Mark Durkan: Health service staff being 'suffocated with frustration' over 'inadequate' pay

SDLP Foyle MP Mark Durkan has praised the enormous and vital contribution nurses, midwives and associated healthcare professionals in Derry and throughout the North make to the NHS at Westminster this week – and has called on the British government to take urgent action to remove the one per cent pay cap and ‘inadequate pay they have been asked to endure’. Nursing staff salaries have been subject to a one per cent pay freeze since 2010 and pay has fallen by more than 14 per cent in real terms since 2011. Speaking during this week’s Westminster Hall debate on ‘Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint', Mr Durkan said: “Unfortunately, the Administration in Northern Ireland have chosen to void the clear recommendations from an independent pay review body – as in England – and have not taken the more constructive approach followed in Scotland to pay recommendations and to meeting the proper pay needs and aspirations of hardworking professional staff. Those staff provide such a valuable service day in, day out. They work long hours with huge responsibilities, but with less and less of a sense of reward and with ever more inadequate remuneration. “People were promised that Agenda for Change would ensure greater equity and transparency on pay; that they would see salary paths improving naturally – with more than just token increments – and that it would reward people’s sense of vocation. Of course, it does nothing of the sort, because people have found themselves locked into highly contested bands. Certainly in Northern Ireland, people doing the exact same work in different trusts are paid differently, which is causing huge frustration and a grave sense of grievance and injustice for many people. Not being able to address those issues absolutely suffocates people with frustration. “This has happened in the context of those staff being locked into the 1% pay rise cap that has endured for a number of years. It is one thing to ask people to take a pay freeze in the name of austerity and managing public financial pressures for a year or two, but it is another to be locked into such a pay freeze while seeing other people, including on the public sector payroll, being able to escape those constraints. Again, it adds to the sense of injustice. “Let us be clear: the long-standing freeze is, in essence, a long-term pay cut in real terms. People are left feeling frustrated and aggrieved by that. People are leaving the profession; they feel they are being driven out – and their sense of vocation is being exploited in a way that now probably more than borders on the cynical. A better response is needed. “Health service staff in Northern Ireland will be asked to manage yet more change. People already work long hours in heavy-demand services, but more structural ​changes will be made to health services following the Bengoa review and others. If people are being asked to manage all of those changes and keep those services going during those transitions, the one thing they are entitled to is some long overdue consideration of the inadequate pay they have been asked to endure.”