First Minister Mark Drakeford has said the Welsh Government cannot afford to part with the money being requested of them by nurses in Wales. Nurses across Wales - as well as in England and Northern Ireland - have been on strike over pay and conditions on Thursday with another walkout planned for Tuesday.
An offer of between 4% and 5.5% is currently on the table, while nurses are asking for a 19% increase - around 8% above the latest inflation figure. Scotland has so far avoided nurses’ strike action with a better pay offer of 7.5% for NHS staff there.
In an interview with BBC Wales on Sunday, the First Minister told the programme that his government’s hands were tied because he can’t “grow the envelope” of money afforded to him in Westminster. He also suggested that nurses do not reasonably expect to get the offer the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is proposing.
Read more: Nurse assaulted by patient joins strike picket line to protect colleagues
“Any trade union enters into negotiations and puts a proposition on the table, and as you heard the RCN say only a week ago, they want talks with Stephen Barclay (Secretary of State for Health and Social Care) about whether the gap between what has been offered and what they would wish to see - whether that can be bridged,” Mr Drakeford said. “I don’t suppose any trade union expects to get absolutely everything.
“We don’t have the money to be able to increase our pay offer while the UK Government refuses to put more money into the pay bill in England. That’s the way the system works.” The majority of the Welsh Government’s budget comes from the UK Treasury. The First Minister made reference to the Barnett Formula - the system used by the UK Treasury to adjust public spending allocated to devolved nations.
“What we are accountable for is making decisions within the envelope we have left,” Mr Drakeford continued. “I can’t grow the envelope, but I do have to make decisions within it. We could have raised taxes, but we chose not to do so. We could have taken £120 million out of the money available to run the health service and have paid nurses that money instead. That would have meant fewer treatments, fewer nurses, and less money for the health service itself.”
Nurses say pay is just one part of why they are striking. This week WalesOnline spoke to Kate Stevens - a 24-year-old nurse who said she "burst out crying" because she was "so burnt out" at work. She said she had become stressed because her ward is so understaffed "almost everyday". You can read more on what Kate and her colleagues had to say here.
After the Welsh Government said the military will not be asked to drive ambulances in the event of further strikes among paramedics, Labour MP for Aberavon Stephen Kinnock told Sky News that he disagreed with that stance, and that he thought there was no other option.
The UK Government has already announced plans to cover for striking ambulance workers over the festive period in England with the deployment of the military. It said 1,200 members of the military would be deployed to pull the service through the strike action, alongside 1,000 civil servants.
Mr Kinnock was asked on Sunday morning: “On the issue of the army being brought in in the interim period, do you support them being brought in to cover emergency services?” Mr Kinnock responded: “Well we’re left with no choice, and so yes, we do support that.”
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