Nurses planning new wave of strikes as RCN votes against pay offer, sources say – UK politics live

The promise to cut hospital waiting times, which could be in jeopardy if nurses go on strike again (see 9.05am), was one of four pledges made by Rishi Sunak in January that seemed easy to meet, because they were likely to happen anyway. The final pledge, stopping small boats, was in a wholly different category because, taken literally, there seems to be no chance of it being fully met by the time of the next election.

Yesterday Sunak refused to guarantee that the small boat Channel crossings would stop by the time of the next election. The public may well share his analysis. New polling published by More in Common, a thinktank, shows that more than half of voters do not think that the government’s Rwanda policy will work. (The Rwanda policy is only part of the government’s plan for dealing with small boats, but it is a central part of the strategy.)

Explaining the findings in an article for the Times’s Red Box, Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, writes.

That desire for control drives public support for the Rwanda policy with 46 per cent backing the government’s plans, 27 per cent opposing and the rest saying they don’t know. But this is where a simplistic picture of support for the policy ends.

For starters, despite the public being more likely than not to support the policy, in no public poll has support reached a majority. Further, when asked whether they think the policy will work to deter crossings the public is far more likely to say that it won’t (51 per cent) than will (34 per cent). This poses a risk to the Conservatives of raising the salience of a problem that the public doesn’t think they will fix — potentially driving their voters to populist parties such as Reform UK.

Tryl has also written about the poll findings in a Twitter thread starting here.

When Sunak announced his five pledges, he refused to say whether the promise meant that all small boat crossings would stop by the time of the next election, or just that numbers would go down. “Ultimately the country will judge,” he said. But other cabinet ministers were less equivocal. Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister, said the government wanted to stop all small boat crossings by the time of the next election. Suella Braverman said, if the government did not stop all small boat crossings by the time of the next election, the Tories would lose.

One theory is that No 10 is treating this not as a transactional pledge (one that voters expect to be met) but as an aspirational one (where the government will get credit for trying, even if it fails). Donald Trump never did build the wall between the US and Mexico (apart from a small section), but his supporters did not seem to mind.

Another theory is that the pledge is just a staging post in a process that will result in the Tories going into the next election proposing to leave the European convention on human rights. This is what Paul Goodman, the ConservativeHome editor who interviewed Sunak, suggests in his assessment of the interview.

[Sunak] has one glaring vulnerability. He has promised to Stop the Boats. I asked him yesterday if he will have done so by the time of the next election. He wouldn’t confirm it. And if he doesn’t deliver on all of his five pledges – or at the very least be straining ever sinew to do so – he will be seen as a house of cards, and will duly collapse like one.

He said yesterday that the government will “robustly challenge” any adverse, interim ruling on its Rwanda scheme from the ECHR. But what would that mean were the unelected state – bits of the civil service, ministers’ legal advisers, parts of border force – to down tools, dig in and declare that they weren’t prepared to defy the court?

The prime minister knows that there appears to be no Commons majority for quitting the ECHR altogether. Perhaps he has some scheme up his sleeve. But I can’t help wondering if he is moving towards – or rather being propelled towards by the force of events – a manifesto commitment to leave?

Nurses in England are preparing to go on strike until Christmas after members of the country’s biggest nursing union voted against the government’s pay deal, the Guardian has learned.

The Royal College of Nursing will announce that members have rejected the government’s offer and will at the same time announce a new ballot for more aggressive strikes likely to last for the next six months.

The decision is a blow for both ministers and union bosses, who came to an agreement after months of strikes culminating in three weeks of intensive negotiations.

Rishi Sunak had hoped that a settlement with nurses would help bring an end to this winter’s wave of industrial action, but instead the prime minister now faces the possibility of another NHS crisis later this year.

An RCN spokesperson said:

The vote has closed and the figures are being verified. There is no result until that point. We will make an announcement later today and tell our members first.

Hundreds of workers at online giant Amazon will launch a strike this weekend in a long-running dispute over pay, PA Media reports. PA says:

Members of the GMB union at the company’s Coventry fulfilment centre will walk out on Sunday for three days.

Further strikes are planned from April 21 to 23.

Amanda Gearing, GMB senior organiser, said: “GMB members are worth more; they will not accept a pay rise of pennies from one of the world’s wealthiest corporations. With strike action in Coventry escalating and ballots under way in five further Amazon depots, this could fast become a summer of strike chaos at Amazon.”

Amazon said the minimum starting pay for its employees has increased to between £11 and £12 an hour, depending on location.

A statement said: “Over the past seven months, our minimum starting pay has risen by 10%, and by more than 37% since 2018. We also work hard to provide great benefits, a positive work environment and excellent career opportunities.”

Polling stations in England will have extra staff to help voters on 4 May as the government introduces its new rules on photographic ID, the Electoral Commission has said. Jamie Grierson has the story.

Leaders of the RMT rail union are considering an “updated” offer from train companies aimed at resolving the long-running dispute over jobs, pay and conditions, PA Media reports. PA says:

The move by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) follows weeks of talks in a bid to break the deadlock.

The RMT has held a series of strikes stretching back to last summer which caused travel disruption for passengers across the country.

An RMT spokesperson said: “We have received an updated offer from the RDG and our NEC (national executive committee) is considering its contents. No decision on any next steps has been taken.”

A spokesperson for the Rail Delivery Group said: “Following further constructive joint discussions with the RMT leadership, we have put forward a fair revised offer which makes important clarifications and reassurances, in particular around job terms and conditions for our employees.

“Our ambition remains to secure long-term, rewarding careers for our people, a better service for passengers and a railway that takes no more than its fair share from the taxpayer.

“Our hope is that the RMT executive will put this proposal to its full train operating company membership and allow them a say on the deal, so we can end this dispute and work together to deliver a strong future for Britain’s railway and all those who work on it.”

A reader has asked me this through the “send us a message” feature.

If RCN reject and other union vote to accept the deal, will the deal be imposed on nurses as majority voted for?

At this stage we don’t know. Just going ahead and imposing the pay deal anyway would be one option – probably the easiest, and most obvious, for ministers – but, as Dan Bloom points out in his London Playbook briefing for Politico, partly it depends on what other unions on the NHS Staff Council (the body that deals with pay for nurses and other NHS workers covered by the Agenda for Change system) decide. Bloom explains:

Playbook tried to answer the question of what happens if one big union, such as the RCN, rejects the pay deal while others accept it. There were differences of opinion among union officials we spoke to, but a meeting on May 2 is key.

Showdown: The NHS Staff Council — including all six unions with strike mandates — is due to meet two days before the local elections to decide on the pay offer. A senior official with knowledge of the process tells Playbook each member of the council gets a weighted vote corresponding to the size of their membership. After weighting, an official says the deal would only need a simple majority to pass — meaning it could in theory be introduced even if not everyone is in favor.

In his analysis for the Times, Chris Smyth says, although it is unclear what will happen next, ministers are not expected to reopen pay negotiations. He says:

The problem for union leaders was the Treasury’s insistence that pay rises of more than 5 per cent would fuel inflation. This meant that more of the offer had to come in the form of a one-off bonus, which many staff see as “insulting”. That is likely to have contributed to a no vote.

What happens now is uncertain, particularly if some unions reject it while others accept. Ministers could drop the bonus and revert to their original plans for a 3.5 per cent rise, or ask the pay review body to make a recommendation, although that is likely to be similar or even higher than the 5 per cent on the table.

Ministers could decide to pay out anyway and hope that extra cash in pay packets weakens the resolve to strike. What they will not want to do is reopen talks. That would send a signal to the rest of the public sector that it is always worth holding out for more.

Ireland’s deputy PM says former DUP leader Arlene Foster wrong to say Biden hates UK

Lisa O’Carroll

Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Micheál Martin, has criticised remarks by the former DUP leader and former Northern Ireland first minister Arlene Foster, who said Joe Biden “hates” the UK.

He said she was “wrong”, declaring that her remarks about the US president were “misplaced” as he doesn’t “hate” anyone. He told RTÉ’s This Morning show:

I’m very surprised by that comment.

The one word that you do not associate with Joe Biden is the word hate. He’s the antithesis of that. He’s the opposite of that. He always speaks about the dignity of every human person. He’s more love than hate by a country mile.

Biden has spoken about the importance of treating everyone with dignity in each of the three speeches he has already given on his four-day trip to the island of Ireland.

Martin said:

I think that was a wrong comment by Arlene. In fact, he often references his British heritage as well, in terms of his uncle who had been involved in the British navy, and I think he gave a personal anecdote about that. So I think that was misplaced. He’s not that type of person.

In his LBC interview this morning Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts and other NHS bodies, said that, if RCN members do reject the government’s pay offer, both sides should resume talks immediately. He said:

If the RCN ballot today is to reject, we can only say to both sides, look you are not far apart please get down to talks and move ahead with it.

In the interview Taylor said that further strikes by nurses could make it “almost impossible” for the government to meet its promise to cut waiting times. (See 9.05am.) He said figures published yesterday were “really impressive” and showed the government has been making good progress.

Reducing the number of people waiting 18 months to only 30,000; reducing the number of people waiting a year; more diagnostic tests than every before; responding to those diagnostic tests in terms of cancer particularly on target. So the NHS can make progress, is making progress, pushing into the backlog, but these strikes make that very, very difficult.

But Taylor also said the strike by junior doctors was not helping. He explained:

We have coped reasonably well [while junior doctors have been on strike this week] in terms of being able to meet emergency critical care. The problem is that in order to do that we have had to put on hold a huge proportion of the outpatients work and the elective work we do.

For example, yesterday I was on a surgical ward, that ward would normally have many junior doctors on it, it now had consultants on it. The consultants were coping fine.

As they are doing that work their outpatients list is not being attended to, the list of people waiting for operations is growing. The backlog will have increased.

When Rishi Sunak announced his five pledges in January, one of them said: “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.” Responding to questions from journalists on the day the pledges were announced, Sunak said he wanted to get rid of waits lasting more than a year and a half by April this year, and to eliminate waits lasting more than a year, and to have the overall waiting list going down, by spring next year.

The figures out yesterday showed the overall waiting list still going up, but 18-month waits down to 30,000 in February, a 35% fall on the previous month.

Good morning. Yesterday, when ConservativeHome was interviewing Rishi Sunak, they started with a video that they described as presenting Sunak’s own account of what he has achieved since he became prime minister. One of the successes it mentioned was agreeing a pay deal for NHS workers, and it quoted Sunak as saying, about a month ago, he was “delighted to say that the government has reached an agreement with unions representing over a million NHS workers, on a fair and reasonable basis”.

Sunak may have been speaking too soon. The unions involved have been balloting their members on the deal and the Royal College of Nursing, probably the most important union in this negotiation, is announcing the result of the ballot today.

Although the union recommended that members should accept the pay deal, there is speculation that they will vote against. In our story Kiran Stacey reports:

Sources close to the union said the vote is so close that it has been forced to make contingency plans for a no vote. Those plans would mean the NHS in England would be hit by another wave of nursing strikes, starting within weeks and going on for what union officials say would be a prolonged period of time.

Such a result could leave patients having to deal with strikes by nurses and junior doctors at the same time, leading to more delayed treatments and missed appointments. It would also deal a heavy blow to the government, which had hoped a deal with nurses would pave the way for a series of settlements and bring an end to the winter’s wave of industrial action.

The Times has had a similar briefing. In their story Chris Smyth and Meheeran Khan write:

NHS bosses are particularly concerned about the RCN, whose members are expected to vote against by a “narrow” margin, with some predicting a 55-45 split. Unison members, who include ambulance workers and other frontline staff, are considered more likely to accept.

Three sources with knowledge of the process said it was becoming increasingly apparent that RCN members were likely to vote against the deal. Although voting will continue until 9am tomorrow, one NHS source said: “It’s not looking good”.

Unison, which represents ambulance staff and other NHS workers, is also announcing the result of its ballot today. It also recommended that members accept the deal on offer. The GMB and Unite are also balloting their members, but those results are due later this month.

Yesterday Sunak signalled that one of the five pledges he made in January, stopping small boats, might not be achieved by the time of the general election. A second pledge was cutting waiting lists, and this morning Matthew Taylor, the head of the NHS Confederation (which represents NHS organisations) said further strikes, which may follow if RCN members vote against the pay deal, would put this pledge in jeopardy. He told LBC:

Another set of strikes would mean that it would become very very difficult, perhaps almost impossible, for the health service, hospitals, to meet targets that they set this year for reducing waiting lists.

There is not much other politics in the diary today, and so we are likely to be focusing on this story.

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