Nurses have voted to reject the Government’s pay rise offer of 5.5%. The Telegraph has more.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) announced the results of a vote on pay as Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, addressed the Labour Party conference on Monday.
The RCN said two-thirds of its members voted against the pay award for 2024-25 in a record high turnout of 145,000.
Nurses will still get the uplift next month, which will be backdated to April, and the union would have to reballot its members to take any form of industrial action.
The RCN has been in a pay dispute with the Government since 2022, but did not pass the threshold required to continue striking in a second ballot after staging walkouts throughout the winter of 2022-23.
It also rejected the pay increase given to all NHS staff last year, and was the only health service union to vote against the uplift this time around, almost two months after it was first announced.
The RCN said the number voting in its consultation on the pay award was higher than its 2022 and 2023 ballots on industrial action.
Worth reading in full.
In the Spectator, Isabel Hardman says it’s no surprise nurses are coming back for more after the Government hosed cash at doctors and train drivers. The announcement came “almost at the very same moment that Reeves was arguing that the Government needed to make pay offers to stop the strikes so that public services could run properly again. The RCN’s ballot underlines that the nurses took a different message from the pay deals: they could, if they held out, get more”.
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I remember the last period of ‘pay restraint’ many years ago. It broke down for many reasons including unions of similar trades and professions trying to ‘maintain their differentials’, a matter of status rather than money.
Well I think this is a bit cheeky. I’d be well miffed if I was waiting to go in and see the doctor for a scheduled appointment but somebody got to jump the queue just because they don’t speak adequate English and where interpreters are concerned, time is money. I wonder how widespread this is;
”English-speaking patients are being pushed to the back of the queue in waiting rooms at NHS hospitals in favour of patients who need an interpreter, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Imperial College Healthcare, an NHS Trust with five hospitals across north-west London, prioritises patients who have been assigned an interpreter.
The trust’s aim is to avoid additional charges from the interpreting service.
It is unclear whether NHS trusts nationwide take this approach, but last night it sparked a row, with Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick claiming the approach lets down British NHS patients.
The former immigration minister told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Brits are already waiting too long for treatment. The last thing they should be subjected to is the indignity of being pushed to the back of the queue.
‘This is yet more evidence of the pressure mass migration places on our public services and the difficulties integrating such unprecedented numbers.
‘Non-English speakers shouldn’t be given a queue pass.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13877611/English-speaking-NHS-Hospital-translator.html
As you’ve had 27 small boats arrive in the last week I can’t see this interpreter/queue-jumping lark going away any time soon. How many of these people do you think speak decent English?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/5cede69b-a408-47eb-8933-31fb2813ab77
If you want to look at objectively then I would think tha the best metric would be the number of nurses who have left the UK in order to find better renumerated employment abroad. After all if you live in a craphole country and you are being offered better money abroad as well as greatly enhanced quality of life then why one earth would you stay? Nursing is equally valuable in every country in terms of the benefit it provides. People rightly ask, why do I earn less than my Australian counterpart. The best people are being drained out of this country and the consequences are disastrous.
Well, of course they would. I suspect that they would have been quite happy with 5.5% – and then they saw this appalling Government caving in to much larger demands (with no strings attached) and thought – why not?
If our (new) Beloved Leaders had possessed IQ scores greater than their hat sizes, they would have offered 5% more in cash and the other 0.5% in cream donuts.
Offer accepted straight away!