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Gvt. recommend 2.8% payrise

PR1Berske

Alligator in chains by the park gates.
The sigh I've just made has knocked over a bottle two miles away.

From the BBC

Government departments have recommended a pay rise of 2.8% for millions of public sector workers including teachers, NHS staff and senior civil servants next year.

Inflation - which measures price changes over time - is predicted to average 2.6% next year by the government's official forecaster.

But union Unison said the proposed pay increase was "barely above the cost of living", while teaching unions said it would only deepen the "crisis" in recruitment and retention.

The recommendations will now be considered by independent pay review bodies.

The government said departments would have to fund 2025-26 and future pay increases from their own budgets and unlike in recent years there would be no additional money if recommended pay awards exceed what departments can afford.

It added that officials would have to consider whether additional costs could be covered through other savings or improvements in productivity.

After winning power, the new Labour government accepted a series of above-inflation pay rises for public sector workers for 2024-25, bringing an end to long-running strikes.

The government said it had inherited a "challenging" financial position and defended the decision given "deteriorating recruitment and retention across the public sector".


Link:
However, it added that this "required difficult trade-offs"
 
"Officials would have to consider whether additional costs could be covered through other savings or improvements in productivity, the government said"

What savings?
 
I seem to remember the previous administration employed some sort of 'efficiency apparatchiks' who would go into schools and tell head teachers to stop buying Moet for team meetings.

They were quietly got rid of weren't they. Meet the new government, same as the old government.
 
Reeves wants 5% austerity savings made by departments each year already, and then further savings to fund any pay rises beyond what the government will settle for. Labour are getting former bankers to look at budgets and decide what to cut.

This is after 15+ years of austerity.

My employer is likely to have to make redundancies to cover a £7 million shortfall in the next few months. There will still be the same amount of work to do of course as we don’t suddenly lose statutory obligations or have a reduction in demand.
 
Same thing is happening in health. We're having lots of meetings where we're encouraged to "think radically" and it all boils down to "manage year on year 10-30% increases in demand with no new money - use AI even though a/ it's quite shit and anyway b/ there's no budget to procure AI and c/ where there is it's so they can sack people".

I think these fucking chumps have been sat in opposition genuinely thinking it was just a case of "thinking radically" in spite of all that reality staring them in the face. I fucking despise them and look forward to my indicative ballot.
 
This'll have a knock on effect for me working for a Housing Association. I'm expecting lots of noises about "the wider sector" and "external environment" etc, despite a central government drive to build loads more housing.
 
"Productivity" is a concept that can be applied to producers of commodities, but not to the providers of services.
Yup , if anything they are talking about unit cost reduction, bench marking and 'best value ' type stuff, and possibly conurbation-wide services . However, this has all been done before.
 
In a few years it’s likely that my salary will map to NLW which increases at a rate two or three times higher than pay awards.

Already some lower pay points are being eroded by NLW and consequently the gaps are heavily compressed.
 
I expected this government to be bad, but enforcing more austerity on public services through unfunded pay rises is absolutely insane. Services will just start to collapse, where they haven't already. Unions need to be striking both for higher raises than 2.8% but also for the govt to fund the payrise. I don't think it's forbidden by the rules saying you can only strike on things directly affecting you. The unfunded nature of the payrises absolutely affects working conditions.
 
Was going to put this on the strike thread but can go here as well, TfGM staff have just suspended their strike after really two strong days, having got an improved offer:

Detailed MEN report of the first day of the strike here, including a reminder of the fun fact that Tony Wilson is the secretary of the Unison Manchester Transport branch:
 
I expected this government to be bad, but enforcing more austerity on public services through unfunded pay rises is absolutely insane. Services will just start to collapse, where they haven't already. Unions need to be striking both for higher raises than 2.8% but also for the govt to fund the payrise. I don't think it's forbidden by the rules saying you can only strike on things directly affecting you. The unfunded nature of the payrises absolutely affects working conditions.

Recruitment for teachers is about two thirds of the target. That's for a year when we got a relatively decent funded pay rise. An unfunded pay rise will make working in schools harder because razor-thin budgets will get thinner, support staff jobs will have to go, what we'll be able to offer to the kids will be attenuated. So that's reducing the incentive to join the profession and increasing the incentive to leave.

Still, the agencies will be happy. They'll gladly snap up all the jaded ex-teachers and charge schools top dollar to send them in as cover.

Same thing in the NHS, where an agency HCA can cost a ward more per shift than a registered nurse or a junior doctor.

Still, Starmer's lot need a year of strikes I reckon. Pressure from labour rather than capital for once. A quick reminder of which of those two actually gets shit done.
 
Still, the agencies will be happy. They'll gladly snap up all the jaded ex-teachers and charge schools top dollar to send them in as cover.
I've never understood why cover and supply work isn't nationalised. Surely it would save loads as the govt could pay at cost, rather than having to fork out the ridiculous fees agencies take.
 
I've never understood why cover and supply work isn't nationalised. Surely it would save loads as the govt could pay at cost, rather than having to fork out the ridiculous fees agencies take.

Some schools have cover staff on payroll but that's only really economical for big secondaries. But peripatetic cover staff should absolutely be with a nationalised or local authority agency. Would reduce costs without costing the staff themselves anything because the agencies' cut is very high. Could also give people access to the teachers' pension scheme etc.

Of course the direction of travel is the opposite of this. The NHS staff bank is now NHS Professionals, a private company that offers much worse conditions to workers and hospitals alike than the old bank did. This was the plan to reduce dependency on agency staff incidentally, make another private agency and force everyone to join it. Destroy the village in order to save it.
 
In the devolved nations we still have in house temporary staffing run by the Health Boards. We're not even supposed to use that, such are the financial constraints at the moment, but in reality you have to sometimes.
 
NHSP is owned by the dept of health.

But they're set up like a private agency. They pay dividends to their owner, which even though that owner is DoH is still money taken away from trusts.

They also treat staff like freelancers, making them do their own timesheets etc. And you have to do a whole separate onboarding process, including repeating trainings etc, even if you're already substantive NHS staff.
 
But they're set up like a private agency. They pay dividends to their owner, which even though that owner is DoH is still money taken away from trusts.

They also treat staff like freelancers, making them do their own timesheets etc. And you have to do a whole separate onboarding process, including repeating trainings etc, even if you're already substantive NHS staff.

So the money goes back into the dept of health. Seems better than using all the private agencies that many trusts still use, not all of them had their own temp staffing that I recall.

I work for NHSP and if you provide proof of NHS mandatory training you do not have to repeat your training with NHSP, its all on electronic record, same as when you get a new job with a new trust.

I took me ages to get onto NHSP but that was due primarily to the trust not NHSP. It's easy, my trust manager requests the shifts for me, he then authorises them to say I've done them, then I authorise to say yes I've done the shifts my manager has authorised, and then I'm paid.
 
Inflation currently 2.6% and rising so it looks like another rise some way below the inflation rate when the 2025 pay awards are finally agreed.
 
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