NHS pay and role reviews: could this be the end of band 5 for nurses?
Role reviews process in the NHS in England will put the onus on employers to ensure their band 5 nurses get the recognition and uplift in pay they deserve. And a nursing union’s threat to enter into local disputes if necessary, may just focus minds.
Employers must be held to account over their banding of nurse roles to ensure pay reviews deliver fair uplift, as nursing leader says she expects all in band 5 to rise to band 6 ‘at a minimum’
Too often nurses feel discouraged from putting in a bid to get their role regraded (and resulting pay uplift) because they think it’s pointless.
They’ll do all the legwork to produce the evidence, only for it to be dismissed for various reasons by employers. ‘Why bother?’, they understandably ask.
NHS employers need to know nurses are serious about proper pay and recognition
Before government-pledged reviews for NHS nurses on band 5 in England have even begun, the RCN has threatened local disputes with employers that decide to resist fair banding and pay uplifts for these nurses.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that and the mere threat focuses the minds of employers, just as, says RCN general secretary Nicola Ranger, a fear of strike action by the NHS’s biggest workforce provoked government to agree to these reviews, to make them mandatory, and to fund them too.
Professor Ranger told the college’s annual congress last week in Liverpool she wants every band 5 nurse to be upgraded to band 6 as a minimum, noting the role reviews mark a significant moment because they will be first time nurses have ever been singled out in such a positive way.
As I write, we await guidance and timelines for the reviews process, which will be vital because they can be used to hold employers to account.
Band 5 role reviews: your questions answered
Band 6 staff’s fight for uplift following job evaluation
Meanwhile, many nurses are watching and hoping for a successful outcome for a dispute for NHS colleagues in Wales. A group of 100 health visitors have begun a two-month strike, having already taken ten weeks’ industrial action, over their employer’s refusal to honour a job evaluation outcome to lift them from band 6 to 7, despite the Welsh government’s insistence it accept it. The nurses don’t want to do this but they’re determined to be ‘treated respectfully and paid the wage awarded’.
Unions and nurses will need to show similar mettle with some employers in England and hold the line to ensure every one of these nurses receives what they deserve.
