The government will hold an emergency Cobra meeting on Monday to discuss contingency plans for when industrial action takes place in December.
The plans will involve deploying military personnel and civil servants to fill in for striking Border Force staff and paramedics.
Indeed, some military staff are already undergoing training ahead of the strikes, with some preparing to be sent to hospitals for tutorials on how to commandeer ambulances.
Border Force staff will be striking at airports including Gatwick, Heathrow, Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff from December 23 to 31.
Meanwhile, paramedics and control room staff will walk out on December 21, during which time they will only respond to life-threatening incidents.
As well as Border Force staff, paramedics and nurses, there will also be walkouts staged by postal workers and rail staff as part of an ongoing dispute with employers over pay and conditions amid rampant inflation.
The Public and Commercial Services Union [PCS] which represents striking Border Force staff is pursuing a 10 per cent pay rise to help mitigate the impact of the rising cost-of-living.
Meanwhile, the Royal College of Nursing wants nurses to be paid five per cent more than the RPI inflation rate, which stood at 14.2 per cent according to October’s figures.
But Downing Street has warned that such wage rises will only fuel inflation further and insisted that it has hiked public sector pay in accordance with the recommendations issued earlier in the year by the independent pay review boards.
Minister Oliver Dowden has been calling on trade unions to call off the industrial action and avoid causing “disruption for millions of hardworking people over the coming weeks.”
Dowden said: “The government will do all it can to mitigate the impact of this action, but the only way to stop the disruption completely is for union bosses to get back round the table and call off these damaging strikes.
“I will be chairing a series of Cobra meetings over the coming weeks to ensure our plans are as robust as possible, and that disruption is kept to a minimum.”
Health secretary Steve Barclay has separately said that he is “very happy to talk” to nurses’ unions after being urged to come to the negotiating table by the Royal College of Nursing.
However, the health secretary has also called on unions to “respect” the pay offer made to NHS staff already, which “honoured in full” the recommendations set by the independent pay review body.
Barclay said: “We have engaged with them (the unions) and we continue to be willing to do so”, warning that the government could ill afford to channel key funds intended to clear the post-pandemic backlog toward financing higher salaries.
While Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said that nurses wanted “more than can be afforded”, he said that he’d still “get around the table” for talks.
He added that the Tory government was guilty of “sitting on their hands” and letting the strikes happen.
Image Roger Blackwell from Norwich, UK, on Wikimedia Commons
