Nurses are set to strike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in December after showdown talks with ministers failed. Meanwhile, official figures have shown that some 417,000 working days were lost to strikes in October, the most recorded in more than 10 years.
Pat Cullen, the head of the Royal College of Nursing [RCN] union said that health secretary Steve Barclay was guilty of “belligerence” after refusing to address salaries in Monday’s discussions.
She said that refusal to discuss pay – which she called “fundamental” to resolving the row – amounted to disrespect of the nursing profession.
The government has dismissed the RCN’s demands for a 19.2 per cent salary increase over affordability and said that it will continue its talks with the union around other issues such as working conditions.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said that the health secretary had “listened” to the union’s concerns over salaries and “reiterated the government has agreed to the recommendations of the independent pay review body”.
Barclay is known to be reluctant to divert funds away from frontline healthcare services and clearing the post-pandemic service backlog simply to fund higher wages.
To justify its demands, the RCN has said that its push for a 19.2 per cent rise (five per cent above October’s RPI inflation rate) is down to the fact that nurses salaries have been subdued for years and failed to keep pace with inflation.
Talks between the RCN and the Welsh government have also failed to make a breakthrough, with ministers at Cardiff Bay warning that they cannot increase nurses’ wages without further funding from the UK government or cutting back services.
Nurses will strike on Thursday (December 15) and again on December 20.
RCN members in Northern Ireland will also be downing tools on those dates, while healthcare workers affiliated to the Unison, Nipsa and GMB unions in Northern Ireland have already staged walkouts this week.
Labour shadow health secretary Wes Streeting agreed with the Tory government that the RCN’s demands were not affordable, but said that a Labour government “would be willing to meet and negotiate” to avert industrial action.
Streeting said that government ministers were blaming strike staff for “12 years of Conservative mismanagement” and were guilty of a “stubborn refusal to engage” with unions.
Meanwhile, the government has already begun contingency planning which will see Armed Forces personnel fill in for striking Border Force staff and paramedics.
There was some good news north of the border, with Unite and Unison members working for the NHS in Scotland agreeing to Holyrood’s offer of a 7.5 per cent average pay increase. Scottish members of the GMB, Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and RCN are continuing to vote on whether to accept the terms.
417,000 working days gone in October, salaries down in real terms
While ministers and the public brace themselves for December’s strikes, figures from the Office for National Statistics [ONS] have shown that some 417,100 working days were lost to industrial action over October.
The figure was the highest since November 2011 and was largely driven by rail and postal workers striking. This action is continuing through December.
Royal Mail workers affiliated to the CWU union are downing tools on Wednesday and Thursday this week (December 14 and 15) and Christmas Eve.
Head of economic statistics at the ONS, Sam Beckett, warned that the true impact of the strikes on the UK economy was yet to be seen.
She said: “We haven't really seen the influence of that in our GDP statistics yet. It is too early to say how it will hit the economy more broadly.”
ONS figures showed that salaries in both the public and private sector were lagging behind inflation, but the former continues to grow slower than the latter.
Between August and October, public sector wages grew 2.7 per cent, compared to 6.9 per cent in the private sector.
ONS analysis said that this was the largest growth rate recorded for the private sector and was “among the largest differences” seen between private and public sector growth rates.
However, once inflation was factored in, regular pay fell by 2.7 per cent in real terms, despite growing numerically by 6.1 per cent between August and October.
