Union reps are working hard to win salary uplifts for many of their trusts’ band 2s following joint union negotiations that started in 2021 when concerns were raised at South Tees’s Joint Job Evaluation Group. The negotiations have focused on four areas: banding consistency, equal pay, recognition and retrospective awards.
The main agreement outstanding is how much backpay the staff should receive.
This joint work by local health union reps started following formal recognition by the national NHS Staff Council that the majority of band 2 nursing staff have been habitually performing tasks graded at band 3 level. The Council agreed new job profiles acknowledging that any staff undertaking patient observations and clinical care such as monitoring heart and blood pressure rates, taking bloods, wound observation and urine analysis should be job evaluated to band 3.
The decision gave the green light for joint work to begin at local level across the country on evaluating staff’s job roles and rebanding them where they were found to be performing above their band. A huge amount of collective bargaining work has gone into this painstaking, lengthy process.
Some trusts have already succeeded in gaining justice for their band 2s but each trust has to individually negotiate with its staff side, leading to potentially unequal results.
Negotiations are finally about to come to fruition in the Teesside trusts, who have agreed to follow a ‘group model’ and share some of their functions to economise on services. It is hoped that group model arrangements won’t delay the conclusion of negotiations; union reps are keen to avoid further delay as their support workers are already struggling with the rising cost of living, with winter well on the way.
RCN reps and staffside chairs Roaqah Shaher (South Tees NHS Foundation Trust) and Margaret Wardrobe (North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust) have led collective work in their respective trusts to improve pay, terms and conditions for support workers, many of whom are expecting to see both their band and salaries rise as a result.
At South Tees, Chair of Staff Side Roaqah Shaher has been working tirelessly to reach an agreement with management side about which band 2 roles in her trust have been performing tasks intended for band 3 level, who should be upbanded and how much backpay they are owed.
A proposal authored by Roaqah and agreed on by the majority of the trust’s staff side committee pushes for ‘significant backdating of benefits to those colleagues in scope’.
It is anticipated that a formal announcement of an agreement will be announced soon.
Roaqah said: “As your RCN reps, we are committed to advocating for fair and equitable treatment of clinical support workers within the trust. With this in mind, we will holding a number of drop-in sessions in the coming months to discuss our work on fair pay within the support worker community. We need our Clinical Support Workers to know how much we appreciate their contribution to the care we deliver and that their efforts are truly integral to all the work that we do to keep our patients safe”
Look out for posters and posts on the RCN Northern region’s Facebook and Twitter feeds about the dates and locations of these drop-in sessions and should you see an RCN stand in your workplace, please feel free to stop and ask them how this work is progressing.
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust staffside unions are also jointly working with managers to address the issue. Led by the chair of staff side, RCN rep Margaret Wardrobe, the unions have been negotiating upbanding and backpay for many band 2s. The RCN has been pushing for a significant, fair amount of back pay for all staff involved, especially given length of time the negotiations have taken. It was more than 2 years ago that the decision was made at NHS Staff Council to give the go-ahead for trusts to enter into this negotiating process.
All staff qualifying for an uplift, regardless of their union, will all receive backpay equivalent to the same length of time. The decision about how long this will be is yet to be made. Watch this space.
