Debate contribution: Health and Social Care Pay Awards 2025-26
Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on .
- MLA
- Mr Alan Chambers
- Party at the time
- Ulster Unionist Party
- Date
- 23 September 2025
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Private Members' Business
- Heading
- Health and Social Care Pay Awards 2025-26
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5129846
Read the official Assembly record
Text
It is shameful that, six months into the current financial year, our Health and Social Care workers are the only group in the United Kingdom's health sector that is still waiting to receive the nationally agreed pay settlements. We talk about the importance of staff retention, but, if ever there were a recipe for health workers to take their skills to another jurisdiction, the current situation is it. I have said in the Chamber many times that our health and social care system has been sustained for years by staff loyalty and delivered with huge helpings of freely given goodwill. However, goodwill cannot be depended on for ever. Goodwill does not put food on the table, pay the mortgage or fund children's education journey. The figure on the payslip deals with the financial demands that we all have to address. How can we as politicians allow that serious breach of wage commitment to continue for a minute longer into the current financial year? The settlement for which our Health and Social Care workers wait was a result not of some bullish and outlandish salary demand but of a national and independent assessment. We hear about the potential of a full strike by our nurses: just imagine the impact that that would have on the operation of hospitals. The front-line heroes for whom we stood clapping on our doorsteps in gratitude for their selfless service during the COVID epidemic do not have one ounce of desire to walk out on their patients at this time. That goes against every fibre of their dedication to care for the sick and help make them well again. Why are we allowing it to happen? Why are we putting our Health and Social Care staff into a corner where they are left with no alternative to secure what they are fully entitled to? I have stood on the picket lines with our nurses, and it was clear that they would rather have been on the wards than standing on the streets with placards. That is not who they are. I will happily stand alongside them again, if we go down the shameful road of forcing them on to the picket lines. The catastrophic consequences of strike action will rest not with them but with us in this place for breaking promises that we have made. The current Health Minister, Minister Nesbitt, and the previous Health Minister, Minister Swann, have made their positions clear that agreed pay settlements for Health and Social Care staff must be met in full and in a timely manner. That should be the position of every member of the Executive. I will conclude by saying that I am disappointed to hear the attempts at cheap political point-scoring on such an important issue in the Chamber.
464 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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