PMQs: Starmer attacks nurses’ “pitiful” pay rise

Boris Johnson has been accused of paying “lip service” to NHS workers at a heated PMQs in which four different MPs took him to task over the government’s proposal to give NHS staff in England a “pitiful” one per cent pay rise.

The proposal has provoked widespread anger among NHS staff and the wider public. The Royal College of Nursing has pledged to establish a £35m fund to support members if they decide to strike this year, and a poll for the i newspaper found that, of the 2,000 people surveyed, 62 per cent wanted a larger pay rise for NHS staff.

Echoing the furore, Liberal Democrat Daisy Cooper said: “The government is throwing a staggering £37 billion at a Test and Trace system that we know has made barely any difference, but yet it says that it cannot afford to give more than a pitiful one per cent pay rise to NHS workers”. She asked the PM if he would do more than “pay lip service” to NHS workers by giving them the wage they deserved.

Johnson agreed that that the country owed an “incalculable debt” to nurses, saying that he was “proud” to have delivered a 12.8 per cent increase in their starting salary over the last three years. He said the review body will look at a higher rise “exceptionally, of all the professions in the public sector” and defended the work of Test and Trace.

Next to take up the offensive was Sir Keir Starmer. Homing in on the unfavourable media reports of renovations at numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, the Labour leader said he would take the PM a bit more seriously if he hadn’t spent £2.6 million of taxpayers’ money on a Downing Street TV studio or £200,000 pounds on new wallpaper for his flat. He added: “They say charity starts at home, but I think the Prime Minister’s taking it a bit too literally”.

Starmer said that as much as Johnson was “desperate” to distance himself from the Conservative record over the last decade, nurses’ pay had fallen “in real terms” by more than £800 since 2010. Asked if he accepted that nurses would be worse off because of the Budget, the PM said: “No, er, no… because of course we will look at what the independent peer review body has to say”.

The Labour leader continued his attack by reminding the PM that he had committed to a minimum pay rise of 2.1 per cent for NHS workers, before Johnson retorted that Starmer himself had voted against the policy – a claim that was later challenged by Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth.

Sticking the knife in, Starmer said that if the PM wouldn’t listen to him, he should at least listen to his own MPs, who had reportedly called the so-called pay rise “inept”, “unacceptable” and “pathetic”. He said that perhaps the most telling of the comments came from a Conservative MP, who said: “The public hear one per cent and they just think how mean we are”.