The pay of NHS consultants is to be frozen for 2010/2011, the Prime Minister has announced.
In a speech in the City, Gordon Brown stressed the importance of senior public sector staff showing leadership on pay restraint. Senior members of the civil service, military, judiciary and health service will all have their pay frozen from April. Brown said £3bn would be saved.
Later, health secretary Andy Burnham announced that trainees and SAS doctors’ pay will rise by 1%. He rejected a 1.5% recommendation for foundation house officers.
He said the government would take on board a recommendation that low-paid doctors receive “a special pay supplement”.
Burnham said: “These pay uplifts are a good deal for the government and the NHS. In tough times, this package targets the pay rises we can afford to make where they can do most good for patients.”
These figures contrast with MPs, who voted themselves a 1.5% increase for 2010/2011.
Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of BMA council, expressed his disappointment that the government overruled some of the recommendations of the independent pay review body.
He said: “Many doctors have already undergone pay freezes or sub-inflation pay rises in recent years and today’s announcement will mean a pay freeze for the most highly experienced senior doctors.
“We are particularly disappointed that the Government, in choosing to interfere with the pay review body’s recommendations, has not fully taken into account the financial pressures on junior doctors in their first years of postgraduate training - who have average debts of £22,000.
“It is interesting that the government accepted in full the salary increases recommended for MPs, yet chose to penalise dedicated and hard-working doctors who strive to lead and deliver improvements in care whilst working in exceptionally challenging circumstances.”
The pay review group said the government had argued strongly for senior staff to show leadership over pay.
It added: “We are not persuaded by this signalling argument since we have seen no evidence, in this or previous years, that the level of settlements for our small remit groups has any impact on behaviour in the wider economy. Indeed, it is hard to see how freezing pay for senior staff demonstrates leadership when more junior staff are receiving significant increases.”
Nurses are due a 2.5% pay rise in April in the last tranche of a three-year pay deal. In primary care, salaried GPs will receive a 1% uplift, while GPs in practices will also suffer a pay freeze.
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Tags: Pay
Hardly a surprise, could see it coming a mile off. We are an easy target. I predict after the election CEA’s will go too as the government will know full well we will have no public sympathy, and those Consultants who are without a CEA (the majority) are hardly likely to go to war to preserve their better rewarded colleagues perk.
What nauseates me is that we are constantly being exhorted to be aware of the ‘market situation’ to which our administrative leaders tell us we simply must adjust. Yet when we try to apply the principles of this ‘market’ to, for example, being rewarded for increased productivity in hospitals, we’re suddenly told “oh no, you’ve got to show leadership” or “You’ve got to behave professionally”. I’ve often told senior managers in my hospital that its the senior consultant in the department who knows exactly how things run and where the savings are to be made, and if I was asked to save £100,000 from the budget I could do it, and would they please reward me with 10% of that. A win/win situation, surely. But no, they simply throw their hands up in horror. So on the one hand its ‘the market’, and on the other, when its inconvenient, its not!
I see that, yet again, consultants are asked to make sacrifices ‘in the public interest’ by showing ‘leadership’ - which, of course, they have been doing for years! However, MPs are exempt! (Surprise, surprise!) Clearly they do not see themselves as ’senior public sector staff’; and clearly they are NOT expected to show leadership - which, of course, they have failed to demonstrate in recent times! Would that the same sort of rules (particularly of ‘accountability’, audit and achievemnet of ‘targets’) applied equally to both groups. But then, I forgot that they are different from the rest of us - after all, they live on anther planet!
After bailing out the banks and then using public money to reward the bankers for causing the mess in the first place they are fairly short of cash. Just a bit left over to reward the MPs for doing such sterling work over the last few years. And they have, sterling will never be worth the same again. I do laugh at the rise for juniors though. I seem to recall that I took a very substantial pay cut for the ‘privilege’ of promotion to consultant. I was also told a few years ago that the highest paid doctor in this trust was an associate specialist in orthopaedics! Well if it will get a few apathetic consultants off their backsides and encourage the timid, the greedy and the brown-nosers to unite for a change to do something about it, then it will all have been worthwhile.