A new NHS pay deal hammered out by ministers and health unions could provide a template for resolving England’s wave of public sector strikes, according to government officials.
The settlement on Thursday with unions representing nurses, ambulance staff and other health service staff was followed on Friday by a resumption of “intensive talks” on pay and conditions between ministers and the four main teaching unions.
Negotiations had been on ice since February after the National Education Union, the largest union, refused a request by education secretary Gillian Keegan to halt walkouts. But with no further stoppages scheduled, the NEU said it would “create a period of calm” over the next two weeks to engage with government.
The offer to NHS staff consists of a one-off payment worth 2 per cent of wages in 2022-23, an additional bonus of at least £1,250 and a minimum 5 per cent pay rise in 2023-24. Downing Street said the ongoing cost of the deal would be £1.3bn a year, in addition to a one-off £2.7bn cost this year.
Officials hope that similar offers, if presented to other parts of the public sector, will be enough to end the walkouts by hundreds of thousands of workers since last summer, sparked by soaring inflation. The 1.7mn working days lost to strikes in the final quarter of 2022 was the highest since the 1980s.
One government insider said: “We now have a precedent with the health workers, which should enable us to make progress with other disputes. But it’s worth remembering that each negotiation is unique with different factors so we won’t see precisely the same deals everywhere.”
The British Medical Association on Friday said it would suspend strikes and begin talks next week with ministers over pay for junior doctors, after they held a 72-hour walkout only this week. Doctors do not fall under the NHS staff pay deal, although ministers have said an equivalent offer is available to them. One person close to discussions said the first meeting would probably be “talks about talks”.
Matthew Taylor, head of the NHS Confederation, which represents health groups, said the junior doctors’ stoppage had been “more disruptive than all the other strikes combined”, citing official data showing that 175,000 appointments and procedures had been cancelled. Other stoppages since mid-December have cancelled 142,000. The BMA said it was keen “to avoid further disruption to patient care”.
The health service is expected to find funds to cover the new pay deal from existing budgets. The government has accounted only for an initial 3.5 per cent pay increase for the public sector in 2023-24.
But the NHS is feeling the pinch from the pay award previously agreed for this year, a rise of 4.1 per cent. Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said that even before the latest pay negotiation, NHS England had asked for an additional £600mn extra this year — and was still expected to overspend.
Were the 5 per cent offer to become the new standard, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, estimates that departments would have to find an extra £210mn for teachers, £200mn for consultant doctors and £90mn for junior medics each year.
Three of the unions involved in Thursday’s deal — Unison, GMB and the Royal College of Nursing — have recommended that their members accept the offer, although Unite has asked its members to vote without offering a recommendation. Voting will conclude by the end of April.
Meanwhile, the RMT transport union has paused strikes involving employees at Network Rail, which manages Britain’s rail infrastructure, while its members consider a “new and improved” pay offer.
According to the union, the offer amounts to an uplift on salaries of between 14.4 per cent for the lowest-paid staff and 9.2 per cent for the highest paid over two years.
Walkouts by the RMT on March 18 and 30 and April 1 are set to go ahead, however, as it remains in dispute with train-operating companies.
Other industrial disputes also continue to escalate, with the Public and Commercial Services union on Friday saying its members at the Passport Office would strike for five weeks from April 3.
Outside the public sector, the Universities and Colleges Union said it would continue stoppages at universities across the country. Security guards at Heathrow Terminal 5 affiliated with Unite also voted for 10 days of walkouts from March 31, threatening “severe delays and disruption” over Easter.
Additional reporting by Bethan Staton and Oliver Telling
