The RCN has taken the step of lodging a formal pay dispute with the Northern Ireland Executive and HSC employers. The dispute focuses on the continuing absence of a 2025-2026 pay award for HSC nursing staff in Northern Ireland.

We have made it clear that our members are not prepared to tolerate a repetition of their experiences in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, whereby a pay award for staff working in the HSC on Agenda for Change terms and conditions was not confirmed for several months after it had been awarded elsewhere across the UK. The uplift was not paid until the very end of the financial year.

Despite the recent welcome intervention of the Health Minister in issuing his Ministerial Direction, it appears that we are, once again, in the same position.

Commenting on the move, Professor Rita Devlin, RCN Northern Ireland Executive Director, said: “Nursing and other health care staff in Northern Ireland are once again on the brink of stepping out of pay parity with colleagues across the UK. We have worked tirelessly to try and ensure that this does not happen again but there has been a failure in some political quarters to listen.

“Our members do not understand why, yet again, they are being treated by their own Executive as second-class citizens and why, every year, the need to formulate a modest pay offer appears to catch the Executive unprepared. The issue of pay should be accounted for in every year’s budget and a failure to do this is a failure of government.

“Without staff there is simply no health service, and we are at an absolute loss to explain this attitude towards nursing staff who are the largest professional group in the health service. As our recent pay consultation has shown, nursing staff in Northern Ireland and across the UK, don’t believe a 3.6% pay rise is enough, but to not even get that is an insult.”