Sussex ambulance staff ballot for strike over pay deal

South Coast Ambulance Service workers ballot for strike over pay

Nearly 250 ambulance workers demand a better deal

The workers, including paramedics and emergency call handlers serving Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, West Sussex, Kent, Surrey and North East Hampshire, are angry over the four per cent NHS Agenda for Change pay award, which was imposed last month.

Unite union said the award falls well short of the real rate of inflation, RPI, which stands at 12.6 per cent.

The imposed award meant most staff received an increase of around £100 per month in their pay packet.

The ballot for strike action opened last week and ends on November 30.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Over more than a decade, NHS workers’ wages have been eroded, even as workloads became increasingly unmanageable. Now with soaring living costs, the situation is critical."

Unite regional officer Jesika Parmer said: “The anger amongst our South Coast Ambulance Service members at rapidly diminishing living standards, increasingly threadbare services and ever more unsustainable workloads, is such that we are balloting for strike action.

“The government must put forward a better pay deal and one that does some not come out of existing, soon to be horrifically squeezed, budgets.”

In a recent consultative ballot over pay, Unite SECAmb members voted by 89 per cent to strike.