Junior doctors offered 22% pay rise by government to end strike action
Doctors have been on strike 11 times since December 2022, demanding a 35% pay rise.
Monday 29 July 2024 16:30, UK
The government has offered junior doctors in England a 22.3% pay rise to end strike action.
The British Medical Association's (BMA) junior doctors committee has agreed to put the offer to its members, and if it is accepted it will end months of walkouts over pay.
The pay rise offer will take place over two years, according to The Times.
It constitutes a pay rise of between 8.1% and 10.3% as well as a backdated 4.05% increase for 2023-24.
That is on top of a 6% pay rise for 2024-2025, topped up by a £1,000 payment - an equivalent to a pay rise of between 7% and 9%.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an offer this afternoon when she made a major speech about spending cuts to plug what she said was a "£20bn black hole" inherited from the Conservative government.
Junior doctors have been pushing for a 35% pay rise to make up for what they say is 15 years of below inflation salary increases.
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Reeves told MPs: "Industrial action in the NHS alone cost the taxpayer £1.7bn last year.
"That is why I am pleased to announce today that the government has agreed an offer to the junior doctors which the BMA are recommending to their members."
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The cost of cancelled operations and appointments due to the industrial action has cost the NHS in England an estimated £3bn.
Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser to the Centre for Economic and Business Research, told Sky News the government "probably can" afford a 22.3% pay hike for junior doctors as it is less than the 35% increase they have been demanding which was estimated at costing between £1bn and £2bn.
"If you look at the cost to the NHS and basically to taxpayers on all those appointments that didn't happen since December 2022, that has been added up to around £3bn anyway," she said.
"So we're much better off paying than having anything similar, sort of continuing, you know, over the next year or two. So, yes, we can afford it."
Government hoping it has taken just three weeks to end dispute
Resolving the junior doctors' dispute was a top priority for the incoming health secretary.
And it seems it has taken Wes Streeting just three weeks to end more than 18 months of crippling strike action.
He had to fix this if the government wanted to make any progress on Labour's pre-election health pledges, namely cutting the elective backlog.
With the junior doctors out on strike it is impossible to make any headway on the waiting list.
Mr Streeting said he wants to create an extra 40,000 appointments a week to reduce the number of people waiting to be seen. And he said he would deliver these with the existing workforce.
To meet this target he needs his junior doctors on side. Goodwill is in extremely short supply among healthcare workers.
They are exhausted after working through the pandemic and then a cycle of winter crises.
By agreeing to move towards pay restoration the government has shown it values its junior doctors.
This will help to stop the haemorrhaging of trained doctors leaving the NHS for more lucrative work overseas.
Critics will say the government has caved in to the demands of a militant union when the government can least afford it, but the NHS has had to spend billions of pounds in covering the strikes.
That cost is real and tangible but the long term cost in suffering to patients who grow sicker while waiting for repeatedly cancelled operations is harder to quantify.
Junior doctors last went on strike over the election, on 4 July, after independent arbitration they had agreed would take place in May with the last government was scrapped when the vote was called.
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Last year, the BMA walked out of talks with the Conservative government in which an extra 3% pay rise on top of an average 9% increase for 2022-23 was discussed.
Junior doctors are any doctor below consultant level, and make up nearly half of the NHS's medical workforce.