HEALTH minister Eluned Morgan is being annoyingly vague over the nurses’ strikes, a dispute as much about desperation over understaffing and consequent threats to patient-safety as about pay. 

This, then, is industrial action stemming from selflessness not, as most news outlets are carelessly putting it, simply a “pay dispute”.

The health minister claims lamely that, without additional funding from Westminster, the government is “not able to make an increased pay offer without risking a reduction in services.” 

Does this mean that, with more money, Cardiff would offer more? Maybe, maybe not. She leaves us to guess. Either way, as a position statement this is feeble stuff, showing not a scrap of empathy, determination or inventiveness. 

The minister’s limp-wristed response comes in the midst of repeated warnings by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) about risks to patients as a result of insufficient nursing staff and a struggling, exhausted workforce. Is the health minister listening to the RCN when it points to “an increase in patient-mortality when there aren’t enough staff on shift”? 

As an Aberystwyth nurse, who didn’t want to be named, told me: “It’s hard for people outside the profession to understand the strain we’re under. Quite honestly, it’s dreadful. On a personal level, many of us really struggle to survive financially, particularly if you’re in private rented accommodation in the town, where costs for a modest flat or a house-share can be totally crippling.

“Added to housing and all the day-to-day spending, there’s then a whole extra level of stress when shifts are understaffed, and then it gets really hard to look after patients to a standard we desperately want to maintain. But at times like that you can’t, because you’re running yourself ragged. 

“You can’t go on like that, and then everyone’s the loser. The nurse gets chronically exhausted and the patients miss out on the degree of attention they need.

“And then you sort of look on in despair when you read about the colossal salaries and pay increases going to senior people in local government round here. There’s no fairness.” 

Eluned Morgan must urgently heed such testimony, and the government must exercise ingenuity, as has happened in Scotland, to punch a way through the impasse the NHS dispute has become. If necessary, as a last resort, it could decide to raise more of its own revenue for this vital area of public spending. 

The scale of nurse shortages is sobering, with currently 3,000 registered vacancies in the Wales NHS, up from 1,719 in 2021, and the problem exacerbated by nurses feeling themselves forced out not only of the NHS but out of the profession altogether. The reasons these departing professionals give are stark and simple and repeated over and over again: “We’re worried about patient-safety, and we can’t afford to live.”

Almost as an aside, Eluned Morgan needs in addition to remember that current pay offers run to a meagre maximum of about four per cent. Even if increases ended up close to the present 10.7 per cent inflation rate, that would have no relevance in terms of inflation growth because, as economists point out, there would be no consequent increase in the price of providing health services.

Ultimately, this is a crisis caused by bad government, both by the Labour administration in Cardiff, which has held back from engaging sufficiently vigorously with the nurses’ predicament, and by a basically indifferent Westminster.

LLOYDS Bank plans to shut its Lampeter branch next year “because customers are using it less often.” 

Such simple and brutal logic really can’t be tolerated. Lloyds Banking Group knows quite well that branch closures by it and other banks are snowballing and are causing immense hardship for people living in small, and not so small, country towns throughout Wales, as well as in rural parts of Britain as a whole.

Ceredigion MP Ben Lake points to legislation going through Parliament that would strengthen the law so as to protect community banking services, including the all-important matter of ATM access to cash, and says he’ll challenge the Lloyds plan to axe its Lampeter branch. Good, and let’s hope it’s a very vigorous challenge.

He could do worse than remind the bank of a recent extremely upbeat quote by its group chief executive, Charlie Nunn, in which he “reflects on the first six months of the year and how we’re shaping up for the rest of 2022 and beyond.”

His announcement of “a strong financial performance” for the first six months of 2022 could indeed be taken as conclusive evidence of the bank’s unstressed ability to guarantee the security of its Lampeter branch, which occupies an elegant Georgian building in the town centre.

“Net income of £8.5 billion,” Charlie pointed out, “is up 12 per cent on the prior year as we have seen higher interest rates and a continued recovery in customer activity and growth in our business.”

Right. No problem then. And certainly every reason for Lloyds not to abandon a town where it’s an integral, and probably indispensable, part of business and individual economies.