Members of the Just Treatment campaign group drop a banner from Westminster Bridge in central London in support of a strike by junior doctors calling for better pay and conditions on June 27, 2024, a week before the July 4 general election. – Junior doctors in England are striking just days before the general election, as a protracted pay battle with the Conservative government threatens to intrude on the culmination of the campaign. (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP)
London, United Kingdom — Hospital doctors in England have accepted a 22.3-percent government pay offer, their union and the health ministry said Monday, ending a wave of damaging strikes that hit patient care.
Junior doctors — those below consultant level — have staged a series of walk-outs over the last 18 months in protest at below-inflation wage increases since 2010 and as cost-of-living pressures increased.
Soon after it was voted into power in July, the new Labour government proposed the substantial rise over two years to end the industrial action that saw the medics strike 11 times.
READ: UK gov’t offers junior doctors 22.3% pay rise to end strikes
The British Medical Association’s Junior Doctors’ Committee in England said 66 percent of its members had now voted for the deal in a ballot.
“It should never have taken so long to get here,” said committee co-chairs Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, hailing the deal as “the end of 15 years of pay erosion with the beginning of two years of modest above-inflation pay rises”.
But they added: “There is still a long way to go, with doctors remaining 20.8 percent in real terms behind where we were in 2008.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting welcomed the deal and restated Labour’s belief that it was fixing a “broken” inheritance from the previous Conservative administration, which governed from 2010.
“Things should never have been allowed to get this bad,” he said in a statement.
The deal averts future strike action going into the cold winter months, when seasonal illnesses typically heap pressure on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
The doctors’ strikes, which saw appointments cancelled and treatment delayed, were among a series of public and private sector walk-outs over pay and conditions as inflation soared.
Some junior doctors, who can typically have eight years or more experience, complained that they were effectively paid less per hour than coffee shop workers.
The Conservatives resisted the BMA’s demands for a 35-percent “pay restoration” to reflect real-term inflation over the last decade and a half but Labour moved quickly to draw a line under the dispute.
Streeting also agreed to change the name of junior doctors to “resident doctors” to better reflect their expertise, the union said.