A Lancashire health board has tried to make staff pay for their own CRB checks, which have to be renewed every three years. The staff, understandably, are rebelling and refusing to pay.

Whoever has to pay, the NHS and healthcare as a whole will lose. The cost of repeatedly CRB checking NHS staff at a time of cuts becomes ever more absurd. We need to turn this union-management dispute into a questioning of the policy of repeated CRB checks within the NHS as a whole.