NHS England’s chief executive has told the Commons Health Select Committee that staff deserve a 2.1 per cent pay rise next year, rather than the proposed one per cent.

Sir Simon Stevens said the salaries of most of the NHS workforce were due to increase by 2.1 per cent from 1 April under the five-year funding deal Theresa May gave the service in 2018. This was verified by Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the committee in question, who was the Health Secretary until a few weeks after the unveiling of May’s deal, under which health service funding would have risen by billions every year until 2023.

Stevens said that the NHS pay review body should independently make a fair recommendation to ministers about how big a rise health workers deserve ‘so that NHS staff get the pay and the reward that they deserve’.

A new poll for campaign group 38 Degrees found that 53 per cent of the public think NHS staff should get at least a five per cent pay rise and that 83 per cent think the one per cent is too little.