Ministers are facing pressure to tackle an escalating wave of NHS strikes, after the organisation representing NHS trusts warned that planned stoppages by nurses that could last until Christmas were “not sustainable” for the health service.
With nurses due to be balloted on new strikes after voting to reject what the government called a “full and final” pay offer, the head of the main nursing union said Steve Barclay, the health secretary, did not seem willing to listen.
Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said members had rejected a pay offer from the government, one recommended by the union, because they believed the deal “was neither fair nor reasonable”.
Nurses were likely to continue to stage strikes up to Christmas, Cullen told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, while adding that there were no plans to coordinate them with continuing strikes by junior doctors.
Speaking later on the same programme, Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, the membership organisation for NHS trusts in England, said ministers had to act to prevent more strikes by nurses, and by junior doctors in a separate dispute over pay.
“It’s really clear to me that it’s not sustainable going forward for the NHS to manage strike action,” she said. “It feels like a really ugly situation to say we are going to have strikes now until Christmas.
“We really desperately need the government to come to the table, alongside the unions coming to the table, to sort this out.”
There are no signs yet of Barclay or Rishi Sunak preparing new offers or overtures to health unions. Cullen said Barclay had replied to a letter from her half an hour before her appearance on the Kuenssberg show, but that it said “very little”.
Speaking on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, the Conservative party chair, Greg Hands, called the rejected offer to nurses “full and final” but dodged questions on what action might follow.
He said: “We are waiting for the other results to come in from the other unions. It’s only reasonable for us during the middle of the balloting process to wait to see those further results and we’ll be laying out a response.”
After RCN members voted by 54% to 46% to reject the government’s offer of a 5% pay rise this year and a cash payment for last year, the union announced a new 48-hour strike starting on 30 April.
RCN members would then be balloted on further strikes, Cullen said: “And if that ballot is successful, it will mean further strike action, right up until Christmas.”
Cullen defended the plan to escalate the type of action, meaning areas such as accident and emergency and cancer care would not be excluded from new strikes.
Asked why this was happening, she said: “Because this government has not listened. That’s that, frankly, the answer to that.
“This government can’t say, on the one hand we value nurses so much that they shouldn’t go on strike, and then we don’t value the value them enough to pay them. That’s why we’re in the crisis we’re in.”
Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the membership body for the health service across the UK, said the possibility of combined industrial action would see the NHS enter “uncharted territory”.
“The people that I represent will have to spend a great deal of time doing the detailed planning, the detailed negotiation with trade unions locally to try to ensure that we protect life and limb,” he told the Ridge show.
In an article for the Sun on Sunday, Barclay praised members of Unison, another union representing NHS staff, for accepting the pay offer, and warned that more strikes could harm patient safety.
Labour’s Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, castigated Barclay for writing in the Sun on Sunday rather than engaging with unions, telling the Ridge show: “There’s no point writing to a newspaper like an agony aunt. You’re the health secretary, show some leadership.”
But he also urged the RCN to not escalate its method of striking: “I think one of the reasons why the RCN has enjoyed widespread public support is that in previous rounds of industrial action they have gone out of their way to say, we’re going to protect emergency care, we’re going to protect cancer care. And I’m deeply worried about the escalation of the nature of their dispute.”
