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The government has announced pay rises for police and prison officers which breach the 1% public sector pay cap.
Prison officers will get a 1.7% rise while police will get a 1% pay rise plus a 1% bonus for the year, paid for from existing departmental budgets.
No 10 also signaled the end of the 1% pay cap, saying they recognized the need for more flexibility in future.
But the TUC said the pay rises being offered were “derisory” and would not address staff shortages
The unions affected by the announcement also reacted angrily.
Steve Gillan, the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said it represented a real-terms pay cut and said he would be seeking coordinated industrial action alongside other trade unions.
Steve White, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said the announcement would leave many officers “angry and deflated”.
“We were not greedy in what we asked for,” Mr White added. “Officers have been taking home about 15% less than they were seven years ago.”
The federation had asked for a 2.8% increase to basic pay, while the Prison Officer’s Association had called for a 5% increase.
The announcement of the settlements for England and Wales from the government came on the day UK inflation rose to 2.9%.
The BBC’s assistant political editor Norman Smith said pay restraint had been the “backbone” of the Conservatives’ austerity agenda since 2010 and Tuesday’s move was symbolically very significant.
But he said the size of the increase, and how it would be paid for, was likely to be highly controversial.
How much will it cost?
By Anthony Reuben, BBC Reality Check
The government has decided to lift the 1% pay cap on the public sector, although at the moment we don’t know by how much, except for the police and prison officers.
How much it would cost is a tricky question. In the case of the police and prison officers, the money is apparently coming from existing budgets, but that means that there will have to be cuts elsewhere or reserves will be run down.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons that an extra 1% pay for the entire public sector would cost about £1.8bn a year, although it would get some of that back in income tax and National Insurance.
But there are other savings that need to be taken into account, for example, some have argued that raising pay in the NHS would stop staff leaving and reduce absence, so reducing the use of more expensive agency staff and saving money.
