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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