Junior doctors to receive 22.3% pay rise

Jeremy Hunt was the longest serving Health Secretary ever (2012–2018) and had become infamous for his meddling which led to the first industrial action amongst junior doctors for four decades in 2016. Fast forward eight years, Hunt is Rishi Sunak’s finance minister and the still-Conservative government is overseeing more striking junior doctors. The tragedy of working in the NHS is consistently the ‘thanks but no thanks’ attitude: Boris Johnson clapped during the pandemic to celebrate key workers but privately denied pay rises— successive Conservative governments have sought to undermine unions for political purposes.

Bizarrely, the average melancholic Brit, glued to Tory defaultism, collectively embraces the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge when discussing junior doctors, wishing to deny their fellow citizens a well-deserved pay rise. In June, an Ipsos poll found that 31% of people opposed a pay rise for junior doctors, despite many seeing firsthand how difficult the pandemic had been.

The British Medical Association (BMA) argued successfully this week to rename junior doctors to the nicer term ‘resident doctor’.

Sadly, it’s a necessity, because many weaponised the former name to discredit the work they do, justify not paying them, and infantilise the strikers— even the former Health Secretary Victoria Atkins called them ‘doctors in training’, when they are already qualified as medical practitioners.

Recent strike action began in 2022— years of repeated pay freezes and below-inflation pay increases led the BMA to demand a restoration of pay to recover nearly 30% real-term pay cuts since 2008— and after a 20-month dispute, the new Labour government reached a deal with the BMA within their first month in office. On a high turnout, 66% of resident doctors voted in favour of the deal. The industrial action consisted of 44 striking days.

Resident doctors will see a 22.3% on average pay increase across two years, backdated to April 2023. Specifically, this is an 8.8% increase in 2023–24, with an additional 4.05% increase, and then the recommended pay increase of 8% in 2024–25. A full time doctor in specialty training would see a £6,000 annual increase, for example. Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, resident doctor committee co-chairs, believe that doctors are still 20.8% in real terms behind the 2008 numbers. Labour is open to further negotiations though and good relations could lead to better pay rise deals in future.

Besides restorative pay rises and renamed job titles, the government also stated they are committed to streamline how additional hours are reported, reforming rotational training, and reviewing bottlenecks which limit training of consultants and GPs— although this and other health-related reforms are likely to come post-budget.

Regardless of your views on Labour, this will give much needed security to those striking and those who rely on resident doctors— at least Labour are open to negotiations with unions at all, even if they aren’t delivering as much as we’d hoped.