Senior managers to get 5% pay rise

Senior NHS managers will receive a 5 per cent pay rise this year, while Agenda for Change staff get 5.5 per cent and doctors 6 per cent, government has announced.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed government was accepting the recommendations from pay review bodies for all NHS staff groups — very senior managers, Agenda for Change staff, and doctors and dentists — this afternoon.

The 5 per cent uplift applies to those on the NHS “very senior manager” scale and the “executive senior manager” grades in arm’s length bodies.

Junior doctors are subject to a separate negotiation, and government today offered them an uplift equivalent to about 22 per cent over two years, which the British Medical Association will put to members.

The Royal College of Nursing and Unite indicated they were not happy with their 5.5 per cent uplift, which — while above inflation which is currently about 2.2 per cent — did not match the proposed junior doctors’ “pay restoration”. They will ballot members on the offer, they said.

The proposals follow below-inflation pay rises last year for most staff.

The 6 per cent doctors’ and dentists’ uplift is also likely to be offered to GP partners, as part of negotiations over the GP contract which so far includes only a 1.9 per cent uplift.

The Treasury said that, in the NHS, the pay awards would be a “foundation on which workforce reform can be delivered” in the next five years, including “enhancing medical training to create a more productive workforce by equipping doctors with both generalist and specialist skills”, and “review[ing] ways to go further and faster to rapidly reduce the costs of temporary staffing”.

No room to cover pressures

Ms Reeves said departments must make efficiencies — targeting communications, management consultants and further “back office costs” — to “absorb as much… as possible” of the multibillion pound cost of the uplifts themselves. She indicated this should cover at least a third of the overall cost.

The Treasury told HSJ these requirements applied to health. But, at this stage, how and when allocations will be made to NHS trusts to cover the additional pay costs and whether NHS organisations will be asked to make additional efficiencies is not clear.

NHS England last week said its budgets were already “very stretching” and there was “no room to cover any further pressures”, while NHS leaders said today’s ask could make for “impossible choices”.

The Treasury is also proposing reform to the pay review timetable, saying: “In recent years the PRB process has delivered awards around six months late… [we] will seek to return the process to a timeline which sees pay awards announced as close to the start to the pay year as possible.”

It also announced it would scrap plans to cap individuals’ long-term social care care costs, as had been planned for October next year, which it said would save £1bn annually next year, and £4bn 2029–30.