This time last year, I was just one of many commentators issuing lurid warnings about the potential for another “Winter of Discontent”. With inflation surging, Rishi Sunak faced rolling walkouts in the NHS, railways, schools, and elsewhere. The unions had the public’s backing. They believed they had ministers over a barrel and hoped to rival ABBA Voyage as 2022’s most successful 70s revival.
Yet it didn’t quite work out like that. Rather than come over all Richard III, we instead endured one of mild irritation. In 1979, over half the workforce was unionised. It is now under a quarter, and overwhelmingly concentrated in the public sector. Union barons can no longer shut the country down. Whilst the economy has taken a slight hit, commuters proved wholly capable of working from home.
The Government’s approach to the strikes was simple. Paint the demands of the unions as unreasonable, engage in dialogue wherever possible, wait for inflation to come down, and strike a series of deals in the public sector that proved neither expense nor inflationary. This approach has been (mostly) successful. Teaching unions, nurses, civil servants: all settled earlier this year.
Nonetheless, there were holdouts. Consultants have staged four rounds of industrial action, protesting that a mooted 6 per cent pay rise would be below inflation. Ministers insisted a larger rise was expensive and inflationary. Yet a report on Monday suggests the Department of Health and the British Medical Association have now come to a deal with allows both parties to save face.
Under the apparent terms of their agreement, the headline 6 per cent salary rise has been coupled with a scheme to enable doctors to reach the top of their pay scales faster. If consultants vote to accept the deal in January, most will receive an immediate pay rise. Some may receive increases of over 18 per cent. Naturally, nurses are furious at having settled for less, and threatening further action.
Yet the logic in settling for Victoria Atkins – the new Health Secretary – is obvious. NHS England estimates that industrial action will cost the NHS £1.5 billion, and that waiting times – one of Sunak’s five priorities – would have fallen this year had it not been for industrial action. Public support for strikes remains high. Sunak hardly wants to be warring with doctors in an election year.
Since Jeremy Hunt has asked the NHS to pay for strike costs out of existing funds, waiting list targets have been scaled back. Yet this is still likely to be a cheaper option than holding out further. It establishes Atkins as someone that the BMA can do business with and allows her to focus more squarely on organising the festivities of our annual NHS winter crisis.
Falling inflation should help with future claims. The deal also puts pressure on those junior doctors still holding out for 35 per cent. The unprecedented join strike action by consultants and junior doctors earlier this year led to considerable pressure on services and added tens of thousands to the million or so routine appointments and procedures already delayed.
As Alys Denby has pointed out, whatever funny maths the BMA have used to generate a demand of 35 per cent – or ‘pay restoration’, as they call it – such a figure is unconscionable at a time when average pay is rising by only 7.8 per cent. Unfortunately, the BMA’s actions have as much to do with hard-left entryism as it does improving conditions for its staff, and thus ensuring a service for patients.
Alas, a full ban on NHS strikes remains as unlikely a prospect as any other major reform to our monolithic and medieval health service. Yet the Government has at least pushed the Overton window very slightly in that direction by passing its Minimum Service Levels Act in July. This empowered Secretaries of State to compel minimum levels of service during strikes in particular areas. Gillian Keegan’s attempt to do so for teachers has elicited an unsurprising reaction.
As the Government has explained, this only brings us in line with countries such as France, Italy, and the United States where services reliably continue during strikes. The police have been barred from striking for over a century. Whilst there are concerns the legislation may prove feeble in practice – similar agreements have been ignored by unions – this is a logical change that was long in the offing.
Yet the Government’s pledge that the equivalent of 40 per cent of normal timetables will now operate as normal will be little comfort to those commuters still battered by an upcoming advent calendar of industrial action on the railways. After 18 months of action, there is little sign the members of RMT and Aslef throwing in the towel any time soon. The latter have announced a nine-day overtime ban.
Despite ministerial backtracking on the closure of ticket offices, the railway unions still refuse to face the post-Covid and pro-Zoom reality of fair income and commuter use being down a fifth on pre-pandemic levels, with corresponding increases in government subsidies and home working. Most will be unaffected by the coming action.
But few of the 70 per cent or so of railway workers who are unionised will believe that they are likely to get a better deal under the Conservatives than from a Labour Party pledging both to scrap the Minimum Service Levels Act and to renationalize the railways. If Sunak does opt for a May election, the consultations for the former may still be in place by the time he goes to the polls.
If the junior doctors prove similarly persistent, the Government may be looking ahead to another winter of mild disruption, lengthening waiting lists, and protracted negotiations. Nonetheless, the prognosis is not half as gloomy as this time last year. Sunak may have made little progress on either his pledges or in the polls. But he has been vindicated in his efforts to wait the unions out.