RCN lodges formal nurse pay dispute with Northern Ireland government

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has lodged a formal pay dispute with the government in Northern Ireland over its failure to implement a 2025/26 pay award for nurses.

Nursing staff working in Northern Ireland’s NHS – Health and Social Care (HSC) – are yet to have confirmation of whether they will receive a 3.6% pay award in line with colleagues in England and Wales.

And today it was revealed that NHS and HSC nurses across England, Wales and Northern Ireland have voted to reject a 3.6% pay award, as per the results of an RCN ballot.

Now, the RCN in Northern Ireland has announced that it has submitted a formal pay dispute with the Northern Ireland Executive, Department of Health and HSC employers.

‘The dispute focuses on the continuing absence of a 2025-2026 pay award for HSC nursing staff in Northern Ireland,’ it said in a statement issued this afternoon.

Related Article: Government launches pilot to train more social care nurse prescribers

The governments in England and Wales have both confirmed they have accepted the NHS Pay Review Body’s recommendation and that NHS staff will receive the pay uplift – backdated to April – in August.

However, in Northern Ireland, health minister, Mike Nesbitt, has announced his wish to implement a 3.6% pay rise, but this is still to be agreed.

This is not the first time that nurses in Northern Ireland have been left in limbo over their pay.

‘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, and the uplift was not paid until the very end of the financial year,’ RCN Northern Ireland added.

Health minister Mr Nesbitt, reiterated today that he had triggered a ‘Ministerial Direction process’ in May to achieve a 3.6% pay rise for HSC nurses ‘as soon as possible’.

‘In line with the Ministerial Direction process, my decision was referred to the wider Executive. Unfortunately, that’s where it still sits,’ he added.

‘Our health workers deserve so much better.’

RCN Northern Ireland said that while it welcomed the intervention of the health minister, ‘it appears that we are, once again, in the same position’.

Related Article: Nurses reject NHS pay award in record RCN vote

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.’

She added: ‘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.’

Results from the RCN’s consultative pay ballot today revealed almost 80% of voting members in Northern Ireland rejected a 3.6% award.

Related Article: Six-month review to explore LGBT+ healthcare barriers

‘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.’

In the highest-ever turnout for an RCN pay ballot, 91% of voting members in England and Wales also said the 3.6% pay award for NHS nurses on Agenda for Change staff was insufficient.

The RCN also warned ministers in England today that they must use the summer to reach an agreement to invest in the nursing workforce ‘or face formal escalation to a dispute and an industrial action ballot’.