[A-List] UK corporate state: PPPs in disarray

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

PFI hospital's £97m equal pay bill could cost NHS billions

Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday October 1, 2002
The Guardian

Nurses and ancillary staff at a PFI hospital are set to win a legal
battle over equal pay that will cost the hospital £97m in back pay and
add £13m to its annual wage bill - with potentially major implications
for the rest of the health service.

Independent expert witnesses to an employment tribunal have decided that
Cumberland Infirmary has routinely discriminated against women, paying
them far less than men doing work of equal value.

Fourteen hundred female staff at the hospital, including C and D grade
nurses, cooks, and cleaners, lodged claims in 1997 in Europe's largest
equal pay case. At an employment tribunal in Newcastle, 38 test cases
were sent to a panel of four independent expert witnesses. In the first
10 cases to come back earlier this month, affecting nurses and caterers,
the experts have ruled in the women's favour.

Nurses who are currently paid £17,500 are doing work of equal value to
men being paid £26,000. Union officials are confident they will win
the other test cases. For many of the women, the claim would be
backdated for 11 years, so some would be entitled to up to £100,000
compensation, as well as enormous pay rises. Legal precedent has
established that the compensation for discrimination should be backdated
for six years from the date a claim is lodged.

The pay rises would see junior nurses leapfrogging senior matrons in
salary and would force the NHS trust to adjust all pay levels if it
wants to retain staff. The hospital was the first to be completed under
the government's private finance initiative.

The case has been backed by the union Unison and could lead to a
compensation bill for the NHS running into billions of pounds. Peter
Doyle, the Unison organiser at Cumberland Infirmary, said: "When our
members get the money, others will fill in industrial tribunal forms.
What we've done in Carlisle can be replicated anywhere else."

The next stage of the legal process is for the experts' findings to go
back to the tribunal in November for a final ruling. There are cases
where the tribunal has not accepted such witnesses' judgment, but they
are rare, and to ignore four experts would be unprecedented, Katy Clark,
Unison's head of legal services, said.

Although the NHS trust might try to challenge the experts because the
implications of the case are so enormous, it is unlikely to win.

The case has given added urgency to the government's review of NHS pay,
Agenda for Change, which is supposed to tackle inequalities and was set
up in 1997. Unison leaders are publicly arguing that the review, rather
than lengthy legal battles, will be the way forward to winning equal pay
in the NHS, but the floodgates look likely to burst.

The Royal College of Midwives is supporting a similar claim involving 50
test cases in north Cheshire which, if won, would dramatically affect
midwives' pay nationally.

Unison's national secretary for health, Paul Marks, said: "These cases
prove many of the things we have been saying since 1997 about equal pay.
We now have to marry this up with pay negotiations which deal with
everyone in the health service."

Four days' of intense negotiation are taking place between the unions
and the Department of Health. The unions hope to secure substantial
rises for health staff, but any deal is unlikely to match what staff in
Carlisle are set to win, because the NHS could not afford it. But if the
NHS pay review does not deliver enough and soon, thousands of nurses are
likely to stage expensive equal pay cases which they would probably win.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said it was waiting for the
tribunal's final ruling before drawing its conclusions. No one from
Cumberland Infirmary was available for comment.