Truth, lies and NHS pay offers

UNISON West Midlands has a statement on its website about the new NHS pay offer.

It says, "The offer includes a lump sum payment for the lowest paid NHS staff, training budgets for non- clinical staff, recognition payments amounting to the recent increase in NMC registration fees for those NHS staff required to register, agreement to enter in to talks on improvements to the Agenda for Change pay structure and terms and conditions."

Which, of course, is not true. There is no "lump sum payment for the lowest paid". There is a flat-rate element to the offer which means lower paid NHS staff will get a marginal greater increase to their pay scale. Not only is there no lump sum but the increase to the pay scale is being brought in only with the second stage of the staged pay offer - which means low paid NHS members won't see a penny of it until November!

As if over-selling the pay offer isn't bad enough, the article goes on to provide a link to a description of the pay offer on the website of NHS employers - who, naturally, think that union members should all accept the offer. In the interests of balance they should probably provide a link here too, so that members in the West Midlands can hear something from those healthworkers who think that we should reject the pay offer. Don't hold your breath, though...

Several UNISON members have been commenting that the official union statements seem to be making the offer sound better than it really is. The agreed position of the UNISON Health SGE, remember, was to make no recommendation for or against the offer, but simply to say it was the best deal that could be achieved by negotiations.

Yet the statements produced so far have repeatedly described the offer as "improved" without mentioning how far it is from the claim we submitted back in March. And it's actually arguable whether the offer really is improved. It is certainly "changed", but for many NHS staff above band 4 the only things it offers are a £25 training allowance paid to their employers and talks about talks on the non-pay elements of the 2007 claim. That's not much in the way of an improvement.

Even for those who stand to gain the most from the revisions to the pay offer - those in pay band 1 and 2 - the new offer is not even worth 2.5%. That means that we'd all have been better off winning the scrapping of the staging rather than cooking up such a complex pay offer but leaving the staging in place.