Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price clashed with First Minister Mark Drakeford in the Senedd after he claimed that the Welsh Government has the available cash to offer nurses an 8% pay rise.
Mr Adam Price claimed that the Welsh Government has sufficient money to offer an 8% pay increase to nurses – more than 3% above what is currently on the table, saying it could use unallocated funding and by drawing down from reserves. In reply, Mr Drakeford accused he could not use a one-off pot of cash to fund long-term pay rises.
The current pay offer from the Welsh government provides around 4.8% uplift on average for NHS staff. To arrive at an 8% initial offer would require an extra £176m in the current financial year.
Plaid Cymru says that the money could come from a combination of the £152.3m of currently unallocated funding in the Welsh Government’s budget, a draw down from the Wales Reserve in addition to any projected under-spends in current departmental budgets.
According to Plaid the extra money in this year's budget will come from drawing on reserve funding. This will mean that the money will not be available for subsequent years but Mr Price is arguing that this could make up the shortfall in the future with a combination of reduced reliance on private sector agency staff and progressive use of the Welsh Government’s income tax powers.
Leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price MS said: “A fairer pay award is not only essential, it’s possible to do – whatever the Westminster Government decides. When there is a clear way forward to increase the pay award to nurses, the only question that remains is whether the Welsh Government has the will to invest in our nurses.
“Nurses need fair pay, and this pay needs to be awarded in a way that helps ensure sustainability of the profession. Welsh Government has been quick to boast that in Wales, we do things differently. But when it comes to the treatment of nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff fighting for fairer pay, the Welsh Labour Government appears doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Tories in Westminster. In the same weekend the Tories announce a one-off payment for nurses in England, without increasing the pay award, we hear that Welsh Labour Government is planning to do the same for nurses here in Wales.”
Mr Price challenged Mark Drakeford on this during First Minister’s Questions in the Senedd.
In response the First Minister said: “Well, there are political choices here, Llywydd, and there are also hard facts, and it is simply a hard fact that you cannot spend one-off money to pay for recurrent bills.
“It is interesting that Plaid Cymru has joined the Welsh Conservatives in suggesting that the way to finance public sector pay in Wales is to raise taxes even further than they are already on the Welsh population. The leader of Plaid Cymru is right that that is a political choice, and that is a political choice that this Cabinet rehearsed in detail in the lead-up to the draft budget. There was a moment—a brief moment, as you know, when Liz Truss was Prime Minister—in which there were plans to reduce the level of income tax across the United Kingdom, and that did, I believe, open up a realistic possibility that we might have been able to raise income tax rates in Wales without disadvantaging Welsh citizens next year beyond the position they are this year.
“Welsh citizens will pay higher taxes next year, Llywydd, than they have for the last 70 years. They're being asked to do that in the teeth of a cost-of-living crisis where they are already struggling to pay fuel bills, energy bills, food bills and other bills too. This Cabinet looked to see whether we should take more money out of their pockets by raising taxes, and decided that that was not a sensible course of action. That remains our view and, therefore, it's not a course of action we will follow, to find one-off money this year and to find recurrent money next year by raising tax levels even higher in Wales.”
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