RCN: Sunderland trust must honour national terms and conditions

Published: 12 October 2012

The Royal College of Nursing has called on City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust to reverse a local policy which breaks away from nationally agreed NHS Agenda for Change terms and conditions.

Under the policy, any member of staff at the trust who does not receive an annual appraisal or complete certain training will have their pay increment frozen. Some staff on the top of the pay band face a pay cut if the locally imposed conditions are not met.

The NHS Staff Survey in 2011 showed that management at the trust has a poor record in delivering appraisals and only 70% of staff at the trust received appraisals from their managers.

Glenn Turp, RCN Regional Director, said: “The RCN Northern Region is clear that all staff should complete these important training modules and appraisals. But it is fundamentally wrong to penalise frontline staff, by freezing – or even cutting – their pay, for individual line management failings.

“The reality is that there are a number of reasons why staff may not have had an appraisal or received mandatory training, and a lot of these are completely out of their control. For example, managers may have failed to authorise staff to take time away from the clinical area, to allow them to undertake the training.”

He added: “But our particular concern is why the trust has chosen to break away from nationally agreed terms and conditions. They should be fully aware that difficult national negotiations are currently continuing. The bottom line is that it is completely unfair for nurses, health care assistants and other NHS staff in Wearside to have inferior terms and conditions to those who do exactly the same job in Tyneside.”

He said the policy could leave the trust vulnerable to potential legal claims for unlawful deduction of wages from RCN members who do not receive pay progression under the proposed policy. “The RCN has already had success in challenging trusts that have deviated from nationally agreed terms and conditions – for example, against Central Manchester Hospitals Foundation Trust. In this case, the employment tribunal found that the trust’s action constituted an unlawful deduction of pay and said it must repay the deductions to the claimants.”

Last month the RCN received correspondence from City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust Chief Executive Ken Bremner, stating that “in principle we remain supportive of the nationally determined AfC terms and conditions".

Further information

Agenda for Change was implemented in the NHS by the UK Government on 1 December 2004, and was specifically designed to ensure that all NHS employees, regardless of where they work in the country, are employed on the same terms and conditions.