Unions calls talks ‘bitterly disappointing’ and an ‘insult’ despite health secretary accepting no end to strikes without higher pay – live | Politics

The GMB is the third major union representing ambulance staff, and it has also issued a downbeat assessment of the talks with Steve Barclay, the health secretary. Rachel Harrison, the GMB national secretary, said:

Today’s talks fell well short of anything substantial that could stop this week’s strikes.

There was some engagement on pay – but not a concrete offer that could help resolve this dispute and make significant progress on the recruitment and retention crisis.

The public expects the government to treat these talks seriously – it’s time they got on with it.

The GMB also said more than 10,000 ambulance staff would go ahead with its strike on Wednesday. Unison ambulance workers are also on strike that day.

According to ITV’s Paul Brand, a GMB spokesperson has been even more critical, describing the time set aside for the meeting as “an insult” (a description also used by Unite, although in a slightly different context – see 12.46pm).

The Royal College of Nursing has described its meeting with Steve Barclay, the health secretary, as “bitterly disappointing”. In a statement Joanne Galbraith-Marten, the RCN’s director of employment relations and legal services, said:

There is no resolution to our dispute yet in sight. Today’s meeting was bitterly disappointing – nothing for the current year and repeating that ‘the budget is already set’ for next year.

This intransigence is letting patients down. Ministers have a distance to travel to avert next week’s nurse strike.

Unison’s head of health, Sara Gorton, said that the meeting with Steve Barclay, the health secretary, did not produce any “tangible” concessions and that her union would not be calling off its strike by ambulance staff later this week.

But Gorton was also more positive about the meeting than her Unite opposite number, Onay Kasab. (See 12.46pm.) She said it was a “very civil meeting” and that they were talking about pay, which was “definitely progress”.

She also said that Barclay accepted that health workers would have to be offered more pay as part of the settlement for this year, 2022-23. Until recently ministers were arguing that this year’s pay deal was closed, and that any compromise would have to focus on what was on offer for next year.

Asked if they were talking about pay for the current financial year, she said:

The secretary of state is very, very clear that resolving this dispute means not just talking about pay for the next period but actually pay for the current year. So very clear that resolving the dispute will take boosting pay ahead of 1 April.

Gorton also said that Barclay asked the unions him to help him make the case to the Treasury for health getting more investment. “We’ll certainly do that,” she said.

Asked whether she felt Barclay was on the side of the unions, she replied:

You might interpret that. I mean, it was very clear that what is needed in order to resolve the dispute is investment.

The Treasury is in the position to unblock that, so I guess the message today is to put pressure back on the chancellor and the prime minister to say the dispute is resolvable.

The strike talks at the Department for Transport do not seem to have gone well either. As PA Media reports, Mick Whelan, the general secretary of the train drivers’ union Aslef, held his arms out in a wide shrugging gesture as he left the DfT building in central London, indicating that talks with ministers had not gone well.

When asked by PA whether any progress had been made in the ongoing pay dispute, Whelan said: “I’ve got nothing to say.”

Pressed again about how negotiations had gone by Sky reporters, he added: “I’m not going to make any comment today.”

Whelan was meeting Huw Merriman, the rail minister. At health and education, the unions were meeting the secretary of state (Steve Barclay and Gillian Keegan respectively).

Unite, one of the unions involved in talks with Steve Barclay, the health secretary, has described what was put on the table this morning as an “insult” to members.

Unite is one of several unions that represent ambulance workers, and Onay Kasab, its national lead officer, told reporters that the talks had gone “not well” after he emerged from his meeting with Barclay. He went on:

Unfortunately, the government have missed yet another opportunity to put this right. We came here in good faith. What they want to talk about is productivity.

Our members are working 18-hour shifts. How you become more productive with that I do not know.

Today, unfortunately, despite us showing up in good faith, the government have missed yet another opportunity to put this right and what will happen is that a strike action taking place by Unite members, our ambulance workers … [will be taking place on 23 January].

Asked if Barclay had mentioned the possibility of a one-off payment for health staff for the current financial year, Kasab said the union was told that, to justify a payment like this, workers would have to come up with productivity savings. He went on:

That is absolutely ludicrous. This isn’t a factory we’re talking about.

We are talking about people who are working well beyond their contracted hours anyway just to get the job done, because they can’t hand patients over because they care so much.

So for the government to be talking about productivity in return for a [payment] is an insult to every single one of our members.

You all know what’s going on in hospitals at the moment. You all know how hard everybody is working. So today is an insult to our members.

Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), told journalists that the government had to put “new money on the table” as she arrived at the Department for Education for talks with Gillian Keegan, the education secretary.

Without the offer of new money, the talks would be pointless, Bousted suggested. She said:

She is going to tell us about the government’s evidence about the pay review body – which isn’t actually independent – and then she’s going to listen to our concerns, so this is in no sense a negotiation meeting.

If this meeting is going to have any outcome, then Gillian Keegan has to tell us if there is new money on the table for an increase in the pay offer this year.

Bousted added that the scheduled hour-long meeting is “not sufficient for the problem that we face” and she has “never seen teachers so angry” about “12 years of neglect of state education”.

When asked whether she was hopeful that a resolution can be reached in time to avoid strike action, Bousted said: “Where there’s life there’s hope – let’s hope that the government recognise that after ignoring us for three months – and in fact longer than that – that they really need to speak to us and I hope we can resolve this.”

The NEU is balloting its members on strike action, with the ballot closing on Friday and the results due to be announced a week today. If the strike goes ahead, state schools in England and Wales could close for several days in February and March.

Kevin Courtney, the other joint general secretary of the NEU, said the union was confident that support for the strike vote would be the strongest it had seen.

Rishi Sunak has described transparency about the donations given to MPs as “really important” for democracy. He was speaking in response to a question prompted by a Sky News investigation showing that a mysterious company, with no staff or website, has donated more than £300,000 to three Labour MPs since the general election.

In their Sky report, Sam Coates and Ed Clowes report:

MPM Connect Ltd is the third-biggest donor to MPs since the last general election. The only organisations that have given more to individual politicians in that period are the trade union giants Unite and GMB.

The company has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary says she has never heard of them.

The £345,217 of donations that MPM Connect has made since the end of 2019 went to three Labour politicians.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has received £184,317, former mayor of South Yorkshire Dan Jarvis £100,000 and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting £60,900.

In his pooled TV interview Sunak said “transparency is really important for the healthy functioning of democracy”. Asked if MPs should be receiving six-figure sums, he replied:

And that’s why we have a set of rules and regulations in place to provide that transparency for people. And it’s important that those rules are adhered to.

The Sky report does not suggest that any of the MPs it features have broken rules. But it does imply that the disclosure regulations are not sufficient to ensure that people have a good understanding of who is funding MPs.

Sky has broadcast its revelations to publicise a new database, Westminster Accounts, that it has set up with Tortoise Media to provide information about who funds MPs. It is based on information which is already in the public domain but which can be hard to find. Westminster Accounts is intended to make it much more accessible. There is an explanation of the project here, and you can search the database here.

Last night Steve Barclay, the health secretary, announced that the UK government wiould spend £200m paying for extra beds in care homes and other settings so that hospitals can discharge patients more quickly. This should have an impact on the A&E crisis because the shortage of hospital beds is probably the main reason why so many patients are having to wait hours in ambulances before they can be properly admitted to hospital.

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is giving a press conference in Edinburgh, and she has just announced a broadly similar policy. These are from the BBC’s James Cook.

Rishi Sunak also insisted in his pooled TV interview that the government was focused on “the people’s priorities”. Referring to the promises he announced last week, he

What the government is getting on with is delivering on the people’s priorities. I set out five priorities, five promises I wanted to make to the country – that’s to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, reduce waiting lists, and stop the boats. That’s squarely what everyone in government is focused on.

Sunak also used this shorthand account of his promises on Twitter last week, and in his ConservativeHome article, and that means that is now the settled summary of what he is pledging. It is significant because a promise to legislate with the intention of stopping small boat Channel crossings has become a commitment to “stop the boats”.

While experts believe Sunak can achieve the first four quite easily, very few commentators believe he will “stop the boats”.

(Perhaps he is assuming that the public will view the tests as a GSCE exam, and that four out of five will qualify as a good pass.)

In his pooled broadcast interview Rishi Sunak was asked if he accepted that the talks happening today would not be able to avert the nurses’ strike scheduled for next week. He sidestepped the question, and just said that it was good that the talks were happening.

Earlier Patricia Marquis, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing, said that even though the talks were taking place, it was “unlikely” that they would result in the strike would be called off. (See 10.19am.)

BBC News is broadcasting an interview with Rishi Sunak.

Asked if the government is proposing a one-off payment to nurses, Sunak does not deny that. “You would not expect me to comment on specifics,” he says.

He says the government wants to be reasonable. It is important to keep talking.

Q: What did you mean yesterday when you said the pay talks would cover pay for this year? (It was not clear if Sunak was talking about pay settlement for the 2023-24 financial year, or the 2022-23 financial year.)

Sunak sidesteps the question.

It was my colleague Pippa Crerar who reported overnight that the government was considering a one-off payment for nurses as a means of ending the strike.

I will post more from the Sunak interview shortly.

In her Sky News interview Patricia Marquis, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said she was alarmed by suggestions from government that future pay increases for nurses could be linked to efficiency reforms. She said that made her “very, very worried”. She explained:

It shows a level of misunderstanding of the situation the NHS and nursing is in at the moment.

There aren’t enough staff to deliver the care that needs to be delivered and there isn’t enough funding in the NHS.

Of course, there’s always some sort of efficiencies that can be made but it really does sound like what they’re trying to do is get … the NHS to fund its own pay award and we don’t think that’s possible. We really think this needs to be extra money that is clearly earmarked for for nursing pay.

Patricia Marquis, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), told Sky News this morning that she thought it was “unlikely” that the talks with the government taking place today would lead to the planned nurses’s strike for later this month being called off.

Asked about the chances of the strike being called off, she told Sky News:

At the moment, it feels unlikely but we’ll see what today brings in those conversations with Steve Barclay.

If there are chinks of hope, if there are further meetings, then I and my colleagues will all maintain optimism that we can get a resolution without nurses having to be on the picket lines again later this month.

Asked if she would be the chances of a resolution at 50/50, she replied:

I don’t think it is 50/50, but there is some hope and we maintain that hope.

A potential government offer of a one-off payment to teachers is unlikely to be enough to prevent upcoming strikes in England and Wales, Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said this morning. My colleague Peter Walker has the story here.

Good morning. There are various meetings taking place today between ministers and union leaders representing workers in health, education and the rail industry after Rishi Sunak called last week for both sides to get around the table. This is quite a shift from the pre-Christmas position when ministers insisted it was up to management negotiators to take the lead in talks with unions. At the end of last week it was not clear whether this was mainly a presentational ploy (Sunak wants the government to be seen as “reasonable’”), or whether significant concessions might be in the pipeline, but yesterday, as my colleague Pippa Crerar reports, Sunak hinted it was the latter in his start-of-year interview with Laura Kuenssberg.

But it is quite possible that the strike crisis could get worse before it gets better. The British Medical Association is from today balloting 45,000 junior doctors in England on strike action and, if they vote in favour, a 72-hour strike is planned from March. This morning Dr Emma Runswick, the BMA’s deputy chair, told Sky News that the chances of a strike were “very high”. She explained:

[Health secretary] Steve Barclay’s planning to meet with us on Wednesday but only to discuss a very narrow set of things. He’s talking about the evidence that the government will submit to the pay review body. Unfortunately, they’ve already submitted their remit letter to the pay review body telling us and them that we only should receive 2% next year.

So, that’s another massive pay cut after we’ve had a pay cut this year, and for the previous 15 years. Again, another pay cut on top of the quarter pay cut we’ve already received, so I’m not optimistic … about the meetings, though we will go and we will negotiate if that is an available option to us.

Asked to confirm junior doctors were looking for a 26% pay rise, Runswick said:

We’re asking for the reversal of that pay cut [over the last 15 years]. So, mathematically, it might even be more and if we have another pay cut this year, it’ll be more again. So, we’re only asking for what we’ve had cut from us back.

Runswick also said she had a colleague who had gone to work in Australia where “she’s doing fewer hours than I am and she’s earning 1.7 times as much”.

We should be hearing again from Sunak this morning. Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak is doing a health-related visit in Yorkshire.

11am: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, holds a press conference on the situation in the NHS.

11.30pm: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Lunchtime: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, and Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, hold a meeting at Lancaster House with Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commission vice-president who is in charge of Brexit-related negotiations on behalf of the EU.

After 3.30pm: Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is expected to make a statement to MPs about extra funding for social care beds. A Treasury minister is also expected to make a statement about the extension of the energy support package for businesses.

Also today, health, education and transport ministers are holding talks with unions about what might resolve the strikes.

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