'Raiding public service pay and pensions is a fundamentally flawed strategy' says NASUWT
Responding to reports of the statements on cuts in public service pay by Steve Bundred, Chief Executive of the Audit Commission, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union in the UK, said:
“The Audit Commission is simply joining the long list of those who use the recession as an excuse to promulgate an anti-public services agenda, to privatise public services and to attack public service workers’ jobs, pay and pensions on the grounds that there should be ‘equity of misery’.
“Public services are vital to the nation’s economy.
“At a time of recession it is public services that will sustain people and rebuild the economy, none more so than the state education service. The education service will develop the ambition, skills, expertise and drive essential for economic reconstruction.
“The last ten years of high investment in education have been necessary to rebuild the infrastructure of the education service, which had been starved in the previous decade of the levels of funding necessary to sustain it, and enable it to deliver the highest standards of education.
“Raiding of public service pay and pensions is a fundamentally flawed strategy for rebuilding the economy.”
