NHS Providers submission to the Senior Salaries Review Body 2023/24 pay round
We welcome the opportunity to submit evidence to the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB) on behalf of NHS trusts and foundation trusts, to inform the 2023/24 pay round. The key messages from our submission are as follows:
- 85% of trust leaders responding to our annual 'State of the Provider Sector' survey state they are more worried about this winter than any other in their careers. Media messaging of "waste and wokery" among NHS leadership is not only unfounded, but has been damaging to the morale of senior NHS leaders working under significant and converging pressures
- Turnover among the group covered by the SSRB’s remit is high, with our remuneration survey finding that over a quarter of executive directors have been in post for a year or less, and 57% were new to their roles within the past two years
- We hope that the new VSM framework will balance the coordination of VSM pay from the centre, with local autonomy and ability to recognise the particular complexities in a given trust, in a way which does not cause undue delays to appointments. We remain encouraged by the overall direction of travel of this work and have been engaging on it with NHSE's team
- We continue to hear from trusts that turnover should be deemphasised in the setting of VSM pay, and instead take better account of the complexities involved in trust leadership
- Most trust leaders continue to tell us that earn back is not an effective or appropriate method of performance management
- The 2021 national Workforce Race Equality Standard report found there has been a fall in the number of executive directors from an ethnic minority background, from 155 in 2020, to 144 in 2021. Ensuring there is increased diversity at senior leadership level needs to be central to developing a leadership pipeline
- It is welcome to see a year-on-year increase in the number of board members who have disclosed a disability, but the majority of trusts do not have a board member who has disclosed a disability
- Findings from our remuneration survey suggest a gender (basic) pay gap of 8.3% among executive directors, equating to female directors receiving £11,714 less than male peers. This gap has increased by 1.7% since 2020/21 but is narrower than the 10.0% gap observed in 2019/20
- While we did not see a large movement of trust leaders into ICB roles this year, we request that the SSRB asks DHSC whether they feel assured that the forthcoming VSM pay framework is equal in its support of senior leaders in trust roles and senior leaders in ICB roles
- The nature of VSM roles is becoming more complex given partnership and system working. It is important to reflect this not only in the new VSM framework, but also in the SSRB's pay recommendations this year
- While we understand delays in pay review processes are not always in the control of the given review body, the 2022/23 pay uplift being announced seven months into 2022 was unhelpful. We would be supportive of all efforts the SSRB can make to ensure that pay rounds are concluded at the start of each financial year.
Download