Nurses' unions reacted with cautious optimism to the shake-up to nurses' pay structure.

Health secretary Frank Dobson reduced the six-banded pay scale to just three to reassure senior staff worried they would be paid less than newly-qualified nurses.

He said the present system denied longer-serving nurses the chance to progress their career. "There are too many grades with too many artificial ceilings," he said.

A spokesman for the Royal College of Nursing, in Oxfordshire, said: "We accept that grading is not working very well because nurses get stuck at a certain level and cannot go any further."As far as the RCN's response goes we look forward to seeing the the proposals in more detail and to consulting with nurses about it." They added: "It will be interesting to see what the details are because in Oxfordshire we have a lot of specialist nurses who cannot be rewarded for the work they do because of the system."

Story date: Friday 29 January

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