Responding to the Health Secretary’s official remit letter to the NHS Pay Review Body, Royal College of Nursing General Secretary and Chief Executive, Pat Cullen, said:
“This letter is extremely late and it confirms the next pay award will be late too. There is no evidence that the government has honoured its commitment to improve how the process works despite a consultation earlier this year. Nursing staff received the lowest pay award in the public sector for 2023/24 - we end the year in formal dispute with ministers and campaigning for a pay rise that addresses the staffing crisis in the NHS.
“Once again, the supposedly independent process has its wings clipped when the health secretary writes about keeping costs down. By suppressing NHS wages, her predecessors have added to the shortage of nursing staff and falling care standards. The new approach must be to invest in nursing professionals as part of a commitment to patient safety. Repeating the mistakes of recent years would raise the prospect of more strike action.
“Two-thirds of the public would back nursing staff taking further industrial action regarding their pay in 2024. Our pay dispute with the government remains unresolved, and the RCN is already consulting our members working in the NHS in England about what they may be prepared to do in the New Year. In an election year, no political party can yet be confident it has the ability to stave off more industrial action by nurses.”
Ends
Notes to editors
Public polling conducted by YouGov on behalf of the RCN released last week showed 66% of those polled support nursing staff going on strike in 2024 because of pay. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+). A breakdown of the polling results is available on the YouGov archive.
Just days before the RCN’s first strike action in England and Wales on 15 December 2022, polling undertaken between 9 – 11 December 2022 of 1,728 adults in Great Britain showed 59% of respondents said they support nurses going on strike.
A report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Health Division in November showed nursing, on average, is a far more highly paid career in most OECD countries, where full-time nurses working in the hospital sector can expect to earn 20% more than the full-time average wage. In the UK, nurses working in hospitals earn approximately 10% less than the full-time national average, which ranks it towards the bottom of the list of 35 other countries.
The latest data from the Nursing and Midwifery Council shows 18,174 nurses in the England left the register between 1 October 2022 and 30 September 2023.
Latest UCAS figures show the number of applicants to nursing courses in England fell by 13.1% in 2023 compared to 2022.
