British government defends ‘pitiful’ pay rise for nurses

The British government has found itself scrambling to defend a wage increase for National Health Service (NHS) workers, which critics have described as an “insult.”

NHS staff have been offered a pay rise of 1 percent. According to the opposition, when taking into account an inflation forecast of 1.5 percent, that amounts to a pay cut in real terms.

Mental Health Minister Nadine Dorries on Friday defended the offer, telling Sky News that “no other public sector employee is receiving a pay rise” and that 1 percent was “the most we think we can afford.”

Dorries added that NHS staff had received a “12 percent increase in pay over the last three years,” and as the end of the pandemic was now in sight, the government’s priority has shifted toward “protecting livelihoods and peoples futures, jobs [and] businesses.”

Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer, meanwhile, called on the government to “give our Covid heroes a pay rise” and said that “you can’t rebuild a country by cutting nurses’ pay.”

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the pay increase was “a kick in the teeth.”

Donna Kinnair, professor of the Royal College of Nursing, said pay would increase by just £3.50 a week for an experienced nurse. “It’s fine to clap us, but we need to be able to pay the bills,” she told Sky News on Friday. She described the proposed wage increase as “woefully inadequate and pitiful and truly disappointing.”

Unions were also up in arms. Unison, a health care union, called the pay increase the “worst kind of insult the government could give health workers.” The Unite union criticized the move as a “slap in the face” for British nurses.

The proposed increase has to be approved by the NHS Pay Review Body before taking effect.