Nurses will vote to go on a national strike for the first time in their history because the NHS has “gone over the precipice” and may not survive, the leader of the UK’s largest nursing union has told the Observer.

James Tapper www.theguardian.com 

Pat Cullen, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said there is anger among nurses, who feel that ministers do not believe they are important.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer before the ballot on industrial action, Cullen recalled a conversation with frontline staff at a major hospital: “They said to me, ‘We’re not important to the government. We were seen as important during the pandemic, but we’re not important now. We don’t think the government will do anything for us’.

“When I talked to them about being a demoralised workforce, they said: ‘we’re not just a demoralised workforce. We have given up. No one seems to care any longer.’ There is an anger that they have been pushed to this position.

“We need to step up and look after these nurses. If we don’t, it’s scary to think about what will happen. The health service is not just staring over the precipice. It has gone over. And the very people who are trying to bring it back up are being paid the lowest wage we can possibly pay them. If we deplete it any further, there will not be a health service there.”

Cullen has toured the country, speaking to hundreds of nurses in the past few weeks about whether the RCN, which represents nearly 500,000 nurses, midwives and support workers, should go on strike.

An NHS nurse’s starting salary is £20,270, and the average salary is £33,384. The RCN decided to ballot after the government unilaterally gave NHS nurses a £1,400 pay rise, leaving them £1,000 a year worse off in real terms, according to the union. It wants a rise of 5% above inflation to avoid a flood of nurses leaving the profession.

The ballot was due to open on Thursday but was postponed after the death of the Queen, who was the RCN’s royal patron.

“It is probably the most difficult it has ever been for every single nurse – even more challenging and difficult now than it was through the pandemic,” Cullen said, speaking before the Queen’s death was announced. “And I think it’s quite a frightening place for our nursing staff because of the absolutely depleted workforces.”

Nurses are caring for patients with highly complex needs, she said, particularly older patients who have been waiting for surgery for years. At the same time, many nurses find themselves having to use food banks, and can’t afford to cook hot meals or buy school uniforms for their children.

Last week, NHS England said 6.8 million people were now waiting for treatment, a record high, with 377,689 waiting for more than a year. Ambulance waiting times have shot up, with only 58% of patients seen within four hours, far below the 95% target. A man died in an ambulance outside Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital on 22 August while waiting to be admitted, because there were no beds available.

Some patients who are medically fit to leave hospital have waited nine months because there is no social care available for them. Thérèse Coffey, the new health secretary, has said her “ABCD” priorities are ambulances; backlogs; care; and doctors and dentists, while prime minister Liz Truss put “delivering on the NHS” as one of her top three priorities.

Cullen became general secretary in July last year, having been director of RCN Northern Ireland. She has been a nurse for 42 years: for much of that time she worked as a nurse psychotherapist in Northern Ireland’s prisons, and principally with victims of the Troubles.

She is confident she can lead a successful strike. The union has a £50m hardship fund for striking staff whose pay is docked – members of the public have already offered donations as well – and she speaks strongly of nurses’ resolve. She also has some practice in industrial disputes, having successfully led a strike in Northern Ireland in 2019.

Nurses there were paid less than in the rest of the UK, but a row between Sinn Fein and the DUP over the Cash for Ash scandal meant there was no Stormont administration to negotiate with. In December 2019, the RCN went on strike. By mid-January, Sinn Fein and the DUP were in talks, and by the end of the month, nurses had been given a £109m pay deal.

“Very quickly we had an assembly re-established and a new executive formed,” Cullen said. “It’s well documented that was a consequence of those nurses saying ‘enough is enough, you need to get back to your work’.”

On the larger stage, Cullen is anticipating a tougher fight, with Britain facing a wave of industrial action as unions try to ensure their members do not lose out as inflation rises above 10%. Rail workers, train drivers, postal workers, bus drivers, council workers, exam board staff, academics, barristers, court staff, teachers, journalists, firefighters and doctors have all taken action or are set to ballot.

Cullen said she talks regularly to other union leaders, although the RCN is not affiliated to the TUC. Although she is unlikely to get the media treatment meted out to RMT leader Mick Lynch, Cullen said she was prepared. “[Newspapers] can dig away at me but I’m a very boring person,” she said. “I’ve been a nurse for 42 years. I’ve been married for 32 years. I spend most of my weekends still nursing. And when I’m not doing that I have the pleasure of looking after my mother-in-law, who needs a lot of care after a stroke.”

Keir Starmer has told Labour MPs not to join picket lines, and Cullen is not expecting particular support from the party for the strike.

“It’s entirely up to them. What I would suggest is that no politician should turn their back on any nurse. If they turn their back on nurses during what will be a very, very challenging time for nurses – if we move to strike – those 500,000 nurses will not forget that, and I think patients will have something to say.”

And if the government believes it can out-wait the RCN, or take them on, Cullen has a warning.

“If the government thinks of trying to set the public against nursing, I’d tell them not to bother,” she said. “The public are smarter than that.”

The high court has ordered the Environment Agency to reduce water abstraction and protect England’s rare wetland habitats, in a landmark case that confirms that European nature conservation laws remain enforceable despite Britain having left the EU.

Patrick Barkham www.theguardian.com 

The victory for Tim and Geli Harris means the Environment Agency will be forced to tackle the damage caused by the removal of water from the internationally important wetlands of the Norfolk Broads, home to rare species including the Norfolk hawker dragonfly and the swallowtail butterfly.

The abstraction of water from England’s largest protected wetland – situated in one of the driest regions of the country – is done mostly so that farmers can irrigate crops.

The couple, who are farmers themselves, have spent £1m on legal challenges over more than a decade, winning a key battle six years ago when a public inquiry found that abstraction licences were damaging critically endangered plants such as the fen orchid at Catfield Fen, a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) that they in part own.

But they took the Environment Agency to court again because it was failing to stop abstraction reducing the flow of groundwater at other internationally important wetland sites across the Broads.

Tim Harris said: “My wife and I are pleased that the high court has ruled that there must now be urgent work done by the Environment Agency to prevent damage from water abstraction to the whole Broads special area of conservation and its unique ecosystems.”

Farmers argue that reducing abstraction would harm their ability to grow food such as potatoes, a high-value crop farmed on dry land close to the Broads and irrigated using water from it.

But Harris said reducing abstraction would simply lower some yields – and land values – but encourage farmers to grow less water-hungry crops. He said: “It’s not about food security, it’s about crop choice. They should be growing wheat, and they can still grow potatoes, it’s just that irrigation adds about 15% to yields and land values.

“Should we destroy the whole of the Broads for the sake of that extra value in agricultural land when the largest by far revenues come from tourism?”

In deciding the case, the court applied a little-known legal provision in Brexit legislation that says that even though the UK has left the EU, rules in European directives – in this case, the habitats directive – remain enforceable against UK public authorities if those rules have been recognised by a court as being enforceable prior to Brexit.

The court also ruled that a lack of funding for the Environment Agency was not a valid reason for it failing to meet its legal duties.

Penny Simpson, a partner in environmental law at Freeths, who brought the case for the Harrises, said: “This is a very important court judgment for both East Anglia and the UK. For East Anglia there must now be significant and urgent work by the Environment Agency to prevent damage from water abstraction to the large Broads conservation area.

“For England and Wales, we now know that public authorities must take appropriate steps to prevent harm to sites protected under the habitats directive where those public authorities are charged with the legal powers to do so.”

The Environment Agency said it had already informed 20 abstraction licence holders in the Ant Valley that their licences must be reduced, constrained or revoked. A spokesperson said: “We are working to restore, protect and enhance the environment but like every public organisation we have limited resources, so focus our efforts on the greatest threats to the environment.

“Originally the scope of this investigation was to evaluate the impacts of abstraction in the Ant Valley to protect the Ants broad and marshes SSSI. As a result of the judgment in this case we will now look at how we can expand our work to cover further protected sites whilst recognising the resource constraints.

“We remain committed to working with landowners, abstractors and Defra bodies to ensure that we continue to address unsustainable abstraction.”

A spokesperson for the National Farmers’ Union said that the agricultural sector in the region was working with Water Resources East on a long-term strategic plan for water resources, and that farmers were already also taking steps to maximise water efficiency. “It’s important that any solutions to the water resource challenges we face find the right balance between food production and environmental protection.”

Harris said: “You may ask why private individuals not public bodies or conservation charities have brought this judicial review, which represents a landmark ruling on the continuing role of European conservation laws in post-Brexit Britain.

“The public bodies such as the Broads Authority say they are working in a joint effort with all the stakeholders. What all sailors know is that convoys move at the speed of the slowest ship, and not much at all if the slowest ship doesn’t pull up its anchor. Unfortunately, nature can’t wait for the boat to come in.”

“We got the big calls right” – Owl

Britain has suffered one of biggest drops in the real value of wages among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Arthi Nachiappan www.thetimes.co.uk

Real pay, which is the value of incomes after adjusting for the impact of inflation, is on course to fall by 2.9 per cent from 2021 to 2022, compared with an average of 2.3 per cent across the bloc of 38 countries.

The figures from the OECD showed that during the pandemic the UK suffered one of the biggest declines in the rate of employment among the members of the population with the least education qualifications. The rise in economic inactivity, when a worker is neither working nor looking for a job, among those with lower educational qualifications was one of the highest recorded.

The UK was one of a “handful” of countries in which employment among workers aged 55 or over was still below pre-crisis levels at the start of the year, the organisation said. Hundreds of thousands of older workers left the labour market in Britain during the pandemic.

The gap in employment rates between white people and people of ethnic minority backgrounds has widened by 0.5 percentage points since the start of 2019. The trend was recorded in several countries. In the six largest European countries, the impact of rises in food and energy prices was 50 per cent higher for the poorest fifth of people than for the richest.

Inflation, which hit a 40-year high of 10.1 per cent in July, is at more than 15 per cent for the poorest people, three times the level among the richest, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund. This is the second most unequal rise in the cost of living of any European country.

Economists at Goldman Sachs said inflation could exceed 20 per cent in January before the announcement of the new energy bills support package on Thursday, which could shave several percentage points off the headline rate.

Mathias Cormann, the OECD secretary-general, said: “Despite widespread labour shortages, real wages growth is not keeping pace with the current high rates of inflation. Governments should implement targeted and means-tested measures to temporarily support the poorest households.”