Further strikes suspended as NHS workers offered new pay deal – as it happened

The government has confirmed it is making a significant new pay offer to NHS staff in England, including a one-off bonus which unions say amounts to £2.5bn.

Unions involved in the pay talks said further strikes by ambulance staff and other NHS workers had been suspended and they would recommend members accept the new offer.

The government and the NHS staff council, which includes the unions, released a joint statement, which said: “Both sides believe [the offer] represents a fair and reasonable settlement that acknowledges the dedication of NHS staff, while acknowledging the wider economic pressures currently facing the UK.”

Britain is to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from ministers’ and civil servants’ mobile phones, bringing the UK in line with the US and the European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing, my colleague Dan Sabbagh reports.

MPs will vote on Rishi Sunak’s deal to revise the Northern Ireland protocol on Wednesdsay next week, Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, has announced.

She told MPs at business questions:

On Wednesday March 22 a debate [will take place] on a motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to the Stormont brake in the Windsor framework.

At one point No 10 was wary of scheduling a vote on the deal because Sunak was nervous about a backlash against it from Brexiter Tories and the DUP. But the DUP has said it will take its time before coming to a considered view on the deal, and most Conservatives, including hardline Brexiters, have backed the agreement.

One Tory who has criticised it at length is the former PM Boris Johnson. But on Wednesday afternoon next week he will be otherwise engaged, giving evidence to the Commons privileges committee about the claims that he misled MPs about Partygate.

Tony Blair was in parliament today to talk to the Northern Ireland committee about the Good Friday agreement and the Windsor framework.

The questions from members of the committee were a mixture of fawning praise and attempts to settle old scores stemming from the Good Friday negotiations. But the most interesting parts were what he said about the current impasse in Belfast, where Stormont has been suspended for over a year .

Blair praised the government’s agreement with the EU to replace the Northern Ireland protocol with the Windsor framework, telling the committee that it is the best practical solution to the border issues that were caused by Brexit. He said:

My reason for supporting what the government has done, what this prime minister has done, on the Windsor agreement is I think it represents the most practical way forward that minimises all the theoretical objections.

He also urged the DUP, two of whose MPs were present, to rejoin power sharing.

If you want to preserve the union today, the best way of doing it is to recognise the status quo is the union, so make people comfortable with the status quo.

Then it was time to depart - but not before a quick stop to allow two members of the committee – the SDLP MP Claire Hanna and the Labour MP Mary Kelly Foy – to take selfies.

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is expected to announce a formal pay offer to key unions involved in NHS strikes in England, including a one-off payment of up to 6% for this year, in an effort to end months of industrial action.

Last-minute talks between the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the unions were understood to be continuing on Thursday morning, but an offer was expected to be made public later in the day.

Two sources suggested it would include an across-the-board payment of up to 6% for 2022-23, and then a permanent pay increase of about 5% for the coming financial year – significantly more than the 3.5% the Treasury had initially suggested was affordable. The payment for this year is expected to be split into two parts – a 2% one-off pay award, and a 4% “Covid recovery bonus”.

With inflation expected to fall sharply in the coming months, 5% is highly likely to amount to an above-inflation rise. Ministers had previously said they could not reopen the current year’s pay deal, under which many NHS workers received a flat-rate £1,400 increase.

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said in his budget statement yesterday: “High inflation is the root cause of the strikes we have seen in recent months. We will continue to work hard to settle these disputes but only in a way that does not fuel inflation.”

Members of the unions involved, which represent ambulance workers and physiotherapists as well as nurses, would have to approve any offer in a consultation before the strikes could be permanently called off.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which began historic strike action in December, was the first union to decide to suspend industrial action and enter “intensive” negotiations with the government last month. Other unions, including Unison, the GMB and Unite, whose members are part of the same bargaining unit as nurses – known as Agenda for Change – agreed to discussions a few days later. At the time, they were reassured any new offer would involve new money and not have to be funded from existing NHS resources.

The government hopes settling the NHS dispute will be the first step to resolving the waves of industrial action that have hit public services, including education and much of the civil service, from Border Force staff to driving instructors.

It is understood some of the final sticking points in the talks included whether the lowest paid would be given a more substantial uplift.

Some unions had been concerned that the government might try to do a separate deal with the RCN, breaking up the Agenda for Change bargaining unit – but Barclay’s offer is expected to apply to all the hundreds of thousands of workers covered.

Sinn Féin’s US fundraising arm has caused a row by calling for a referendum on Irish unity in adverts in the New York Times, Washington Post and other US publications.

The half-page ads were paid for by Friends of Sinn Féin and ran on Wednesday urging support for unity referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. “It is time to agree on a date,” it said. “Let the people have their say.”

They coincided with the annual migration of political leaders from Ireland, north and south, to New York and Washington to network with US politicians while celebrating St Patrick’s Day.

The taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, expressed concern at the adverts coming at what he termed a “sensitive moment” in efforts to restore power sharing in Northern Ireland.

The Democratic Unionist party leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, accused Sinn Féin of focusing on a “divisive border poll campaign” that will further polarise Northern Ireland.

The Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, played down the significance of the move. She told PA Media:

They’re ads from Irish American organisations whose view on reunification is well known and held for a very long time and they take out ads every year. So, the focus now needs to be on getting back to work [at Stormont].

The IFS director, Paul Johnson, also said that abolishing the cap on tax-free pension savings “probably won’t play a big part, if any” in increasing the number of people in work, my colleague Richard Partington reports.

In his presentation, Johnson said:

One policy that probably won’t play a big part, if any, in increasing the number of people in work, is the increase in the pension tax annual and lifetime allowances. Even on OBR’s, in my view, optimistic assumptions, this will come in at £100,000 per job. There is a case for allowing people to save more in a pension, even if those who gain will generally be on high incomes up to £250,000 a year or more. While it was sensible to accompany this change with a limit on the size of the tax-free lump sum to 25% of the existing lifetime allowance, it was disappointing that other over-generous aspects of pension taxation – not least complete freedom from inheritance tax – were not reined in. The lack of any coherent strategy here remains deeply disappointing. Don’t forget, these changes are largely a rowing back on changes made just a few years ago by this government.

People are going to feel “continuing pain” with their finances regardless of the measures in yesterday’s budget, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says.

Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, delivered a bleak verdict in his opening presenation at the start of the IFS’s briefing on the budget. He said:

What households are going to feel over the next year will be continuing pain. Inflation may be coming down, but prices remain much higher than two years ago. Earnings haven’t caught up. The freezing of income tax and NICs [national insurance contributions] allowances and thresholds will cost most basic-rate taxpayers £500 next year and most higher-rate payers £1,000. The OBR may be relatively optimistic about the medium term, but it still thinks these will be the worst two years on record for household incomes. Its projections suggest that real household disposable incomes will be no higher in 2027 than they were in 2019, and barely higher than in 2017 – a lost decade for living standards.

The government has made a revised pay offer to unions representing nurses, ambulance staff and other health workers, Sky News is reporting. It says an announcement is expected this afternoon.

Here are some more lines from Jeremy Hunt’s morning interview round.

• Hunt claimed it was “bizarre” to describe the budget as a giveaway for the rich in light of all the support going to people dealing with the cost of living crisis. Asked about this on Times Radio, he replied:

I think it is a rather bizarre thing to say that when this is a set of measures that means in two weeks’ time we are going to be spending a total of £94bn this year.

[It is] a huge amount of money: giving around £3,000 of cost-of-living support to a typical household, including uprating benefits with inflation, [and] one-off payments to people on low incomes of up to £900.

Yesterday the Treasury published a distributional impact analysis to go with the budget. It contained seven graphs, all of which showed measures benefiting the poorest households the most (making them progressive, by definition). But none of them analysed just the changes announced in yesterday’s budget; instead they included all measures from the autumn statement last year, all measures from the spending review of 2019, or the impact of the tax and benefit system as a whole.

• Hunt claimed it was “impossible” to know how many doctors would return to work, or keep working, as a result of his abolition of the lifetime pensions allowance. He said he did not accept the estimate from the Office for Budget Responsibility that only 15,000 more people would stay in the labour force as a result. (See 9.01am.)

• He accused Labour of hypocrisy on the lifetime pensions allowance, saying that last year Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said removing the limit on the allowance for doctors would save lives. Hunt said:

[Streeting] seems to have changed his mind overnight on that one. He said it was crazy and it would save lives to get rid of that cap. Well, he was right in September when he said that.

Labour said today it would “encourage doctors to stay in work by creating a targeted scheme as the government has done for judges, rather than create free-for-all for the wealthy few”.

• Hunt defended the decision to roll out the new free childcare policy for children aged one and two over several years, saying such a big reform had to be introduced over time. He told Sky News:

This is the biggest transformation in childcare in my lifetime.

It is a huge change and we are going to need thousands more nurseries, thousands more schools offering provision they don’t currently offer, thousands more childminders.

We are going as fast as we can to get the supply in the market to expand.

• He rejected the claim that his decision in the budget to include construction workers on the shortage occupation list, which will make it easier for foreign construction workers to get visas to work in the UK, was a betrayal of people who voted for Brexit to reduce immigration. When this was put to him, he replied:

People who voted for Brexit didn’t vote for no immigration. They voted for control on migration …

But what those people who voted for Brexit want is an economy and economic model that does not depend on unlimited and unskilled migration. What those people want is to know that the government has a plan to remove the barriers that stop people working in the UK … That was the plan that I announced yesterday.

As my colleagues Aubrey Allegretti and Denis Campbell report, ministers and health unions are on the verge of a breakthrough in talks to resolve their long-running pay dispute that has triggered a series of NHS strikes in England, with an announcement expected later today.

In his interview on the Today programme this morning, Jeremy Hunt said nothing to counter suggestions that a deal is imminent. He said:

We are having discussions, quite good discussions I think, with unions.

We’ve been very flexible about what we’ve been prepared to offer. The only condition we put on those talks is we can’t give an offer that would itself fuel inflation and mean we are having the same discussions this time next year.

Asked if the government would be offering health workers more money, he replied:

We don’t have an agreement yet, so I can’t tell you what the quantum is.

I am hopeful we will have an agreement. I think we’ve had some very positive discussions but let’s see where it ends up today.

But he did not rule out the government increasing the 3.5% pay rise proposed for health workers for 2023-24 in its submission to the pay review body. Asked if the government would offer more, he said:

All I will say is, if the government says we will do a different deal, we will find a way to pay for it. Yes, we would like to settle these disputes.

The UK remains on track for a “disastrous decade” of stagnant incomes and high taxes, despite cuts to public services, the Resolution Foundation said in its analysis of the budget this morning. Here is the full report from the thinktank. And here is my colleague Phillip Inman’s story.

Good morning. Liz Truss’s mini-budget self-destructed last year for many reasons, but the first element to get unpicked was the abolition of the 45p top rate of tax, a tax cut for the very rich. Labour is attacking Jeremy Hunt’s budget in the same manner, attacking his plan to abolish the pensions lifetime allowance (the limit on how much can be saved tax-free) as a tax cut for the very rich.

Last night, in an interview with ITV’s Peston show, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said Labour would try to block this with a vote in the Commons next week.

I think this could unravel as quickly as it began. If you remember last September, Liz Truss tried to cut the top rate of tax from 45p to 40p; everybody kicked off about it.

Next week there will be a vote on this, Labour will force a vote on this next week. And I would say to Conservative MPs in places like Ashfield, or Bolsover, or Stoke-On-Trent, whose side are you on? Are you on the side of ordinary working people in your constituencies who are seeing their taxes go up, or are you going to vote with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt for a tax cut for the wealthiest in society?

This morning Labour said that, if it wins the next election, it will reverse Hunt’s move.

Reeves and Hunt have both been giving interviews this morning, and Hunt has defended the policy, saying it will benefit the NHS because it will stop senior doctors retiring early because the existing pension rules are a disincentive. He told the Today programme:

We have a particular problem in the NHS. We have large numbers of doctors who are reducing their hours or retiring early. The Royal College of Surgeons say that 69% of their members have reduced their hours because of the way pension taxes work. We have a big backlog in the NHS and all of us depend on the NHS.

We need to do everything we can. This is a measure that we can deliver quickly. The British Medical Association … say that this will mean that doctors do not leave the NHS because of pension tax rules. I think that’s very important.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said yesterday the policy would only lead to an extra 15,000 people staying in work. When this figure was put to Hunt, he said he did not accept it. He refused to give a figure for how many more doctors would stay in the workforce as a result of the pension allowance changes. But he said groups representing doctors insisted this would make a difference. He said:

We‘re spending £3bn a year in the NHS on locum doctors and agency nurses because of doctor shortfalls. If you ask doctors, they say this is one of the biggest reasons why consultants aren’t available.

If you’re asking what will have an impact on ordinary families up and down the country, it is getting their NHS operation done more quickly. And this is the simplest and quickest way to resolve that issue.

I will post more from the post-budget interviews this morning shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: The Resolution Foundation holds a briefing to present its assessment of the budget.

9.30am: Tony Blair gives evidence to the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee about the institutions set up by the Good Friday agreement.

10.30am: The Institute for Fiscal Studies holds its budget briefing.

11am: Keir Starmer is visiting a life science company in Edinburgh.

11.30am: MPs resume their debate on the budget.

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