Wes Streeting, the health secretary, says that he is accepting a recommendation for doctors to get a 4% pay rise, and other NHS staff, including nurses, to get a 3.6% – even though these figures are above the 2.8% deemed affordable by the government in its own recommendation to pay review bodies.
But he says costs will have to be cut in other areas of NHS spending to pay for these salary increases, covering 2025-26.
In his written ministerial statement, he says:
Today I am formally accepting the headline pay recommendations for NHS staff from the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB), the Review Body on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration (DDRB), and the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB). We are working closely with payroll systems to ensure staff receive their backdated pay uplifts from August.
I hugely appreciate the work of so many talented staff across the NHS. Accepting these recommendations gives them the pay rise they deserve. These awards are above forecast inflation over the 2025/26 pay year, meaning that the government is delivering a real-terms pay rise, on top of the one provided last year, underlining the extent to which we value our nurses, doctors, and other NHS staff ….
Through their deliberations, [the pay review bodies] have made recommendations above the level we stated as affordable in our evidence. I am however accepting their headline pay recommendations as fair and well-evidenced uplifts for public servants. To maintain financial prudence, I have had to make difficult decisions on other areas of spend to afford these uplifts.
The 4% will cover GPs, dentists, consultants and resident doctors (previously called junior doctors).
And the 3.6% will cover NHS staff covered by Agenda for Change – which means most NHS workers who are not doctors.
Senior managers will get a 3.25% pay rise.
In his written statement Streeting also says he wants to speed up the payments of pay rises. He says the pay increases for 2025-26 will arrive in pay packets two months sooner than they did last year, but he says he wants NHS staff in future to get their pay rises at the start of the financial year in April.
Normally they are announced later, which means pay has to be backdated.
And teachers will also get a 4% pay rise, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has announced. In her ministerial statement, she says:
Today I am … accepting in full the independent STRB [School Teachers’ Review Body] recommendations for 2025/26, implementing a pay award for school teachers and leaders of 4% from September. This means school teachers will see an increase in their pay of almost 10% since this government took power and over 22% over the last four years. This will provide a competitive starting salary of almost £33,000, attracting talented graduates into the teaching profession, and we estimate the average teacher can now expect a salary of over £51,000 from September, helping retain talented existing teachers to deliver high standards for children.
Phillipson accepts that schools won’t have budgeted for this, and she says she is making £615m available to help them to fund these pay rises.
We recognise that this is beyond the costs for which many schools will have budgeted for. Therefore, we are providing additional funding of £615m this financial year to schools to support them with the costs of staff pay awards, on top of the funding already provided in their existing budgets. This funding has come from existing DfE budgets.
But schools will still have to fund some of this from their own budgets, she says.
Schools will be expected to find approximately the first 1% of pay awards through improved productivity and smarter spending to make every pound count. There will be those who say this cannot be done, but I believe schools have a responsibility, like the rest of the public sector, to ensure that their funding is spent as efficiently as possible.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, says that he is accepting a recommendation for doctors to get a 4% pay rise, and other NHS staff, including nurses, to get a 3.6% – even though these figures are above the 2.8% deemed affordable by the government in its own recommendation to pay review bodies.
But he says costs will have to be cut in other areas of NHS spending to pay for these salary increases, covering 2025-26.
In his written ministerial statement, he says:
Today I am formally accepting the headline pay recommendations for NHS staff from the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB), the Review Body on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration (DDRB), and the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB). We are working closely with payroll systems to ensure staff receive their backdated pay uplifts from August.
I hugely appreciate the work of so many talented staff across the NHS. Accepting these recommendations gives them the pay rise they deserve. These awards are above forecast inflation over the 2025/26 pay year, meaning that the government is delivering a real-terms pay rise, on top of the one provided last year, underlining the extent to which we value our nurses, doctors, and other NHS staff ….
Through their deliberations, [the pay review bodies] have made recommendations above the level we stated as affordable in our evidence. I am however accepting their headline pay recommendations as fair and well-evidenced uplifts for public servants. To maintain financial prudence, I have had to make difficult decisions on other areas of spend to afford these uplifts.
The 4% will cover GPs, dentists, consultants and resident doctors (previously called junior doctors).
And the 3.6% will cover NHS staff covered by Agenda for Change – which means most NHS workers who are not doctors.
Senior managers will get a 3.25% pay rise.
In his written statement Streeting also says he wants to speed up the payments of pay rises. He says the pay increases for 2025-26 will arrive in pay packets two months sooner than they did last year, but he says he wants NHS staff in future to get their pay rises at the start of the financial year in April.
Normally they are announced later, which means pay has to be backdated.
And members of the armed forces are getting a 4.5% pay rise in 2025-26, John Healey, the defence secretary, has announced. In his written ministerial statement, he says the government is acccepting the pay review body’s recommendations in full. He says:
Along with subsidised accommodation, health and childcare, a generous pension scheme, and world class training, education and skills development, pay plays a key role in rewarding service personnel for the extraordinary sacrifices they make. To recognise that commitment I am announcing today that we will be accepting in full the 2025 Pay Award recommendations for Armed Forces remuneration made by the independent Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body (AFPRB) and Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB).
Senior officers will get a pay rise of 3.75%, he says.
The government is starting to publish its public sector pay announcements for 2025-26. The news is coming out in the form of written statements giving the government responses to public pay review body recommentations.
Georgia Gould, the Cabinet Office minister, has published the figures for senior civil servants.
She says the government is accepting that “all members of the senior civil service [SCS] should receive a 3.25% consolidated increase to base pay from 1 April 2025”.
But the government is also going to “fundamental review and ‘reset’ of SCS pay and reward frameworks”, she says.
Richard Adams is the Guardian’s education editor.
The number of international students coming to the UK plummeted last year, with universities warning of the threat to their financial stability if the trend continues.
The Office for National Statistics said that 266,000 non-EU nationals came to the UK for “study-related” reasons in the year to December, with the bulk aiming for higher education institutions.
That was a 37% decrease compared with December 2023, when 423,000 arrived, and December 2022 when 422,000 did so.
Much of the decrease was the result of a 83% fall in the number of family members accompanying students following new visa restrictions but there was also a 17% fall in the number of student visas alone.
The sudden fall has led many UK universities to miss out on lucrative international tuition fee income, sparking budget cuts and concerns throughout the sector. The government is now proposing further restrictions including a possible international student levy on universities.
Joe Marshall, chief executive of the National Centre for Universities and Business, said:
The current trajectory threatens to undermine one of our most powerful assets: our standing as a global leader in knowledge and innovation. A retreat in international enrolment will not only have significant financial repercussions but could also diminish the UK’s influence and capacity for world-changing research and discoveries.
Back in the Commons, Tessa Munt (Lib Dem) asked Mahmood if she would publish the evidence that she was citing earlier to defend her proposal for chemical castration. (See 12.29pm.)
Mahmood said she would. But she said the evidence from trials in the UK was limited. There was better evidence from abroad, she said.
But she said she did believe that the use of chemicals, combined with with psychological interventions, could have a big impact on a sub-set of offenders.
In fact, a lot of evidence is cited in the footnotes to the Gauke report. See footnotes 366 to 380, starting on page 181.
PA Media has snapped this.
An injunction temporarily blocking the government from concluding its negotiations over the Chagos Islands should be discharged, a high court judge has said.
In the Commons Mahmood has just restated her belief that these plans will lead to a huge reduction in the number of female prisoners.
This is what the independent sentencing review report says on this topic.
In the year ending June 2024, 77% of women sentenced to custody received a sentence of 12 months or less. Third sector organisations informed the Review through engagement that for many women, custody is not the right place due to their vulnerabilities (such as being victims of crime themselves) or because they pose low-level of risk to the public. The rate of self-harm incidents in the female estate is stark: from December 2023 to December 2024, the rate of self-harm was nine times higher in women’s prisons (6,056 incidents per 1,000 prisoners) than men’s prisons (687 incidents per 1,000 prisoners). The Farmer Review (2019) also established that relationships are women’s most prevalent criminogenic need. Family relationships can be damaged when women are given short custodial sentences, particularly as women are often housed far away from home, making it difficult and costly to maintain relationships.
The Review’s recommendations in chapter three promote the use of custody as a last resort. Recommendation 3.1, to legislate to ensure the use of short custodial sentences are only used in exceptional circumstances, will encourage women to be diverted from custody to more effective sanction and support. In encouraging a reduction in the use of short sentences, the Review aims to reduce the harm that female offenders may experience.
The government says it is going to introduce “a presumption against custodial sentences of less than a year – in favour of tough community sentences that better punish offenders and stop them reoffending”.
The Gauke report says women comprise only 4% of the prison population. But it also says 60% of women in jail, or under supervision, say they have been victims of domestic abuse.
Charlotte Nichols (Lab) asked Mahmood how many future offences could be prevented by chemical castration. She said this would only apply to people who have already offended, implying that the impact might be limited.
Mahmood said studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60% reduction in offending.
She accepted that this might not help with sexual offenders whose offending is motivated primarly by power. But for other offenders, primarly motivated by sexual compulsion, it could have a “big and positive impact”, she said.
Mahmood said studies looking chemical castration have been taking place for years, but she said her Tory predecessors were not very interested. She was different, she suggested. “I’m not squeamish about taking these further measures,” she said.
Back in the Commons Desmond Swayne (Con) complained that that current sentences are a “fiction” because the amount of time spent in jail is much less than the sentence read out in court. He said these reforms would make this worse.
Mahmood said that Swayne was wrong, and that David Gauke, who wrote the report, agrees with Swayne about the importance of transparency in sentencing.
One of the recommendations in the Gauke report says:
Government should consider how to make sentencing outcomes as explicit and unambiguous as possible, perhaps through a combination of guidance, national and tailored communications and engagement.
Here is the Ministry of Justice’s news release summing up its response to the Gauke review on sentencing.
Mahmood tells MPs that the Gauke proposals will lead to “a huge reduction in the number of women going to prison”. She goes on:
Approximately two thirds go in for sentences of less than one year. Many of those women are victims of domestic abuse. In future, we expect the numbers to drop very, very significantly, and I know we will make progress in that regard.
Josh Babarinde, the Liberal Democrats’ justice spokesperson, said his party would be pushing for guarantees that domestic abusers would be excluded from the early release provisons. But, overall, he was supportive of the government, and he condemned the Tories for playing politics with this issue.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, responded to Mahmood’s statement. He restated his claim that the government is decriminalising some offences. (See 9.24am.) He told MPs:
Should violent and prolific criminals be on the streets or behind bars? I think they should be behind bars. For all the Justice secretary’s rhetoric, the substance of her statement could not be clearer. She’s OK, her party is OK, with criminals terrorising our streets and tormenting our country.
In response, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, said the Tories should be apologosing for leaving the prison system “on the verge of collapse”.
