1% NHS Payrise

[Borin' Baggie]

It can't have escaped your attention, surely - that we're all going to be in for baked-in pay cuts for the next 5 years?

The Tories will be happy to let people get outraged about "nurses"* as they're then less likely to look at the fact that the government has shafted all of us.

I don't have any more sympathy with NHS workers than I do with the workers who've kept Aldi and Amazon running. They're no more deserving of a pay rise, particularly as their employment status has been and is solid and they benefit from pension entitlements the rest of us could only dream of.

*Not all NHS Workers are nurses - far from it

That is why I have more sympathy that they have, yet again, had a real terms pay cut than I do private sector workers at Amazon and Aldi.

Fancy selecting 2010 as the base year, just after the two years of the greatest financial crisis and private sector devastation in our history.

Have you got the figures starting from say, 2008?

I didn't select anything, that is from the Nuffield Trust.

The Royal College of Nursing did a study in 2015 using ONS figures and found there to be an almost 10% cut in real term pay between 2008 and 2010 though, vs a roughly 0% cut in real term pay for all full time workers (public and private sector). Now you know this, you can extrapolate the rest.

[Protheroe]

I didn't select anything, that is from the Nuffield Trust.

The Royal College of Nursing did a study in 2015 using ONS figures and found there to be an almost 10% cut in real term pay between 2008 and 2010 though, vs a roughly 0% cut in real term pay for all full time workers (public and private sector). Now you know this, you can extrapolate the rest.

I can't extrapolate anything from that. It's meaningless.

The Nuffield Trust knew exactly what they were doing by using 2010 as the base year for that chart.

[Borin' Baggie]

I didn't select anything, that is from the Nuffield Trust.

The Royal College of Nursing did a study in 2015 using ONS figures and found there to be an almost 10% cut in real term pay between 2008 and 2010 though, vs a roughly 0% cut in real term pay for all full time workers (public and private sector). Now you know this, you can extrapolate the rest.

I can't extrapolate anything from that. It's meaningless.

Yes you can. I've given you enough information to extrapolate the extra 2 years given the 5 year overlap between the Nuffield Trust and RCN data, which is over 50% the timeframes that the ONS data looked at covers.

[Ossian]

There's an ONS dataset which is downloadable from: here

There are a number of columns, but the three most pertinent are probably: Average weekly earnings (seasonally adjusted) private sector; AWE public sector; AWE whole economy. For quarter 1 of 2008, these figures were (£) 434, 432 and 441 respectively; and for quarter 4 of the same year 435, 442 and 435. I'm not sure why the whole economy figure is substantially higher than the others for quarter 1, but that seems to be an anomaly when compared to most of the table.

During 2009 a gap opened up between AWE private sector and AWE public sector, and by Q4 the numbers were £433 and £458 respectively (whole economy £438). Some of that will probably be a consequence of the financial crash and possibly backdated public sector pay settlements; individual years do show some anomalies not immediately explainable by the bald figures.

In any event, from about mid 2015 that gap began to close again, and by Q2 of 2017 it had reduced to £503 cf £511 (whole economy £504). By the end of 2018 the numbers were - following the usual order - £527 cf £531 (and £528). The last published figures (2020 Q4) were £566 cf £571 (and £567).

Those numbers suggest that neither private or public sector average weekly earnings have kept pace with the BoE's inflation figure of 36.4% over the same period. It is (or, if you prefer, they are) just data, it/they can be interpreted at will.

[Protheroe]

Those numbers suggest that neither private or public sector average weekly earnings have kept pace with the BoE's inflation figure of 36.4% over the same period.

And that private sector wages fell sharply before Nuffield's chosen start date of 2010.

[Ossian]

And have therefore, in comparative terms, recovered since.