Nearly 900,000 workers will benefit across the country, with teachers and doctors seeing the largest rise at 3.1% and 2.8% respectively recognising their efforts on the frontline during the battle against COVID-19.
Police and prison officers will both have a 2.5% rise in pay. The Armed Forces will receive a 2% uplift.
This pay rise follows the settlement for more than one million NHS workers who continue to benefit from the three-year Agenda for Change pay deal, under which the starting pay for a newly qualified nurse has increased by over 12% since 2017/18.
This means nurses who are still moving up their pay structures will receive an average 4.4% rise this year. There are 12,220 more nurses and health visitors working for the NHS compared to last year.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said:
“These past months have underlined what we always knew – that our public sector workers make a vital contribution to our country and that we can rely on them when we need them.
It’s right therefore that we follow the recommendations of the independent pay bodies with this set of real-terms pay rises.
This year’s pay awards reflect the enormous effort made by those in the public sector in responding to the unprecedented challenges for the country during the Covid-19 outbreak says the Government
Anneliese Dodds MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, responding to above inflation pay rises for public sector workers, said:
“The Conservatives froze public sector pay for seven long years, and the rises they introduced after that failed to plug the gap.
“A pay rise for our police, nurses and teachers now is good news, but for many frontline workers it still won’t make up for a decade of real terms pay cuts.
“And many other public sector workers – including those working on the front line in social care – won’t get a pay rise out of this at all because the Tories haven’t made good on their promises to boost local authority funding.
“That’s not fair – and it’s no way to reward those who’ve been at the forefront of fighting this pandemic.”
