Nurses have voted overwhelmingly to take industrial action unless ministers improve a “miserly and insulting” pay deal for health workers.

The Government has offered nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland a 1.5 per cent pay rise this month, with another 1 per cent to come in November, in defiance of the recommendations of an independent pay review board.

But delegates at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) annual conference rejected the offer yesterday, and called on the Government to agree the recommended full 2.5 per cent pay rise immediately — as it already has in Scotland — or face the consequences.

Thousands of ambulance workers, porters and other NHS staff who are members of the GMB union have said that they are also prepared to take industrial action over a similar staged pay deal.

If industrial action were taken it would be the first on a national scale by nurses. In an angry and passionate debate at the conference in Harrogate, delegates said that a strike was unlikely but that they would be prepared to take action such as working to rule, which would mean nurses working their contracted hours and no more.

Such measures are designed to minimise any impact on patients, but could mean longer waiting times for nonessential operations. The union’s council will now seek an emergency meeting with Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, to discuss the issue before deciding whether to ballot members next month.

Peter Carter, the RCN’s general secretary, said that the staged offer was equivalent to a 1.9 per cent pay rise, which was “unacceptable and miserly”, but that he did not want to proceed in a “ramshackle way”. He added: “Let’s be clear, we want to avoid strike action. We are hoping that Gordon Brown and Patricia Hewitt will wake up and take this seriously. But we are prepared to find ways to hurt the Government while trying to protect patients. We mean business.”

Ministers at the Scottish Assembly, with elections looming next month, have agreed to award nurses a 2.5 per cent pay rise from this month.

Ann Taylor-Griffiths, of the RCN’s Welsh board, told the conference: “We are one nursing body, we are one NHS and deserve one nationally implemented pay award.”

David Harding-Price, a nurse from Nottingham, was given a standing ovation as he said: “Stand up now and tell the Government: no more rhetoric. Action, action, action now.”

Unison, the public sector union, is also expected to support industrial action by nurses when it meets at its conference in Brighton next week.

Ministers have defended the staged offer as fair for nurses and affordable for the economy.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “What we have suggested is a sensible increase that’s fair for NHS staff and affordable for the economy. In fact we expect the overall average earnings of nurses to rise by 4.9 per cent next year, above the national average.” Mothers and newborn babies are being put at risk because of a lack of specialist care for postnatal depression, the RCN says. The conference will be told today that suicide is the biggest killer of new mothers and that more resources are needed to support women who suffer mental illness during pregnancy or after childbirth. 6.5 hours of unpaid overtime worked on average by nurses every week Source: RCN estimate

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