Will the nursing strike finish off the NHS?
Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, met the boss of the Royal College of Nursing today for crisis talks as nurses across the country prepare to go on strike within weeks.
Barclay said the talks were “constructive” and “we have agreed to meet again shortly,” but no further details have emerged.
In a testament to just how fed-up staff are, the looming strike over pay will be the first time RCN members have taken UK-wide strike action in the union’s 106-year history.
The walkout will kick off before Christmas and, according to the RCN, could rumble on until May.
Nine in ten nurses reportedly backed the industrial action, though it will only go ahead in about half of NHS trusts in England as some trusts didn’t meet the threshold for action due to low voter turnout. The patchy nature of the strikes will exacerbate a postcode lottery of care.
The RCN insists that hospitals will ensure services such as intensive care are fully staffed. Yet operations and check-ups will be affected, and planned action in several specialist cancer hospitals will impact chemotherapy treatment.
Nurses are fighting for an inflation-busting pay rise of 17 per cent, the equivalent of around £6,000 for an average nurse who earns £35,000. This is some way off the 4.75 per cent rise currently being offered to NHS staff – which amounts to a real-terms cut given inflation is running at over 10 per cent. According to research commissioned by the RCN, nursing salaries have also dropped in real terms by 20 per cent since 2010.
The timing of the strike action is less than ideal, to put it mildly. Aside from adding to usual winter pressures, fresh figures reveal that the NHS backlog has reached a new all-time high, with 7.1 million people in England – one in eight – now on waiting lists for elective hospital treatment, up from 4.4 million before the pandemic. ONS figures last week also revealed that the number of excess deaths is currently higher than during the pandemic, which it believes is partly due to delays in treatment.
Will these unprecedented waves of strikes prove fruitful?
At the moment, there is no sign of ministers budging. According to government sources, Barclay did not meet with the RCN today to negotiate on pay, but only to discuss other ways to improve nurses’ working conditions this winter.
On pay, he has been firm: “Union demands for a 17.6 per cent pay settlement are around three times what millions of people outside the public sector will typically receive and simply aren’t reasonable or affordable.”
Barclay has also argued that the government “accepted the recommendations of the independent NHS Pay Review Body in full” and that Labour isn’t backing the strikes or pay demands either.
That said, Labour has criticised the government for not doing enough to engage with the RCN over concerns, with ministers instead dismissing reports of nurses struggling to make ends meet on current salaries. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan didn’t help matters this morning by suggesting that nurses using food banks are being driven to do so by a broken “relationship or boiler”.
The government has also urged nurses to consider the impact of the walkout on patients. Yet nurses in favour argue that strikes will help patients in the long term: poor pay and working conditions are driving staff out of the sector and an overstretched, exhausted workforce is compromising patient care.
NHS bosses, meanwhile, are generally sympathetic to nurses’ demands but there is concern that a further pay award without extra money from the government would inevitably lead to cuts to services.
A pay rise for nurses would also set a precedent and pile pressure on the government to appease demands of staff elsewhere in the NHS. Indeed, unions representing NHS staff from paramedics to porters are likely to strike later in the winter. It’s worth remembering that the NHS is the largest employer in Europe and fifth biggest in the world.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life