NHS pay review body: twenty-sixth report 2012 - Official Documents

Chapter 3 – Agenda for Change Staff Earning £21,000 or Less
Introduction
3.1
20
In this chapter we examine the specific evidence presented under our remit for 2012/13
to consider pay increases for Agenda for Change (AfC) staff earning £21,000 or less. We
set out below the composition of the AfC staff group earning £21,000 or less followed
by the relevant evidence and information from other sources for this group relating to
the economy, inflation, labour market and earnings, the funds available to the Health
Departments, and recruitment and retention. We then conclude this chapter with our
comments and recommendation.
AfC Staff Earning £21,000 or Less
3.2
3.3
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s letter of 20 June 2011 and those from the Secretary
of State and Devolved Administrations sought our recommendations on uplifts for
workers earning £21,000 or less. These included definitions of pay (set out in full in
paragraph 3.65) which, for NHS staff employed under AfC terms and conditions, apply to
those paid at or below AfC spine point 15 in Band 4 which is currently £20,804. The first
AfC spine point above the limit is spine point 16 which is currently £21,176 – the bottom
point of Band 5 and equivalent to the starting salary for qualified nurses and many other
professionally qualified clinical staff.
The estimated distribution of our remit group by AfC spine point is shown in Figure 3.1,
with the shaded area indicating the number of staff in our remit group paid at or below
spine point 15. According to the latest available data in each UK country, approximately
448,700 FTE staff (37% of the remit group) were paid at or below spine point 15, a
decrease of around 9,400 FTE staff (1.5 percentage points) compared to the 2010
estimate1 . In England, 36% of staff were paid under the threshold; in Scotland, 39%;
in Wales, 40%; and in Northern Ireland, 41%, with the percentage having decreased
slightly in each country. Of those staff paid £21,000 or less, approximately 34% are at
the top of their pay bands, compared with 37% in the remit group as a whole (see Figure
2.5).
1 An error in our estimate in our Twenty-Fifth Report of the number of staff paid at or below spine point 15 has been
identified: in Northern Ireland, headcount data rather than full time equivalent data were used, which had the
effect of inflating the number of FTE staff in the UK paid at or below spine point 15 by approximately 8,170, and the
percentage of staff by approximately 0.3 percentage points. Revised estimates for 2009/10 are 458,100 FTE staff,
38.5% of the remit group. Corrected data have been used when making year-on-year comparisons above.