The national living wage (NLW), which came in last April, marked an unprecedented 11% increase in the national wage floor in a year, from £6.50 last April to £7.20 for over-25s. A survey by Nursery World showed employers would use a diverse range of models to implement what is effectively a rise in the minimum wage, the most likely being increasing salaries of just those staff who receive below the NLW (20 per cent of respondents). This indicates that, for some businesses, working out a fair long-term pay strategy may have been lost in a rush to comply with the deadline. Working out what was affordable versus the need to maintain differentials left many finance directors scratching their heads. And, even if a business can afford to keep the differentials, there are other nuances to consider. As one director told Nursery World in March, ‘If there were equal increases across the board for all staff, the top end tends to be less well off from salary inflation, so you get senior staff leaving. We don’t know yet how we are going to do it.’
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