It’s no surprise nurses want a bigger pay rise

Just as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves was talking in her conference speech about the importance of resolving public sector strikes, the Royal College of Nursing announced that its members had rejected their pay deal. Nurses have voted two thirds against the 5.5 per cent pay rise, and the College published a letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting warning that ‘this outcome shows their expectations of government are far higher’.

The timing was no accident. It was almost at the very same moment that Reeves was arguing that the government needed to make pay offers to stop the strikes so that public services could run properly again. The RCN’s ballot underlines that the nurses took a different message from the pay deals: they could, if they held out, get more. This was the warning to ministers when they made the big offers to junior doctors and train drivers: settle this way, and other public sector workers will think the way to get higher pay is to have a protracted run of strikes.