Our organisation pays appointed First aiders and Fire Wardens an additional sum to cover these duties. The amount is paid to them every 3 or 4 months.

Ours get paid £20 a month and we still have trouble finding volunteers!

Yes, a token amount circa £5 a week. This has been the case at all Manufacturing establishments I have worked in the last 20 years also if that helps.

There are a couple of pharmaceutical firms that pay similar to matt

We used to pay £8 per month, paid annually and thereafter as a voucher, as something more of a tangible benefit. We now don’t pay anything and I don’t have any problem getting first aiders. Most staff are happy to do this and learn a useful and 'transferable' skill. If I recall correctly, first aid payments never formed part of the purple book arrangements, but did form part of the arrangements for ‘manual’ workers prior to single status/harmonisation and that some public sector employers then used this as a basis for paying NPT&C staff. Happy to be wrong though. A recent employment survey has indicated that nearly half of employers did pay an allowance that it was more common place in the public sector, but that the private sector actually paid more, £150 against £109. The average across all sectors was £150

Our first aiders get a bonus payable in the Christmas pay run :)

The comments by canopener at #10 and grumpyb at #13 about employees being keen to be trained in first aid make welcome reading, and echo what I found with quite a number of the schools I worked with in my last job. They offered first aid training to all employees, not just those designated as first aiders, and found that most or all employees were very keen to have the training. Just to turn the thread heading on its head, I wonder how much employees would be willing to pay their employers to get first aid training leading to a certificate, especially if it were provided during work time! p.s. On a much more jocular note, I'm also wondering about the stick mentioned by grumpyb: Is it merely waved at the excessive numbers of aspiring applicants to achieve a deterrent effect? If not, are they slapped with the side of the stick and/or prodded with its end, perhaps suitably pointed for extra effect?!!!! :-)

We do not pay any of our staff for being First Aiders. It is a pre-requisite for our Site Based Project/Contracts Managers and for the office staff we have three volunteers that I have already trained and the remaining four all want to attend the next course I run. We have never had a problem getting volunteer first aiders. Regards Clive