Despite Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s efforts, the British Medical Association (BMA) has announced this afternoon that the doctors’ strikes are on. From 7 a.m. this Friday until 7 a.m. next Wednesday, medics across England will stage a walkout – the first of Keir Starmer’s premiership – over pay disputes. The announcement by the doctors’ union comes after Streeting wrote to members today in an 11th-hour attempt to halt the strikes and conduct more talks about improving working conditions. It was to no avail, however, with resident doctors deciding today that Streeting’s offers simply ‘did not go far enough’.
Resident doctors decided that Streeting’s offers simply ‘did not go far enough’
As I wrote earlier today, this means that up to 50,000 medics are preparing to walk out for better pay in action that could affect up to a quarter of a million patients. Previous industrial action by the union saw 44 days of strikes between 2023 and 2024, resulting in 1.5 million cancelled appointments and a cost to the health service of £1.5 billion. But while in previous years, NHS England operated a ‘Christmas Day policy’ where everything bar urgent care was cancelled during walkouts, this time around health service bosses have urged hospitals to keep elective operations going ‘to the fullest extent possible’ and only cancel in ‘exceptional circumstances’. The BMA has hit out at the NHS over the change in approach, warning that it could seriously impact the safety of both emergency and elective patients.
In a statement released by the BMA this afternoon, the union’s resident doctors committee co-chairs Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt claim that they have continued talks with the Health Secretary over the last few days in a bid to come to a solution on the ongoing disputes. ‘We have always said that no doctor wants to strike and all it would take to avoid it is a credible path to pay restoration offered by the government,’ they added. ‘We came to talks in good faith, keen to explore real solutions to the problems facing resident doctors today.’ But while both the union reps and Streeting had described the discussions as ‘constructive’, Streeting’s refusal to reopen negotiations on this year’s pay uplift of 5.4 per cent has proven the sticking point.
The Health Secretary had been open to other ways of improving working conditions, from changes to pensions, student loan debt, exam fees and even career progression. And while dishing out a higher pay packet was off the table this year, there had been suggestions from the Department of Health that greater sums could be offered in years to come. ‘It doesn’t mean we’ll never be able to move on pay in the future,’ Streeting’s parliamentary private secretary (and surgeon) Zubir Ahmed told me.
Yet despite discussions involving various aspects of doctors’ working conditions, the BMA co-chairs concluded that the government wasn’t on the same page. Indeed the union’s statement suggests that while student loan debt ‘forgiveness’ had been floated, this wasn’t part of Streeting’s latest offer.
While we were happy to discuss non-pay issues that affect doctors’ finances we have always been upfront that this is at its core a pay dispute. The simplest and most direct means of restoring the more than a fifth of our pay that has eroded since 2008 is to raise our pay. While we were keen to discuss other items, it was made very clear by the government that this obvious course of action was going to remain off the table.
Student debt and the cost of training remain crushing burdens on the finances of resident doctors. We had hoped that there would be enough new ideas about relieving these burdens that we could make some progress in these talks. Disappointingly, what we saw would not have been significant enough to change the day-to-day financial situation for our members. The non-pay aspects of last year’s pay deal have still not been delivered, which has shaken the confidence of our members that any further non-pay elements would be honoured… We want to keep talking – but we don’t accept we can’t talk about pay.
The Labour government will be keen to limit the number of strike days as much as possible, as walkout could wipe out the progress made on waiting lists. But given the tight pursestrings of the Treasury and Streeting’s firmness that this year pay negotiations are off the table, more creative thinking will be required to alleviate the current stand-off.
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