In the latest development of ongoing disputes that have endured for months, Wiltshire Health and Care (WHC) nurses who are members of UNISON picketed outside Five Rivers Leisure Centre to protest their exclusion from the “NHS backlog bonus”.

Three picket lines were organised across Wiltshire on Wednesday, February 14 from 7am to 11am in Salisbury, Warminster and Chippenham.

Those in Salisbury met at the mini-roundabout where Hulse Road meets Ashley Road and Butts Road near Five Rivers Leisure Centre.

Salisbury Journal: Wiltshire Health and Care employees picketed on Wednesday, February 14 to protest the exclusion of

Around 10 people were in attendance, including former Salisbury mayor Councillor Tom Corbin representing the ASLEF train drivers’ union and the Salisbury and District Trade Unions Council in solidarity with the nurses.

Cllr Corbin said: “[The nurses] are looking for a resolution for money that they’d been assured they were going to have and then suddenly it’s no longer happening.

“It’s just a source of frustration for everyone here. Nobody here actually wants to be on the picket line, they want to be working.”

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Along with a pay rise, which WHC employees did receive, more than one million NHS workers also received a one-off backlog bonus in June, worth at least £1,250 per employee and increasing with experience and pay band.

However, WHC nurses were excluded from this lump sum bonus due to the technicality of how the service is legally organised on paper, making it ineligible to meet the criteria of an Annex 1 employer.

In 2015, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust and Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust joined together to create WHC as a limited liability partnership (LLC) to enable the three organisations to make a joint bid for the Adults Community Services Contract, which national legislation would have otherwise prohibited.

The arrangement left community care nurses in Wiltshire in the rather bizarre position of not technically being NHS employees, but employees of an LLP entirely owned by NHS entities. WHC nurses collaborate with staff at the hospitals, discussing the best regiment of care for patients, handle discharges, and even wear uniforms that say NHS, but are, legally speaking, the employees of a non-NHS LLP.

For many community care nurses in Wiltshire, the implications of WHC’s status as a non-NHS LLP did not become apparent until after they learned that they would be considered ineligible for the backlog bonus.

Vanessa Cole, 54, who has worked for WHC for two-and-a-half years, said: “That’s when I first realised — and we realised that all our friends in the NHS in the hospitals - they got the whole pay deal and we only got half of the pay deal.”