As we head into the new year, striking workers are preparing for a long battle with the government. Increasingly in the spotlight in these disputes are the nine independent watchdogs that make recommendations on how much to pay 2.5 million public sector workers, from prison officers to teachers.
Ministers have refused to negotiate on pay, saying they must follow official guidance.
But the TUC leader, Paul Novak, said this morning that pay review bodies were “at risk of going bad”.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, he said: “The Government is hiding behind pay review bodies, refusing to negotiate pay and refusing to reach a reasonable agreement with our public sector unions.”
Despite the intense debate, the commissions, whose members decide the incomes of millions of workers, are not at a high level. So who sits on them and how responsible are they?
Members of salary review committees are not permitted to discuss their work and their voting records are kept confidential. Their conclusions are agreed “collectively” and there is little parliamentary questioning.
Unions complained that they could only submit applications until review bodies were paid. Unlike the Low Pay Commission, which sets the level of the minimum wage and includes senior TUC official Kate Bell among its nine commissioners, unions are excluded from having representatives on the pay bodies themselves.
House of Commons select committees do not have the opportunity to question nominated members about their qualifications before they are appointed by the Prime Minister, as they can with Bank of England politicians.
There is one former union official at the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB), Stephanie Marston. She previously worked for the Prospect union, which covers 100,000 professional workers in the public service and private sector.
A spokesman for Prospect said they had no contact with Marston, who left her job with the union in 2017.
Unions also say membership is heavily skewed toward retired senior executives with little sympathy for workers’ concerns. The members are forbidden to talk about their role, so it is possible to judge their likes only based on their previous jobs and rare interviews.
Philippa Hird is Chair of the NHS Pay Review Body. Photo: Gov.UK
The chair of the health payments review body is Philippa Hird, a former head of personnel at ITV and now a serial non-executive director. The 58-year-old studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University in the same year as Boris Johnson.
Like all other review body members, she has a renewable three-year term. As chairman, she is paid £350 a day to prepare and attend 15 meetings a year. The fee for other members is £300 per day. In some years there are more than 15 meetings.
Hurd, who is in the final year of her second term, sits on several government boards, including the Strategic Command for the overhaul of the British Armed Forces. Last month she was parachuted in to head the commission to review the pay of senior civil servants, judges and senior police officers after losing two chairmen in the past six months.
Karen Mumford is a labor market economist and professor at York University. Photo: University of York.
Karen Mumford is a member of the review body who can be considered a friend of the worker in her role as a labor market economist and professor at York University. However, she describes herself as “essentially a neoclassical labor economist” and considers the godfather of free market economics, Adam Smith, as her main hero.
Stephen Boyle is the other economist on the review body. He spent most of his working life as a highly paid executive in the financial industry, most recently as Chief Economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Richard Cooper was a senior manager at BT who continues to be a “highly accomplished senior executive” at the Health Research Authority and the accountancy body, ACCA.
Neville Hunsom and Ann Phillimore are long-serving board-level personnel directors, while Patricia Gordon was a hospital trust chief executive for much of her career.
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The Armed Forces have a Pay Review Body (AFPRB), while the Doctors and Dentists Remuneration Body – DDRB – covers nearly 250,000 hospital doctors, general practitioners and dentists. Prison staff, who do not have the right to strike, have a separate pay review body, as do the police and school teachers. Finally, the National Crime Agency has its own Remuneration Review Body (NCARRB).
Patricia Gordon worked as a chief executive of a hospital trust. Photo: HSC
The NHSPRB’s latest report was three months late when it appeared in July and covered 2022-23. It was the board’s first meaningful assessment since it was stripped of its core role by the government after signing a three-year deal covering staff at NHS between 2018 and 2021 and a centrally imposed pay cap of 1% in 2022.
Tory MP Dan Poulter pointed to this disconnect when criticizing the government’s current approach. He said that given ministers had “chosen to ignore the advice of the independent pay review body” for four years, it was “quite disingenuous for the Government to now accept the recommendations because it is financially expedient to do so”.
The eight-member body met 21 times in the year to July 2022 to produce a 165-page report outlining recommendations for this year’s wage settlement.
The report recommends a flat-rate increase of £1,400, equivalent to 4% for most staff, saying it “provides an investment in staff pay that goes some way to reducing the risk of pay being a reason to leave the NHS service “.
In its submission to the NHSPRB, the Treasury said inflation was expected to peak at around 4% in 2022 and was likely to return quickly to the Bank of England’s 2% target. There were the usual caveats to the forecast, but she added that private sector employers appeared confident they could hold average pay down by 2.5% in the 12 months to August 2022.
Much of the prediction turned out to be wrong. By April this year, the consumer price index, a measure of inflation, was rising to 7.8% and the momentum was for it to rise. And it did rise, reaching 10.7% in November. The miscalculation of the rate of inflation has led to calls from many countries for ministers to review the pay review body’s recommendation.
Yet Health Secretary Steve Barclay took an even harder line.
A 7.8% increase in the cost of living in the year to April 2022 and a 10% increase to April 2023 would mean the authority’s pay offer averaged 4% this year and a similar pay rise next year would to nearly a 10% inflation-adjusted pay cut over two years.
It’s the pay gap that nurses will want to close.
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