The 17.6% pay rise understood to be being demanded by nurses who voted in favor of strike action has been described as “remarkably high” by a Cabinet minister, who said the planned action this winter ” would completely disrupt’ the NHS.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, said it was “difficult to judge” whether nurses were currently paid enough and that, while it was not his “area of expertise”, he believed their job was “a vocation”. He said nurses had a starting salary of £27,000 rising to an average of £30,000 and asked: “Is that enough? Who can put a value on such care?”
The rejection comes after nurses voted to strike across the UK for the first time in their history in pursuit of a better pay deal.
The government says the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is calling for a 17.6% pay rise, which, if applied to all NHS staff except doctors and dentists, would cost £9bn.
The RCN believes current NHS services are “not safe” and has accused ministers of failing to address their concerns.
Heaton-Harris said it was “worrying and very, very sad” that nurses were being forced to use food banks and were reportedly eating leftover food from patients’ plates.
He told Sky News that public sector finances were “not in the best shape”, but added: “Everything the government is doing on public sector pay as a whole, which is the only pay sector in which we can influence, it targets the lowest. paid and the most vulnerable in society. So we understand that we have to help people a little more.”
Asked if a 17% pay rise was appropriate, Heaton-Harris told Times Radio it was “remarkably high”.
He said the NHS pay review body had given 1 million NHS workers a pay rise of at least £1,400 this year, equivalent to 4.5% for most nurses. He added: “I want people in the public service to be properly rewarded, everyone else too. But there’s also a much wider economic context.”
She brushed off questions about whether nurses should be paid as much as politicians. Heaton-Harris earns £84,144 as an MP and as a senior minister boosts his salary by an extra £67,505. “There are people who wouldn’t want to pay politicians anything,” he noted, before adding that it was an “unfair question.”
The nurses’ strike “completely disrupts a huge number of public services that are very, very important to the whole nation,” Heaton-Harris said.
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He said that dialogue was “always the best way” and that he had often found it useful to discuss issues with the unions when he was previously railways minister.
However, the RCN said on Thursday that current NHS services were “not safe”.
Patricia Marquis, the union’s director for England, told BBC Breakfast that ministers “didn’t listen” to what nursing staff have said. He said there were some services that would need to continue during the strike action to keep patients safe “and we will agree with the employers what those are and what staff should be working”.
He added that employers across most of the UK needed 14 days’ notice of strike action, adding: “What I can say is that we intend to take action before the end of this year “.