Today
23 April 2012
Nick Seddon, Deputy Director of Reform, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today this morning to debate regional pay in the public sector with Christine McAnea, Head of Health at Unison.
Nick’s key points included:
• “If 60 per cent of our spend on the NHS goes on the workforce, then if you are going to drive inefficiencies out of the system, you are going to have to look at the workforce as an area to achieve that. You need a more flexible workforce, you need a workforce that can be incentivised in all sorts of different ways.”
• “Regional pay is a halfway house reform. Local managers need control.”
• “National pay rates have caused inflation in pay in the health system and have not driven productivity in the way that was hoped for.”
• “High performing health care organisations around the world incentivise and motivate their staff at the local level.”
• “In the private sector, you don’t pay for length of service, or nothing like as much. There are far higher incentive and bonus schemes, there is a far high worker satisfaction, productivity standards are higher. This is not because there is some wonderful thing that private is good and public is bad, or vice versa. What it is is that there is a greater deal of control within organisations over the way that they do things.”
• “Regional pay won’t actually sort it out. There is actually a strategic health authority, NHS North West, which has tried to do this a great deal, and it has really put its nose to the grindstone, but employers have shown very, very limited inclination to take up the provisions that are there and I think that actually what you need to do is to push it down even further and make that responsibility and accountability local.”
Nick pointed out that NHS employers do have some flexibility over pay but do not use it:
• “Agenda for Change does have flexibility built into it but that flexibility is not used at a local level. There is one hospital in the whole country, Southend Foundation Trust, that actually has set up contracts for its own staff on the basis of the Agenda for Change provisions, but nobody else has actually gone in that direction. I think that this is because there is a culture which is risk-averse and doesn’t want to innovate in the NHS and one of the best things the Government could do is to send out very powerful signals that it is time for you to take control of your organisations.”
The full debate is available here
@reformthinktank
