Nurses will not get higher pay offer, says UK health secretary, as strikes loom

Read More

Th?r?se Coffey, the UK health secretary, has said nurses will not get a higher pay offer as they vote on strike action for the first time in decades.

The Royal College of Nursing will ballot nurses this week, asking for a higher pay award as well as action to tackle pressures caused by surging vacancies.

The RCN says the government’s offer of a 3% wage rise “makes a difference to a nurse’s wage of 72p a week”.

Speaking on Sky News, Coffey said there was limited scope for negotiation: “We’ve honoured the independent pay review body’s recommendations on this. That was higher than many of the other pay rises that other public-sector workers are getting. Dare I say it, having respect of the independent pay review body, I’m not anticipating that we’ll be making any further changes.”

Coffey appeared to suggested she was sanguine about strike action. “That’s a decision for nurses who decide how to vote in this next coming month.”

On the day MPs returned to Westminster, Coffey denied that Kwasi Kwarteng had brought his medium-term fiscal plan forward as a fresh attempt to calm the markets on Monday. “I think he decided we’re in a good state and we’ll continue to discuss this across government and with parliament over the few weeks ahead,” she told Sky News.

MPs will meet on Tuesday morning for the first time since Kwarteng’s ill-received mini-Budget, which has seen ministers and the Bank of England struggle to contain market turmoil. Liz Truss will chair the cabinet, where several ministers are also expected to oppose any attempt to link the benefits increase to wages, rather than inflation, which would mean a real-terms cut.

Kwarteng will also appear in front of MPs at Treasury questions, the first opportunity for many to question the chancellor since the mini-Budget and the government’s subsequent U-turn on abolishing the 45p rate of tax for the wealthiest.

On Monday, the chancellor said he would bring forward a new fiscal plan with details of how to fund the tax cuts announced in the mini-budget. Overnight, new analysis from the IFS found Kwarteng would need to find ?60bn of savings by 2026 to fill the gap from unfunded tax cuts and the costs of extra borrowing caused by a panicked reaction on international money markets.

The IFS also said the UK would struggle to hit the chancellor’s 2.5% growth target, using economic forecasts that predicted the UK would struggle to grow at more than 0.8% on average over the next five years. The IFS director, Paul Johnson, said that while it was “technically possible” for Kwarteng to balance the books via spending cuts, public sector spending had already suffered a huge hit over the last decade and that there was “not much fat left to cut”.

Despite the change in the date for the next financial statement and the appointment of the Treasury veteran James Bowler as the department’s permanent secretary – all attempts to calm the market turmoil – the Bank of England announced on Tuesday it was expanding its emergency bond buying operation.

The move is the Bank’s second, a fresh attempt to calm the markets and protect pension funds. The Bank said it was acting because there had been a “further significant repricing of UK government debt, particularly index-linked gilts”, which could threaten the UK’s financial stability.