Unions representing hundreds of thousands of health workers are to meet the health secretary for talks aimed at averting the wave of strikes set to hit the NHS in coming weeks.
Steve Barclay on Monday invited six unions to the “round table” at 10 o’clock the following day at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), near the Houses of Parliament in central London, “to discuss workforce issues”.
The invited unions are the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) and the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), as well as Unite, Unison and the GMB.
It will be Barclay’s first meeting as a group with the main unions planning to stage strikes across the UK this winter unless ministers give NHS staff a pay rise at least equalling inflation, which is currently at 10.1%. However, he did meet the RCN last Thursday after its ballot result the day before, which came out in favour of nurses going on strike at most hospitals and other places of care, from before Christmas.
Tuesday’s get-together is unlikely to pave the way to a deal, given the gulf between the government and unions over how big an uplift NHS staff deserve. Barclay has offered about 1 million NHS staff at least £1,400 a head for 2022-23, which equates to a rise of 4% to 5%.
Speaking before the meeting, the GMB national secretary, Rachel Harrison, said: “The secretary of state has to make this more than a box-ticking exercise if he wants to avoid an unprecedented winter of NHS strikes.
“The failure to pay staff properly means that the NHS cannot recruit and retain the staff it needs, putting the safety of patients at risk every day. Without urgent action the very future of our health service is on the line.”
At the weekend Barclay dismissed the RCN’s demand that nurses get an increase that is 5% above inflation as “neither reasonable nor affordable”.
“Huge settlements like these would turbocharge inflation when we are endeavouring to keep it under control,” he said.
One union official said of Tuesday’s talks: “We’re not hugely hopeful. I suspect it’s the optics of reaching out and not ignoring the unions. But I suspect there’ll be little substance.”
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GMB members who work in the Scottish ambulance service will be the first to go on strike in what could be a prolonged campaign of UK-wide industrial action, potentially lasting months, by NHS unions.
They plan to stage a 26-hour strike between 6am on 28 November and 7.59am the next day, after 89% of GMB members in that service who took part in a ballot backed industrial action.
Up to 3 million operations in England alone may have to be delayed because of the impact of strikes on hospitals, a former DHSC special adviser has estimated.