The government is under renewed pressure from unions, on the eve of the TUC annual conference, with civil servants threatening to co-ordinate a series of strikes with other unhappy public sector workers this winter.

The Public and Commercial Services will ballot 270,000 civil servants, covering every government department and agency, for a “rolling programme of industrial action” planned to start in November to the beginning of February.

The UK’s largest civil service union, PCS, said that it was talking to teachers and college lecturers who are also in dispute over government pay policies, about co-ordinating action.

Around one million public sector workers could be involved in industrial action if local government workers, who have already rejected a 2.45 percent pay offer, joined the strike, said Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary.

Today [Monday] the TUC Congress in Brighton will debate a motion that will call for co-ordinated industrial action by public sector unions.

So far this year there have already been strikes by local government workers, coastguards, immigration officers, driving test examiners and passport, jobcentre, customs and tax staff, all of whom have been angered by the prime ministers insistence that public sector pay rises should be kept in line with the Treasury’s 2 percent inflation target as measured by the consumer price index. Unions argue that the retail price index, currently rising at 5 percent, is a better guide to living costs.

Mr Serwotka said that a quarter of the union’s members earned less than £16,500. Around 20 percent of civil servants are at the top of their pay band, so would receive no further increase this year.

He said: “The government says it is on the side of hard-pressed families, yet compound the financial misery for hundreds of thousands of hard working people by pursuing an unjust pay policy.

“The government is out of touch with the people who keep this country running and who deliver the everyday things we take for granted. Our members have grown increasingly frustrated by the government peddling the myth that they are the causes of inflation when they see their food, fuel and housing costs soar.”

Keith Sonnet, deputy general of Unison, the largest public sector union agreed, saying that there was a “huge level of unhappiness” among public sector workers that could severely damage Labour at the next general election. “We expect a Labour government to do more,’’ he said.