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As well as teachers and prison officers, some NHS workers will be entitled to salary increases of up to 3.1 percent. Nurses were not included in the latest rises because, along with other health workers, they agreed to a separate three-year deal in 2018. Under that, they are due a pay rise next April, but unions want the Government to show its appreciation for NHS staff by bringing it forward to this year. The agreement is said this year to have seen the average nurse receiving an average increase of 4.4 percent.

However, experts say many frontline nurses are in Band 5 and received a rise of only 1.65 percent in April.

The Unite union’s branch at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in central London joined Keep Our NHS Public and Nurses United to hold last night’s march.

It saw Whitehall awash with frontline nurses dressed in scrubs – a familiar sight during the past months of the pandemic.

Many held placards aloft emblazoned with slogans like “Clapping doesn’t pay my bills” and “Happy nurses equals healthy patients” in reference to the outpouring of love and affection shown towards them by the public and politicians after the greatest crisis in NHS history.

Nurse Iain Wilson said: “Things can’t improve in the NHS without more staff to care for our ageing population and we won’t have more staff until existing staff are trusted and valued, so that more people want to join us.

“After everything we’ve done, we deserve better – and a pay rise should be the start.”

The socially distanced event started outside St Thomas’, where in April Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent three nights in intensive care with the virus.

It culminated in a series of speeches outside Downing Street.

Rebecca Reid, a 27-year-old London-based nurse from Scotland, said she would extend an invite to the Prime Minister to join her on a shift in the event of a second spike of Covid-19, but she did not think he would accept, adding: “I think he’s a coward.”

She went on: “We worked through an unprecedented pandemic. There are things I’m never going to forget.

“I think the general feeling is anger. We’re angry.

“We’ve been let down by our Government.

“As a profession, we looked after the Prime Minister himself. He’s seen how brilliant we can be. And this is the reward we get. It feels like a kick in the teeth.”

The event was at the centre of a series of protests around the country by NHS workers demanding an immediate pay rise.

Nursing unions claim that since 2010 NHS workers have experienced around a 20 percent pay cut in real terms.

According to Unite, a Band 5 NHS nurse is more than £6,000 worse off today than 10 years ago, due to the failure of salaries to keep up with the rate of inflation.

In London, low paid NHS staff are finding it increasingly difficult to afford high rents and increasing numbers are leaving the profession.

A Royal College of Nursing survey showed 36 percent were considering quitting.

Of these 61 percent said pay was the primary factor.

There are now around 40,000 nursing vacancies in England alone.

Mark Boothroyd, a nurse at St Thomas’, said: “Despite all our sacrifices, the Government has not included nurses in the pay deal for public sector workers.

“We have worked masses of overtime, isolated from our families, and lost over 540 of our colleagues to Covid-19.

“We are not valued. NHS workers deserve a pay rise after a decade of austerity for the 20 percent pay cut since 2010 and to address the 40,000 vacancies across the NHS that puts patients at risk.”

Dame Donna Kinnair, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “The Government must urgently bring forward the NHS pay round and a resulting significant pay rise for NHS staff. Asking them to wait until 2021 is unacceptable.

“Worryingly, our survey of staff showed that more than a third were considering leaving the profession, with pay cited far more than any other reason.

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