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NHS leaders must make flexible working the norm to deliver better patient care and help resolve the staffing crisis, say unions.

A coalition of 18 unions representing every part of the NHS workforce has launched a new initiative to promote more choice for staff over how, when and where they work.

The Get Ahead on Flex pledge aims to get employers to speed up their progress on working arrangements that allow more freedom. This can include team-rostering and ‘any-hours’ contracts, offering staff the hours they want to work from the outset.

Flexible working in every job

Those who sign up will commit to highlighting flexible working in every job advert. They’ll set targets to increase the number of approved requests, publish data (such as the number of requests staff make) and train all managers on how to champion choice for workers.

Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust and Milton Keynes University Hospital have already signed up to the pledge. It’s also got backing from equality campaigners including Kate Jarman, who champions flexible working the NHS, and Professor Alison Leary from London South Bank University.

At present, all NHS workers have the right to request flexible working from day one of employment and to make unlimited requests without providing a reason.

However, health unions say all too often accessing the flexibility they need is a struggle for staff, including those with childcare and other family commitments. The inconsistent approach by employers has created a postcode lottery across the NHS.

Some staff are having to accept less favourable contracts – or bank shifts, which are lower paid – in return for gaining flexible working. Employers often reject applications from workers who want to determine their own schedule and instead insist they must fit in with rigid shift patterns.

One health worker, who cares for her mother, said:

I applied for flexible working twice, but it was declined both times. I used all my annual leave to have weekends off [to care for her mother]. It meant I had no holidays or time away for me for several years until we got a different manager.

Raising standards

The health unions say flexible working should become the standard, to help attract and retain experienced staff. Tens of thousands of workers have already left the health service due to poor work-life balance, according to data.

Get Ahead on Flex is also aiming to ensure managers know how to handle requests in a way that benefits individual staff. The campaign encourages them to take the initiative to redesign jobs and services to better meet the needs of staff and patients.

The benefits of flexible working, such as increased performance and higher quality care for patients, are well-understood at the policy level. But the unions say financial and other pressures on the health service get in the way of real change.

In England, a new standard on flexible working is expected to be introduced for NHS employers in April as part of the government’s 10-year workforce plan.

Trusts who sign up and meet the commitments of the Get Ahead on Flex pledge will already have a head start on implementing the new standards, say the unions.

And in 2027, tougher statutory requirements on flexible working are due to come into force for all employers.

Chair of the NHS unions and UNISON head of health Helga Pile said:

Too many NHS staff are struggling to balance work with other parts of their life including caring commitments. This affects their health and well-being, and forces many to consider jobs elsewhere.

The NHS has long talked about the importance of improving flexible working options. However, old-fashioned attitudes and rigid one-size-fits all shift patterns are still getting in the way.

This pledge provides a real opportunity to improve working life for staff and give patients a better service.

Campaign lead for the NHS unions on flexible working and Society of Radiographers head of industrial relations Leandre Archer said:

Flexible working shouldn’t depend on which employer you work for or who your manager happens to be.

NHS staff deserve fair, consistent access to flexibility so they can deliver the best possible care without sacrificing their own wellbeing.

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The Get Ahead on Flex pledge is a vital step towards ending the postcode lottery and making flexible working a genuine reality across the NHS.

Featured image via the Canary

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Labour is in deep trouble with Black voters. Operation Black Vote (OBV) chair David Weaver warns the party is ‘accepting the normalisation of racism’. This isn’t just a polling dip, it is a fundamental collapse of trust from its voters.

Weaver highlights how to government’s plans to restrict jury trials will ‘heighten, normalise and embed’ racial disproportionality. This is not a new concern for those watching the party’s trajectory. We’ve long been aware of how the current leadership has prioritised pro-business optics over the safety of marginalised communities.

Labour have a hierarchy of racism

We’ve all long known of the hierarchy of racism within Labour. In the 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by the party itself, confirmed this toxic culture. It found that Labour was failing to treat all forms of racism with equal seriousness.

Martin Forde KC detailed how Black and Asian MPs and members faced specific, targeted abuse which was often ignored or downplayed by Labour’s own bureaucracy. The reported stated that antisemitism was being used as a factional weapon while other forms of racism – specifically anti-Black racism and Islamophobia – were being systemically ignored.

The Labour Files and subsequent investigations revealed a judiciary as well as a party structure which often treats Black and Brown voices as disposable when they conflict with the party’s central narratives. This hierarchy means that whilst some forms of prejudice are rightly tackled, others are normalised, creating an environment where Black voters feel increasingly ignored and alienated.

Juries are out on justice

Restricting juries means moving the UK towards judge-only trials, removing a massive safety net for Black people. In England and Wales, only 1% of judges are Black and removing the public oversight of a jury hands total power to an overwhelmingly white judiciary.

In drug offenses the odds of getting a custodial sentence are 140% higher for Black people than for white offenders with similar histories. Juries act as a filter for prejudice that single judges simply do not provide.

This reform ignores the racial reality of the UK justice system. Juries often act as the last line of defence for Black people against state overreach. By gutting this right, the Labour party is intensifying this systematic bias that already sees Black people given longer sentences.

We are not protecting Black people from the prejudices of biased white judges. A University of Manchester study, Racial Bias and the Bench found that 95% of legal professionals believe racial bias plays a role in the justice system. Furthermore, 56% of those professionals reported witnessing a judge show racial bias towards a defendant.

At a time when racial tensions are growing and white supremacy is on the rise in the UK, it’s fucked up to think that Labour thinks removing juries is going to be a good idea.

The Race Equality Act betrayal

Confidence is also eroding because of the lack of urgency surrounding the Race Equality Act. Labour promised a landmark Race Equality Act to mandate ethnicity pay gap reporting for large employers. However, the legislation has faced repeated delays.

Campaigners have accused Labour of stalling out of a fear of political pushback, with the party’s promises being nothing more than performative bollocks. Labour seems to love using Black struggles for campaign photo-ops but slows the actual legislation progression behind the scenes.

This stalling is a material failure. Closing the ethnicity pay gap could add £37bn to the UK’s annual GDP. Labour is failing to act on these promised protections whilst simultaneously fast-tracking racist jury reforms, sending a clear message about whose safety and financial stability it actually values.

The marginal seat risk

Black voters backed Labour more than any other group in 2024, yet that loyalty is not reflected in the party leadership. Weaver warns that support is now wavering in key marginal seats.

We saw how the 2024 elections produced a surge in marginal seats, with 115 being won by a margin of 5% or less. In constituencies such as Hendon, where the winning margin was a tiny 0.04% – just 15 votes – a small shift in Black voter turnout is enough to change the result. Especially when the white population of places such as Hendon only equate to 50%.  So why the fuck are Labour spitting in the face of their most loyal voter demographic?

By betraying Black voters, Labour risk putting marginal seats on the line.

Labour’s strategy of putting people of colour in high positions without changing the underlying systems is failing. It gives legitimacy to institutional racism rather than dismantling it. If Labour continues to ignore these warnings it will lose more than just votes. It will lose its moral authority to stand for equality.

Will the party finally stop taking Black people’s votes for granted? Or will it let its most loyal voter demographic walk away?

Featured image via National Diversity Awards

Dr Emmanuel Igwe is lead economist at the Prosperity Institute.

One may be forgiven for being fatigued by Liz Truss’ repeated assertion that ‘the Blob’ derailed her short-lived premiership in 2022.

Yet, in a recent appearance on the Daily T, she made a thought-provoking comment amidst her usual diatribes. When Tim Stanley challenged her about recent criticisms levelled by broadcast media and colleagues in the Conservative party which described her proposed tax cuts as “unfunded”, and thereby fiscally reckless, Truss dismissed the entire framing. “Unfunded tax cuts” she said, “are just a left-wing attack line”.

This may seem like merely another bellicose remark, attempting to wave away a substantive criticism with mere rhetoric. But, placing any reservations readers may have about Mrs. Truss to one side, we are faced with a serious point: is the idea of ‘unfunded tax cuts’ one we should accept without question?

Accepting the idea of “unfunded tax cuts” implies that the current level of taxation is the natural baseline, and that people holding onto more of their money is an extravagance that needs to be justified. Such framing, championed by the Treasury and associated independent bodies, is now unanimously shared across the political spectrum. Even Reform Party’s new shadow chancellor, Robert Jenrick proposed that a Reform Government would only cut taxes if there is sufficient fiscal headroom to do so.

At what point did tax cuts cease to be a distinctive feature of the British economic Right? Somewhere between kowtowing to the bean counters at the Treasury and the need to court votes from a public made allergic to wealth it has lost its way. The policy objective that defined the Thatcher years, Reaganomics, New Zealand’s Rogernomics, and Australia’s Hawke-Keating administration is now derided as inherently fiscally irresponsible by many Tories, as well as their flagship newspaper.

Granted, there are clear reasons to criticise the ill-fated 2022 mini-budget, though not the ones so often touted. The Energy Price Guarantee, for instance, a £40 billion subsidy which capped household bills at £2,500 distorting price signals, was an interventionist policy which command economies would envy. These errors were compounded by the institutional warfare unleashed in response to Truss dismissing the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and disregarding the OBR forecast, damaging market confidence in the process.

Nonetheless, as the Bank of England admitted in 2024, the mini-budget only accounted for nearly 50 per cent of the turbulence that led to the fall in gilt prices, with the remaining 50 per cent attributed to its lacklustre regulations on liability-driven investment strategies used in pension funds at the time. In other words, although the mini-budget catalysed the fall in gilt prices (for which Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng deserve the blame), the Bank had created the underlying conditions which made such a fall highly likely anyway.

The distinction between the catastrophic execution of the mini-budget and the core principles of tax-cutting supported in supply-side economics matters. There has never been a pre-requisite for spending cuts to be identified before tax cuts are made, because the tax base is expanded through tax reductions.

What follows from tax cuts is economic growth stimulated by capital formation and a smaller state. This is what was witnessed in the United States during the Reagan years, in the Hawke-Keating administration in Australia, in New Zealand’s Rogernomics and in Britain during the Thatcher government. Across the board, drastic tax cuts resulted in economic growth, all of whom justified their premise on the fact that higher taxes in the 1960s and 70s stifled economic growth, and cutting taxes enabled enterprise, that engine of economic growth.

Demanding that tax cuts need to be supposedly “funded” suggests that the money people earn is the property of the State. To believe this is to accept the baseline assumptions of communism and Liz Truss is right to point that out. It should be noted here that the other side of the Left-wing position—that is the Modern Monetary Theorists (i.e. heterodox Left)—would posit that governments with sovereign control of their currencies only need taxation to control inflation, stating that there should be no limit to government spending.

By contrast, the conservative position recognises peoples’ income as theirs, with taxes being only a necessary contribution to the maintenance of certain common assets, which has broad consent and ought to be clearly justified and constantly reviewed by those who wish to take it. Economic growth, therefore, is achieved when there is a healthy relationship between private enterprise, individual incentives, and the State — with productivity and capital formation being stimulated rather than the private sector being continuously crowded out by the public sector.

Thus, the OBR was right to be questioned about its reach and its poor methodology, as I have suggested elsewhere. Regarding its modelling on taxation, its static approach fails to account for both the changes which lower taxes cause in consumer and market behaviour and the dynamic supply-side responses (e.g. growth in productivity, labour supply, and investment). Thereby, the OBR perpetuates an institutional narrative that favours higher taxes, undermining long-term economic growth in the process.

The error of the Truss mini-budget was not tax cuts. Rather, it was the accompanying subsidies which posed distortionary effects as well as the absolute disregard for fiscal institutions. The lesson learned here should not be that tax cuts are risky. Instead, it should be that the relationship between the government and the OBR needs reform such that the government is neither beholden to its opinion, nor totally dismissive of any commentary it may have on the state of the economy.

In a period where government spending continues to expand, the calamity of the Truss mini-budget has emboldened critics of a major tenet of supply-side economics that was central to economic growth in Britain, the United States, New Zealand and Australia in the 80s and mid-90s. Hence, we are stuck in a bind where the reigning viewpoint is that government spending is at the heart of the economy, with each state spending priority a sacred cow that must not be desecrated.

For the Right to show it has not bought into the narrative of unfunded tax cuts it needs to be emphatic on the benefits of lower taxation as a vehicle for both collective and individual economic freedom and audacious in its pursuit to achieve it.

Brandon To is a Politics graduate from UCL and a Hong Kong BN(O) immigrant settled in Harrow.

I am writing this from Japan, where I have spent the past week rediscovering what it means to be unmistakably in someone else’s country.

The cultural signals are relentless. Bowing — so much that my back may never recover. Escalator etiquette (standing on the left, how deeply unsettling for a Briton). The absolute silence on public transport. The choreography of politeness in even the most mundane transactions.

Japan has an unshakeable confidence in its own way of doing things.

But something else struck me this time. Compared to my last visit over a decade ago, there are far more foreign faces. Not just tourists, but immigrants.

In Tokyo, I found myself speaking to a bank manager from Denmark in an izakaya (the Japanese equivalent of a pub), who was heading to his weekly onsen retreat. In Kyoto, I chatted with two Malaysian exchange students in a tea house. Convenience store workers, hotel staff, restaurant servers… many were from South or Southeast Asia.

Yet what surprised me was not their presence.

It was how unmistakably Japanese they were.

They spoke fluent Japanese (at least according to my Japanese friend). They bowed instinctively. They navigated the rituals of politeness with ease. They did not appear to be living adjacent to Japanese society; they were part of it.

And it made me reflect on a simple truth about immigration that Britain has spent years avoiding.

There is a spectrum, from tourist to student to worker to permanent resident to citizen. The duration differs. The legal status differs. But the core principle is the same: when you enter another country, adapt to it.

Integration is not an optional extra that begins after settlement. It is the starting condition of being a guest, be it two weeks or two decades.

Japan is unapologetic about this. If you wish to live and work there, you are expected to learn the language properly, respect public order, and internalise their etiquette. That expectation is not framed as hostility. It is framed as respect — both for the host country and for those who came before you.

It is, in effect, a country with faith in its own culture.

Britain once had that confidence too. We are a country famous for etiquette, from holding doors open to queuing instinctively. But more importantly, we are defined by deeper civic habits: respect for the rule of law, free speech, fairness in public life, and tolerance rooted in shared norms.

Where we faltered was not in allowing immigration. It was in losing clarity about the need for integration.

For too long, governments of different stripes treated migration primarily as an economic instrument. Integration was assumed to happen organically. Cultural cohesion was dismissed as either automatic or irrelevant. And don’t forget there’s the liberal flank that always confuse integration with “ assimilation “, framing any discussion of it as racist and xenophobic.

The result, in some areas, has been parallel lives rather than shared ones. When any group, especially religious ones, begins to “ claim “ certain neighbourhoods, and behave as if British freedoms such as free speech apply selectively, integration has clearly failed.

That failure has fuelled understandable public frustration. It has also created space for parties like Reform UK to argue that the only solution is a blanket hostility towards immigration.

But here is where we must think carefully.

Reform’s instinct is blunt. It risks suggesting that if you do not look British, you may never truly be British. That is not a confident nationalism; it is a brittle one.

A country unsure of itself excludes by default. A country secure in its identity integrates by expectation.

The Conservative answer should not be a return to liberal complacency. Nor should it be a race to outflank Reform on rhetorical hardness, a competition we will never win, because they can always go further.

In this immigration debate, the Conservative answer should be integration.

If you come to Britain, whether as a student, a worker, or a permanent migrant, you are expected to adapt. Learn English properly. Obey the law. Respect social norms. Participate in civic life. Contribute economically.

Those who refuse should not remain.

But those who do integrate should be more than welcome. They should be recognised as strengthening the country, and as Conservatives, we should actively speak up for them.

This is not “weakness in the face of the immigration crisis”. It is the ability to distinguish. To welcome the contributors, and stop the disturbers.

Japan’s lesson is not that it has no immigration. It is that it manages immigration with cultural clarity.

Britain does not need to become Japan. Our history, our diversity, and our institutions are different. But we do need to recover the confidence to say that British norms matter, and that adapting to them is the price of entry. That is the middle path between open-door policy and blanket hostility, and if the Conservative Party wishes to win again, it must articulate that difference clearly.

Welcome to those who adapt. Exit for those who refuse. It is just common sense, and it is long overdue.