By former RUH Bath Hospital governor NICOLA JAMES
(This article is an update and a follow-up on our May 12 Lowdown article More NHS outsourcing as management of bank staff contracted out.)
If you want to understand how a multi-million-pound NHS outsourcing deal gets quietly pushed through behind closed doors, it is worth paying attention to what Jude Gray, Chief People Officer for the Bath Swindon and Wiltshire Hospital Group, said to the Bath and North East Somerset Health Scrutiny Panel.
The Zero-Hours Loophole
When asked to justify stripping direct NHS employment and slashing pension benefits for bank staff at the RUH (Bath), Great Western (Swindon) and Salisbury hospitals, Ms Gray stated on the record:
“The whole point of a workers’ agreement is that we’re under no obligation to provide the work, and likewise they’re under no obligation to take the work, and for those individuals which represents 15% they will be given access to people’s pension.” Jude Gray, Chief People Officer – 2hrs:26mins into Health Scrutiny Panel proceedings
Let that sink in.
This is the Group Chief People Officer of an NHS hospital group talking about the nurses, healthcare assistants and support staff who keep those hospitals safe every single day. People the trust depends on entirely to prevent an acute safety crisis when wards are short-staffed.
Hidden behind a cold legal technicality, they are treated as disposable numbers on a spreadsheet because they do not have a conventional employment contract.
The trust relies on their goodwill and dedication every shift. Apparently, that earns the staff nothing in return.
The People’s Pension Deception
Ms Gray actually pitched the replacement pension scheme as a benefit, telling the panel:
“…you also then enter into an agreement with bank partners which would also give you access to the peoples pension which currently those NHS employees wouldn’t have.”
Let us be clear about what the People’s Pension actually is.
It is a bare-minimum auto-enrolment scheme.
Under the Pulse/Acacium contract that the bank staff would be left with, the employer contribution drops to 6%. By contrast, the NHS employer contribution these workers currently receive is 23.7%.
Pitching an inferior private scheme as a ‘perk’ to workers, being stripped of their 23.7% gold-standard NHS pension, is not offering a benefit. It is a raid on their retirement.
The Part-Time Trap
Ms Gray tried to reassure the panel that permanent NHS staff doing extra bank shifts would be unaffected:
“If the additional hours that you work are in the same role, they would attract NHS pension up to 37 and a half hours. If you do a different role, you would be paid, um, the people’s pension if you’re operating outside of your NHS employment role.”
She also said:
“Under the NHS pension scheme once you’ve done 37.5 hours you cannot increase your pension any further it is maxed out. So I just wanted to be really clear that we’re not changing the offer to our NHS employees.”
Ms Gray told the panel that NHS pension protection for additional hours would only apply if workers were doing the same role.
In practice, bank work rarely works that way.
Official NHS Workforce Statistics show that between 30% and 40% of NHS nurses and clinical support staff work part-time, the majority of whom are women.
A part-time nurse working 20 hours currently picks up extra bank shifts and has those hours pensioned at the full NHS rate.
But in Bath, Swindon, and Wiltshire hospitals, from 1 August, those extra shifts move to a private equity company, under a separate commercial contract.
Here is what that means in practice:
- A part-time nurse contracted to an outpatient clinic covers a Friday night A&E shift to help with a staffing crisis. Because Pulse treats it as a separate commercial assignment outside their core substantive rota, those hours may not be poolable into the NHS pension scheme.
- An experienced Band 6 sister picks up the only available bank vacancy, a standard Band 5 role, to help out at the weekend. Because the job code changes, the private provider may treat it as a different position with a different employer, cutting off her 23.7% NHS pension contribution for those hours.
- A part-time maternity nurse picks up a general medical ward shift to top up her income during the cost of living crisis. Even though she is still a registered nurse doing nursing work, the department code variation may mean those hours fail the exact role match and fall onto the lower corporate pension.
These are not unusual situations. They are the everyday reality of how bank work actually operates.
If BSW believe this interpretation is incorrect, we would welcome their clarification.
Until then, the 85% of workers Ms Gray implied would be unaffected are not as protected as she suggests.
The Financial Modelling Failure
The board used the language of corporate services transformation to make this look like routine administrative housekeeping.
It was not. Council of Governors minutes from September 2025 reveal what was actually going on. The trust was in the bottom Segment 4 of the NHS Oversight Framework … one step from government takeover. If they did not plug the deficit the Foundation Trust board would lose autonomy.
The Associate Director of HR told the panel that upgrading the existing bank system was ruled out because it would not save enough money to hit the top investment priority.
What the board papers show is that the option they chose instead saves between £3.3 million and £5.4 million a year, entirely through cutting employer pension contributions.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about which consideration actually drove the decision.
No medium or long-term financial modelling or risk analysis has been provided.
The Bottom Line
Ms Gray suggested bank workers who wanted to avoid these cuts should simply sign up for permanent contracts. But the reason these professionals work on the bank is often that they are parents and carers who cannot commit to rigid NHS rota terms.
Penalising them for having family responsibilities while claiming to be a ‘flexible employer’ is not a policy. It is a contradiction.
This contract was designed to plug a regulatory deficit while the board was under pressure to avoid losing control.
Trust bosses hid it from B&NES Council and from their own Integrated Care Board for almost a year because they knew the public would be revolted by the details.
The Health Scrutiny Panel voted unanimously, cross-party, to invoke their legal powers and refer this decision formally to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
This is not just about pensions: the board has produced no medium or long-term financial modelling or risk analysis. The primary concern appears to be plugging a short-term deficit – leaving the longer term consequences for service sustainability and workforce stability and patient care unexamined.
A formal submission has been delivered directly to Health and Social Care Secretary James Murray, calling on him to halt and urgently review the contract before it goes live on 1 August.
The board thought they could hide in the fine print and that staff would not check the maths. They were wrong.
* The Lowdown is grateful to Paula Riseborough of Protect Our NHS Bath and NE Somerset for alerting us to this issue and forwarding this latest information to us.
We urge other readers concerned about local issues that threaten the continuity or quality of services, or who seek savings at the expense of worsened staff conditions, to contact us at the Lowdown.
Nicola James, the author of this article, urges local campaigners to share it on social media, email groups and anywhere else you can – and we urge any trade union readers aware of similar moves in your area to get in touch so we can help to sound the alarm.
As Nicola says: “The more people who know about this, the harder it becomes to ignore.”
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