Ambulance workers in the North West will strike again on February 10 in the long-running dispute over pay and staffing, Unison has announced. The walkout also involves thousands of ambulance workers in London, Yorkshire, the South West and the North East .
It means strikes will now be happening across the NHS every day next week apart from Wednesday. Unison urged the Government to stop 'pretending the strikes will simply go away' and act decisively to end the dispute by improving pay.
The union warned that unless the Government has a 'major rethink' over NHS pay, and gets involved in 'actual talks' with unions, it will announce strike dates running into March. By then, the dispute is likely to affect double the number of trusts and extend to the whole of the ambulance service in England, said the union.
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Unison's head of health Sara Gorton said: "After promising everyone a quicker pay review body process, the secretary of state’s own department failed to get its evidence in on time earlier this month. Ministers must stop fobbing the public off with promises of a better NHS, while not lifting a finger to solve the staffing emergency staring them in the face.
"The Government must stop playing games. Rishi Sunak wants the public to believe ministers are doing all they can to resolve the dispute. They're not.
"There are no pay talks, and the Prime Minister must stop trying to hoodwink the public. It's time for some honesty. Ministers are doing precisely nothing to end the dispute.
"The Government's tactics seem to be to dig in, wait months for the pay review body report and hope the dispute goes away. It won't. And in the meantime, staff will carry on quitting, and patients being let down.
"There can be no health service without the staff to run it. Ministers must open proper talks to end the dispute and put in place the urgent retention plan needed to boost pay and staffing across the NHS."
The GMB union has announced that more than 10,000 blue light workers in England will walk out on February 6 and 20, and March 6 and 20, in a fraught dispute over pay. The February 6 date coincides with further strike action by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in England and Wales, marking the first time paramedics and nurses will down tools on the same day.
Physiotherapists who are members of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy are also striking next Thursday - February 9. Earlier this month, health unions decided against submitting joint evidence about the wage rise due in April to the NHS because of the ongoing dispute.
Health secretary Steve Barclay had promised unions he would speed up the pay review body process. However NHS pay review body chair Philippa Hird told MPs this morning that his department has still not put in its own evidence despite the deadline having been on January 11.
When asked whether not receiving evidence from the Department of Health would impact the pay review process, she said: "I’m still expecting evidence from the Government. If it doesn’t come, we’ll cross that bridge when it comes to it."
Health and Social Care Committee chairman Steve Brine said he's 'astonished' the Government has still not responded. He said it must be 'intolerable' not to have heard from the Government after it 'spent all the holiday season... standing behind the pay review body'.
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