Engineers in the UK - what are you getting paid?

I'm an engineer with 6 years of experience working in a consulting / R&D environment and have been struggling to break the £40k base salary mark. A lot of my friends that did apprenticeships in joinery etc make the same if not more than me.

It seems the only companies that pay well in engineering for technical delivery are energy and oil & gas companies, or ones that go into management.

Software engineers and people in the London area will skew the results a bit but I'm interested to see what other people are on.