Government pledges to end NHS pay award delays
The NHS Pay Review Body (PRB) process for 2025-26 will kickstart in September this year, as part of government plans to curb historic delays to the process.
The government pledged this week that it would create a PRB process in which pay awards were announced as close as possible to the start of the financial year.
The plans were set out in the public spending audit 2024-25, presented this week to parliament by chancellor Rachel Reeves.
It came as part of the announcement that nurses and other NHS staff would receive a 5.5% pay uplift for 2024-25.
The NHS PRB is an advisory body that makes recommendations to the government on the pay rates of NHS workers.
In recent years, the PRB process has been delivering pay awards around six months late “because previous governments chose to delay the process”, the document said.
This is despite the pay year for most public sector workers beginning on 1 April.
The government confirmed that it would kickstart the process for 2025-26 this September, in a bid to get pay awards into public sector pay packets on time.
The document added: “This government intends to restore confidence in the PRB process.
“As a first step the government will seek to return the process to a timeline which sees pay awards announced as close to the start of the pay year as possible and will start by remitting the PRBs for the 2025-26 pay round in September, three months earlier than for this pay round.”
Remitting refers to when the PRBs begin to commission and gather evidence for the pay award, after recieving remit letters from government departments.
In 2022, most remit letters were received by the PRBs in November 2022, with most PRB reports then submitted to government in May and June 2023.
The pledge to restore faith in the PRB follows concerns raised by health unions in recent years that the body is not fit for purpose.
Several unions have raised doubts about the independence of the body and have instead favoured direct pay negotiations with the government to reach a settlement.
For the 2024-25 pay round, many unions refused to submit evidence to the NHS PRB.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing and Unison also both voted at their annual conferences in 2023 to withdraw from the NHS PRB process.
