the government has utterly lost the argument. The public think the pay restrictions are unfair, and the government knows it. Theresa May’s MPs heard it again and again on the doorstep during the election, and it helped lose the PM her majority.
The prime minister may “note the sacrifice” that public servants have made. But it’s not a sacrifice at all—they had no choice. And a political choice could end change that tomorrow.
Across a range of motions, the message from delegates this week is clear: public sector pay must rise. Representatives from across the union movement, including those representing private sector workers, passed motions calling for the pay cap to end. And they highlighted the damage it has done to working households in general, to the NHS and healthcare, to schools and education funding.
The TUC has set out five tests that the government must meet to give public sector servants a fair pay deal.
Pay decisions must be taken out of the hands of Whitehall. No more top down restrictions on pay delivered from on high. Instead, public sector workers and their representatives should be free to negotiate with their employers to find a fair and appropriate pay award. This should happen through collective bargaining, or following the advice of genuinely independent pay review bodies.
Pay has to be fully funded. It is simply not feasible to force public services to cut into their stretched budgets to fund a fair pay settlement for their workers. The majority of NHS trusts finished the last year in the red, and schools in England and Wales have already lost nearly £3bn since 2015. The Chancellor must step up with the funding needed.
The pay increase must apply to all public sector workers. May’s government cannot simply cherry pick a few workers for a feel-good headline. The public sector is a team and it must be treated as such. Nurses and doctors perform life-saving treatments in A&E, for which they are rightly lauded. But they would be incapable of doing so if it wasn’t for the cleaners and administrators who ensure that hospitals are well-stocked and clean. Police officers may crack a case, but they are reliant on backroom forensics and courtroom clerks to bring criminals to justice.
“Pay decisions must be taken out of the hands of Whitehall. No more top down restrictions on pay delivered from on high”Any new pay deal must take account of the loss of income public servants have already suffered. Today a physiotherapist earns ten per cent less in real terms than when the Treasury began to impose restrictions on NHS pay in 2010. We need to find a way to recover that lost pay over time.
Finally, all public sector workers should earn at least the real living wage—the one set by the independent Living Wage Foundation. Thousands of public sector workers are earning just barely above the minimum wage. That isn’t good enough. All public sector jobs should be great jobs.
Giving our public servants fair rewards for the amazing work they do is reason enough to end the pay cap. But the benefits do not stop at better living standards for them. There will be benefits for all of us.
Some of our public services are facing recruitment problems, which will only get worse if wages continue to be held down. We cannot afford to be short of people wanting to train as teachers or nurses. And we cannot afford to lose skilled and experienced staff who decide they’ve had enough of having to deliver more for less. We all want to know that our family will receive a high standard of service, whether being rescued in an emergency, or given long-term care.
Higher public sector pay could help improve everyone’s living standards. By putting more spending power into the pockets of public workers, their local businesses and services will get a boost. Each extra pound that starts out in a public servant’s pay packet will work hard as it travels from one business to the next, helping the economy grow, and helping private sector wages increase too.
So it’s a good economic move, especially while our economy is struggling to achieve a decent growth rate. And it’s affordable. The government has surprisingly deep pockets when it comes to funding tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It’s time they put hardworking public servants first.
