Thursday’s pay offer marks a significant victory for the thousands of NHS workers in England who have been on the picket lines in the past three months – and a major climbdown for Rishi Sunak’s government.
Until just a few weeks ago, the government appeared determined to hunker down and stick to the script that this year’s pay deal could not possibly be revisited, and that finding extra cash for health workers would jeopardise the fight against soaring inflation.
Yet the end result of negotiations is a sizeable one-off payment for the current year worth up to 8.2% for the lowest-paid workers and what appears likely to be an above-inflation pay rise of 5% for 2023-24.
Union members will make the final decision about whether the deal is acceptable, and it certainly falls well short of the inflation-busting numbers some had hoped for.
The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, pointed out that in real terms it still leaves NHS staff below where they were in 2021-22. But it is also considerably more than the government wanted to give.
Significant questions remain about how the offer will be funded, but Sunak ultimately appears to have taken the decision that – like the debilitating tensions with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol – the NHS strikes were a problem worth expending political energy, and in this case, cold hard cash, to resolve.
Ministers took a much more combative tone early in the dispute, suggesting striking health workers were irresponsible. The business secretary, Grant Shapps, at one point appeared to accuse ambulance staff of putting patients’ lives at risk.
Yet every time NHS workers went out on strike, public attention was once again drawn to the dire state of the health service, and the burnt-out nurses and ambulance workers interviewed outside hospitals were hard to caricature as greedy or politically motivated.
Ultimately, Sunak appears to have decided there was little to be gained in continuing to take a tough line in the hope that either public support would drain away, or NHS staff would lose heart.
The prime minister has form on belatedly caving in to political pressure long after the writing was on the wall.
Last spring, he delivered a financial statement widely regarded as inadequate to tackle the looming cost of living crisis. A few weeks later, he was back in the House of Commons to have another go.
During the Covid pandemic, he repeatedly signalled the end of the costly furlough scheme before being pressured into extending it rather than risk hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Unions involved in the NHS strikes say the health secretary, Steve Barclay, grasped way back in January that the government’s line of refusing to reopen this year’s pay deal was never going to hold. But at that point he was unable to secure Downing Street’s signoff.
Many thousands of union members elsewhere in the public sector will now be asking themselves whether they, too, can secure concessions from a government that appears to want to draw a line under a miserable winter of industrial strife.
There may be some clue as to how ready ministers are to compromise in the fact that the one-off payments for this year won by the health unions are split into two – a 2% bonus, and an additional “Covid recovery payment” worth about twice as much.
The government may be hoping that by tying this larger bonus to the horrors endured by many NHS workers during the pandemic, they can argue that other hard-pressed public sector staff, whether teachers or Border Force staff, don’t deserve the same generosity.
Ministers are also likely to be banking on the fact that many of those still out on strike have considerably less public support than nurses. But after watching the way the NHS dispute has played out closely, the other public sector unions are unlikely to want to settle for much less.
