While justifying the government’s refusal to negotiate with NHS unions over pay, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, has ducked and dived to such an extent that it is little wonder there is “no trust left”, as Christina McAnea, the Unison leader, put it on Monday. Ahead of an unprecedented week of strike action involving both nurses and ambulance workers, Mr Barclay and the government continue to hide behind the fiction that the recommendation of the independent NHS pay review body – which suggested a pay increase of around 4% for nurses – must be the last word on the matter. “Ultimately, independent bodies are there for a reason,” suggested the health secretary last week. “To take the politics out of this kind of stuff.”
As Mr Barclay will know, this is disingenuous nonsense. “Politics” – specifically the politics of austerity – led the current chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to reject a pay rise recommendation from the review body in 2014 as “unaffordable”. Between 2010 and 2017, nurses’ average earnings fell by 1.2% a year in real terms. This was not down to supposedly apolitical deliberations by the review board; it was a result of a seven-year, government-imposed public sector pay freeze.
