Sir Jake Berry highlights Government's failure to avoid nurses' strike - The Yorkshire Post says

The former Conservative Party chairman says that the Government’s pay offer to nurses is “too low” and called on it to improve the offer.

This casts doubts on the Government’s claims that it has done everything it can to avoid industrial action.

The Royal College of Nursing isn’t a militant union and the Tories attempts to associate it with Labour is also off the mark, given it is not affiliated to Labour. In fact it never voted to go on strike in the 1970s. Yet here we are with thousands of nurses taking to the picket line.

The Government has repeatedly attempted to hide behind the NHS pay review body’s recommendations. While the body’s independence cannot be doubted, there is a case for its recommendations to be revisited.

As Jerry Cope, who was chair of the pay review body from 2011 to 2017, points out, the recommendation on nurses’ pay took place in February and is out of date as “the world was a rather different place in February and therefore I think some of the evidence they considered was probably out of date by the time it was published”.

While he also urged ministers to ask the pay review body to look again at the recommendations, the Government refuses to budge saying it doesn’t plan on telling the independent body what to do. It is very much the actions of a Government washing its hands of responsibility.

With the Bank of England raising interest rates from 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent, costs are only increasing and with nurses already struggling it is hard to see how the Government can look to play hardball.