Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I am pleased to move this important amendment, supported by my noble friends Lady Thornton and Lord Hunt. The amendment would provide some much-needed morale and security at a time of great upheaval for NHS staff. In turn, it would reassure patients that the morale of those treating or caring for them will not impact on the quality of care they receive. Let us just imagine how NHS staff must be feeling now, no matter how dedicated or determined they are to carry on providing the best care possible. There is the Nicholson challenge to implement £20 billion worth of savings, which they know will seriously impact on patient care, they are facing huge disruption to services and patient care as primary care trusts and strategic health authorities are abolished under the enormous upheaval of reorganisation, and there is massive uncertainty about the future bargaining arrangements for their pay and conditions. The amendment calls on the Government to commit to the continuation of national determination of pay and national collective bargaining for terms and conditions for NHS staff under the reorganised NHS, leaving employers and trade unions nationally to agree what local flexibilities should operate. The Government have so far failed to acknowledge the need to retain national workforce structures for terms and conditions, pay and bargaining. The Bill prescribes nothing on the pay systems that clinical commissioning groups should adopt, giving them greater leeway to break away from the existing long-established and well-tested pay systems for NHS staff. Agenda for Change is the single, national pay system in operation for the NHS and applies directly to all staff, excluding doctors, dentists and some very senior managers. It is well established, much respected by employers and staff and delivers equality-proof pay and grading schemes. However, the Liberating the NHS White Paper threatened the viability of a stable, national collective agreement, potentially undermining the NHS pay review body, which makes recommendations on the remuneration of all staff paid under Agenda for Change and employed in the NHS. The current Bill applies only to England, but the implications for national pay determination across the UK are significant. We know that most staff do not work in the NHS to get rich, despite the constant, distorted picture in some parts of the media about the levels of public sector pay and pensions. Nurses’ pay starts from £21,000 a year and healthcare assistants from as little as £14,000 a year. The average public service pension is around £7,800 a year, but the average pension for a woman working in the NHS is only around £3,500 a year. If staff do not work for the NHS to get rich, what do they value? Job security is no longer the public sector staple employment motivator that it was: 13,000 redundancies have resulted from the current reorganisation. A recent survey by the Royal College of Nursing showed that an estimated 15,000 nurses and healthcare assistants expect to be made redundant in the next 12 months. Staff are not able to value job security any longer, but they do value fairness. Agenda for Change has delivered that, as well as equal pay. In the uncertain environment caused by the reforms, having some guarantee about access to a fair, national pay system would at least provide an element of security. If, in the future, foundation trusts, with the heavy financial pressures they will face, start to abandon established pay rates and conditions, we fear that this will lead to the rapid downward spiralling of pay for staff, which will be particularly hard in these economic times. Staff morale and motivation are already suffering, and local pay bargaining would make it harder for the NHS to recruit and retain the best available staff, so in turn affecting patient service. Undermining staff pay and moving to local pay bargaining would also have a detrimental impact on patients. We must have an equitable spread of doctors, nurses and other professionals across the country. If local pay bargaining leads to many health staff moving away from a particular area, we could see the quality of service reduced there or patients having to wait longer because vacancies have not been filled. Agenda for Change is generally considered across the NHS to be a vast improvement on the previous fragmented and complex arrangements. It is seen as providing a firm basis for taking forward important, substantive issues, particularly equal pay, new ways of working and workforce reprofiling. The amendment also explicitly refers to public health staff, because this is one of the major concerns for the NHS public health workforce, who continue to operate in limbo, unsure of exactly who will be employing them and on what pay, terms and conditions. The Government have promised a detailed public health workforce strategy in the autumn to support effective transition to the new system. When is the strategy to be published and what will be the consultation arrangements for all stakeholders? All we know now is that the directors of public health will transfer to local authorities, but precious little else is known yet about the arrangements for the remaining public health workforce, a factor highlighted by the House of Commons Health Committee last week. The committee stressed that, "““uncertainty has inevitably been created by the transition to new structures; this is undermining morale and causing people with valuable skills to leave the profession. Uncertainty around staffing issues must be resolved as quickly as possible. It is also important that the public health specialty is fully integrated into the Government's forthcoming proposals for healthcare workforce planning, education and training””." The amendment would give the Government a chance to provide some much-needed solace for public health staff by committing that they should be covered by the same pay system as other health workers. It would also give hope and reassurance to all NHS staff about their future pay bargaining arrangements. I urge the Minister to respond positively.