HEALTH and education unions have warned the Labour government that they won’t accept its imposition of a miserly 2.8% pay cap on them for the year 2025/26 and that strike action will ensue.
RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive Professor Nicola Ranger said yesterday: ‘Nursing is in crisis – there are fewer joining and too many experienced professionals leaving. This is deeply offensive to nursing staff, detrimental to their patients and contradictory to hopes of rebuilding the NHS.’
BMA chair of council, Professor Philip Banfield, said: ‘For this government to give evidence to the doctors’ and dentists’ pay review body (DDRB) believing a 2.8% pay rise is enough, indicates a poor grasp of the unresolved issues from two years of industrial action.
‘It is far below the current rate of inflation experienced by doctors in their daily lives and does not move significantly closer to restoring the relative value of doctors’ pay lost over the past 15 years.
‘When doctors accepted their pay offers this summer, the government was under no illusion about the need to continue to reverse the effects of pay erosion, the path set to achieve that in future pay rounds, and the very real risk of further industrial action if this was not achieved.’
Dr Patrick Roach, General Secretary of NASUWT teachers union, said: ‘The government’s decision to publish its submission to the pay review body has caused major concern for teachers and for schools.
‘Notwithstanding the government’s failure to recognise and address the real terms cuts to pay that teachers have endured, Ministers appear intent on adding insult to injury by asking schools to fund any pay award from their existing budgets. The government’s proposals can only mean further cuts to pay, jobs and support for pupils.
‘The government needs to understand that it is facing the prospect of industrial relations misery in the new year if it persists on this path.’
Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union, said: ‘The proposed unfunded 2.8% pay increase for September 2025 for teachers in England set out in the government’s evidence to the STRB falls well short of the urgent action needed.
‘School cuts have left education on the brink, with a deep and severe recruitment and retention crisis that is causing wholescale damage to education provision.
‘We have got the highest primary class sizes in Europe. We have the highest secondary class sizes on record. We have a million pupils taught in classes of more than 30. There are no “efficiencies” that can be made without further damaging education. Starmer will be the only Labour Prime Minister other than James Callaghan to tell schools to make cuts.
‘When the Secretary of State took office, she rightly committed to securing the best life chances for every child and to recruiting 6,500 new teachers. However, neither objective can be achieved without properly investing in our education service and in the teachers who deliver it.’