Public sectory pay: Can Stormont afford new pay deals?

The funding package from the UK government which helped restore devolution included £584m to meet the immediate cost of backdated public sector pay awards.

An independent watchdog, the NI Fiscal Council, said that in practice a further £520m of that package would mostly be “swallowed up by pay”.

However all that money was to settle disputes which had festered in the absence of Stormont ministers.

For example industrial action by teachers had gone on for years and their starting salaries had fallen far behind the rest of the UK.

So that was essentially a backward looking exercise; what is happening now is a more normal annual pay setting process.

The reasons why pay review bodies may favour above inflation deals could include the need to compete with private sector pay increases and the need to rebuild the real value of public sector pay.