The health secretary has accused nurses poised to strike for higher pay of seeking to grab money badly needed for millions of people who are waiting for NHS surgery.
Steve Barclay stuck to his refusal to enter talks about pay – insisting that is a matter for the “independent” review body – despite the health unions’ offer to suspend the strikes if he agreed to do so.
Instead, he claimed conceding higher pay would force him to divert funds earmarked for bringing down the record post-Covid treatment backlog, which stands at more than 7 million people.
“We’d have to take money away from patients waiting for operations to then fund additional pay,” Mr Barclay told BBC Breakfast.
He repeated a disputed claim that handing inflation-proofed rises to all public sector workers would cost £28bn – although the Institute for Fiscal Studies has put the bill at £8.5bn.
Around 750 members of the armed forces will be drafted in to support the NHS, including by driving ambulances, during the strikes, after the Department of Health and Social Care made a formal request
Later on Monday, Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister, will lead the first of two Cobra emergency meetings on the wave of strikes, discussing contingency plans with other ministers.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which is due to pull 100,000 of its members out on strike on Thursday, is prepared to “press pause” if Mr Barclay agreed to talks to thrash out a deal, as happened in Scotland.
Steve Brine, the Conservative chair of the Commons health committee, also urged him to get around the table to satisfy a “bemused” public, saying: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”
Patricia Marquis, the RCN’s England director, said its industrial actions could be avoided if the government made a “serious commitment” to holding talks with the union.
“This has been the position from the beginning and we have taken many goes at getting Steve Barclay and the government to come and meet and talk about the things that we need to talk about,” she told Times Radio.
She called for “a serious commitment to coming to talk about pay and safe staffing and not talking about peripheral issues, which are important, but are not going to solve this dispute”.
But Mr Barclay insisted said 7 million people are waiting for an operation “and it’s important we prioritise our funding to patients to clear those operation backlogs”.
“We do have an independent pay review body and it’s important both sides respect that independent body, it includes trade union representation on it,” he said.
“We’ve honoured the independent pay review body and that’s additional to last year, when the rest of the public sector had a pay freeze, prioritising the NHS with the extra 3 per cent. We have an independent body for a reason.”
