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Nurses’ pay will go ‘back to the future’

While doctors may have won their battle with the government over local pay determination, current indications are that the government intends to press ahead with local pay — set by trusts, rather than nationally — for nurses and allied professional staff.

But in doing so it will be ignoring the lessons of a previous period when nurses’ pay was determined locally, according to Dr Carole Thornley, lecturer in industrial relations at the University of Keele.

In Back to the future, published by health service union UNISON, Dr Thornley warns that local pay for nurses, which was universal before 1939, led to a national nursing shortage because of low pay and poor working conditions.

Recruiting nurses to the profession became so difficult as to force the then Tory-dominated National government to establish an inquiry into the causes of the crisis in 1939.

The report of the Athlone Committee identified local pay as a key factor in the ‘continual condition of overstress and overwork’ to which nurses were subject.

‘Only if the two fundamental matters of salary and pension are treated on a national basis will the present condition of the profession be improved’ concluded the inquiry. UNISON is now asking the government to learn from history.