Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:54 pm on 17 January 2023.
Diolch, Llywydd. With the news of the teachers' strike on 1 February and the failure of the talks with the health unions last week, public sector strikes in Wales are widening and deepening. What's the strategy of the Government, First Minister, to prevent this winter of discontent continuing on into spring and into summer? Is it your policy that you're going to offer the one-off payment that you referred to in the case of the NHS workforce to the teaching workforce, for example? But, even if you are, then would you not accept that that doesn't get to grips with the central point about this public pay dispute, that as far as the public service unions are concerned, it comes after a decade of erosion of real-terms pay? And are you prepared to acknowledge, in the case of both the health and the teaching unions, that the recommendations of the pay review body relate to evidence taken in late 2021, early 2022, before the Russian-Ukraine war when inflation was about 4 per cent? By the time you accepted the recommendations, the cost of living was already nearing 10 per cent, so is there not a case, First Minister, for asking the pay bodies to revisit their work, and for you as a Government to agree to abide by any higher award if they were to do so on that basis?