Ambulance workers in Yorkshire could walk out before Christmas after voting for strike action

Paramedics, emergency care assistants, call handlers and other staff are now set to walk out at Yorkshire Ambulance Service, and eight other trusts in England and Wales.

The GMB said workers across the ambulance services and some NHS trusts had voted for industrial action over the Government’s four per cent pay award, which it described as another “massive real-terms pay cut”.

The pay award has increased average basic pay for qualified ambulance staff from around £35,300 in March 2022 to around £36,700.

The news follows an announcement by Unison that thousands of 999 call handlers, ambulance technicians, paramedics and their colleagues working for ambulance services in swathes of the country, including Yorkshire, will strike over pay and staffing levels.

The GMB will meet with reps in the coming days to discuss potential strike dates before Christmas.

Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers, said NHS trusts would do all they could to mitigate risks to patients, but ambulance response times will be “incredibly stretched”.

And she ruled out the widespread use of the Army, saying they wouldn’t play a “central role in keeping the ambulance service going”.

Figures show that trusts in England repeatedly miss targets for reaching patients in an emergency.

The average response time in September for the most urgent incidents, defined as calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries, was nine minutes and 19 seconds, against a seven-minute target.

Ambulances also took an average of 47 minutes and 59 seconds in September to respond to emergency calls such as burns, epilepsy and strokes, well above the 18 minute target. Ms Cordery said senior managers at trusts across the country were making sure they could provide as safe a service as possible. She said: “We know the challenges already of not having enough paramedics, call handlers available, because we’ve seen the challenges to ambulance handover times that we have at the moment in terms of not being able to transfer patients from ambulances into A&E departments and the challenges that brings when they can’t get back out on the road.

“Additional challenges on top of that, I think, will make response times incredibly stretched."

Rachel Harrison, GMB national secretary, insisted the strike was “as much about unsafe staffing levels and patient safety as it is about pay”.

She said NHS workers were “on their knees”, adding: “(They’ve) fought on the front line of a global pandemic and now face the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. No-one in the NHS takes strike action lightly – today shows just how desperate they are.”

Health Secretary Steve Barclay said the unions’ demands are “not affordable” given the current economic situation. Every one per cent pay rise for staff on the Agenda for Change contract would cost around £700m a year and the NHS had already been prioritised with record funding.