Junior doctors offered 22% pay rise by government to end strike action

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%.

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Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce the move this afternoon when she makes a major speech about spending cuts to plug what she will say is 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.

The prime minister’s spokesman said the government was “committed to working to find a solution”.

“We’ve been honest with the public and the sector about the economic circumstances we face,” he said.

“But the government is determined to do the hard work necessary to finally bring these strikes to an end.”

He added the industrial action has been “hugely damaging both to patients and to the impact on the waiting lists and we’ve said we’re committed to finding a solution and resolving this dispute”.

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.

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.

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