When will the Tories admit defeat on nurses pay?

Another day, another strike. Nurses are walking out today and tomorrow, with the Royal College of Nursing vowing to ‘keep going’ with industrial action until ministers compromise on pay demands. Ambulance workers will also announce further strike dates today. 

Strikes have become part of the wallpaper in Britain recently, but what is troubling for ministers is that the state of the health service more widely is causing more angst than health workers joining picket lines. Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay is still engaging with them on the basis that their pay demands are ‘unaffordable’ and would require cuts elsewhere in the health service. This is because any pay increases will have to be met out of the Department for Health and Social Care’s existing budget.

Barclay has reportedly been in a stand-off with the Treasury over this, with some claiming he has accepted that nurses should be paid more. I am told this has been overplayed, though. His emphasis in public has also been on the need to find ‘efficiencies’ in the health service: not telling staff to work harder but looking for ways of lessening administrative burdens. 

That’s all very well and good, but a reasonable retort from healthcare workers and indeed patients might be that the government has spent thirteen years shirking its responsibilities on efficiencies related to social care reform (or the glaring lack of). 

Barclay and colleagues are acutely aware that they aren’t winning in this war of attrition, and that it will have to go on a good while longer before the public starts to blame the nurses and not ministers. The current Ipsos polling shows nearly 60 per cent of voters say the government has caused the nursing strikes to go on for so long, with 25 per cent blaming both sides and 10 per cent focusing on the nurses.

Even when the dispute is over, it will have raised the salience of the problems in the health service still more. So the question is when will ministers buckle on pay, not just for their own political benefit but for the morale of the workers propping the edifice up?