Our Unite union had talks at the Acas conciliation service on Monday. We got an email from St Mungo’s on feedback from that last night. The new offer is £1,200 per year consolidated for everyone under the position of a service manager.

But it removes the backdated element of the pay deal. And it’s removed other things like extra annual leave and converting this into pay.

It also removes freezes on senior executives for some reason. Talks are still ongoing, but we’ve had emails from managers for Unite members to strongly encourage for this to be voted on. But it’s even less than last week’s offer.

As we’ve lost the backdated pay it’s not even worth discussing. The only thing is that this is £150 extra a year than the last—4 percent in total.

The members’ meeting on Tuesday was a bit split. Unite wants to go back to Acas on Thursday and a lot of us want to wait for that before deciding what to do next. Some people who have stayed in work are really vocal about wanting this over. But the general feeling is that we need to keep going and there is more to get out of this.

That’s why we will stay strong. The pickets and demos have been so positive and there’s so much energy—we are more determined than ever.

We’ve been targeting donors the last couple of weeks. Our latest, Mace, is a new major donor that a lot of people aren’t happy about. Our protests have proved quite effective because the donors are quite ruffled.

And although people disagree in the meetings, it’s all handled really well. We are all listening to each other. There’s reasons why people don’t come or stay out, and it’s positive that we can have discussions that don’t descend into chaos.

St Mungo’s is moving agency staff so it can bypass the court restrictions that came in on 10 August. In our members’ meeting, we asked how much money they’re saving by not paying staff during the strike.

We know agency workers have been leading on shifts, which would never usually happen. We don’t know if they’ve been DBS checked or whether the commissioners are aware of what their money is being spent on.

We’ll see what happens in upcoming talks, but we know CEO Emma Haddad is “crossing her fingers” for this to be sorted. We need her to sort it.