For the first time in NHS history, junior doctors and consultants in England will strike together for four days this September. The joint strikes, announced by the BMA, will be in addition to other separate days of industrial action for both junior doctors and consultants. Health secretary Steve Barclay has slammed the BMA’s announcement as ‘callous and calculated’ while BMA representatives have criticised the government for ‘refusing to negotiate’.
The decision by the doctors’ union comes after junior doctors voted today to continue industrial action for another six months. Since March, junior doctors have had 19 days of strikes over pay disputes. To end the strikes, the government has offered doctors a 6 per cent pay rise along with a one-off payment of £1,250. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called this rise his ‘final’ offer.
Medics though are looking for full pay restoration to 2008 levels, which would mean a pay uplift of 35 per cent, including inflation. Co-chairs of the junior doctor committee, Dr Rob Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, claim that ‘managing the strikes’ has already cost the government £1 billion — a figure the union reps say is what it would cost to settle the pay dispute. The co-chairs have said that this latest announcement sends ‘a single message, loud and clear, to the government: we are not going anywhere’. The doctors continue:
Rishi Sunak now has nowhere to hide. There can be no more delaying, no more wasting time with impositions of pay deals, no more declarations that strikes must end before even stepping in the room with us. If he does not come to the table with a credible offer on pay, he will face another six months of strike action. And another six months after, and after that, if he continues to ignore us. He knows the stakes, he knows our ask and he now knows our resolve.
Consultants, meanwhile, are looking for inflationary pay rises as well as pension changes. Chair of the BMA consultants committee, Dr Vishal Sharma, has reiterated junior doctor concerns about the government’s engagement, saying that ‘never before have NHS consultants and junior doctors been forced to strike together for days on end, but that is where we have been brought by this government’. ‘Our message is simple,’ he urges Sunak. ‘Work with us.’
The health secretary has called the result ‘extremely disappointing’, estimating that ‘nearly 900,000 appointments have been cancelled due to strike action’ already. In retaliation to union claims that the government is not cooperating with the doctors’ union, Barclay says that his ‘door is always open to discuss how we can work together with NHS staff to improve their working lives’, but that the latest government pay offer is ‘final’.
While consultants have voted in favour of industrial action, it remains to be seen just how many will follow through with this walkout. One senior medic in England described how his colleagues are already facing severe patient backlogs since the pandemic and that it is harder, in practical terms, for senior doctors to strike — given how much the service relies on them. Even if some senior doctors who voted to strike end up crossing the picket line, this won’t reflect the general mood of NHS consultants, many of whom are reportedly ‘planning their exit strategy’ from the health service.
In Scotland meanwhile, the government managed to avert junior doctor strikes by offering medics a 12.4 per cent pay uplift for this year, backdated to April, as well as guaranteeing a minimum pay rise in line with the rate of inflation over the next three years. First Minister Humza Yousaf says that the Scottish government has offered to mediate talks between the BMA and the UK government. Dr Laurenson has said that junior doctors in England would not accept the same deal if offered to them by the Tory government on the basis that there is not a ‘working relationship’ between the UK government and the English BMA.
What does this mean for patients? England’s NHS will operate with ‘Christmas day’ cover over the joint strike days — which means that only emergency care will be available alongside a small amount of routine work. Drs Laurenson and Trivedi say the onus is on the government to make their mandate for strike action more limited by coming to the table. But with Sunak’s opposition to further public sector pay rises, it seems unlikely that an end to the doctors’ strikes is in sight.
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