Labour doesn’t have the one thing striking doctors want

I was on Sophy Ridge’s show last week as negotiations between the health secretary and BMA were under way to avert strike action. I was asked to stick my neck out and call it. I got it spectacularly wrong. 

I looked at the dynamics: a Labour government, a health secretary who brought to an end two years of industrial action by (as they were then) junior doctors, an ambitious programme of NHS reform with a universally acclaimed 10-year plan. All positives.

And this 10-year plan relies heavily on the goodwill of the NHS workforce, including resident doctors as they are now known.

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So surely, Wes Streeting would do everything in his power to stop resident doctors walking out again, I gambled. He says he did. The BMA says he did not.

But ultimately Mr Streeting does not have what the resident doctors want: money.

The BMA is demanding a 26% pay restoration. They say resident doctors have been underpaid for 17 years, that these medics earn around £18 per hour and they want that raised to £22 per hour.

Looking at it like that, it looks reasonable. But the health secretary says they have already had a pay rise of nearly 29%.

Put it like that and the optics don’t look good – and that could explain why there is considerably less support from the public for these strikes.

Expect the language to become more accusatory. Fingers are being jabbed. Each side blaming the other for putting patient lives at risk.

Mr Streeting is determined to ensure these strikes do not have the same damaging impact the last round did.

He going to do this by allowing local trust leaders to make local decisions. They know and understand their staff and patients better than central command, so they will be able to decide which non-critical patients can still attend their appointments.

They will argue a cancer patient attending a pre-arranged appointment can be deemed urgent, so hopefully fewer patients will have their appointments cancelled.

Read more:
Resident doctors’ strike to go ahead
Streeting says doctors’ strikes ‘a gift to Farage’

This did not happen before. Almost all non-critical care was temporarily paused. A&E stayed open but that was about it.

The BMA will argue that this approach is unsafe for patients. With resident doctors striking and senior colleagues backfilling, there is not enough staff to protect patients from harm.

This gives us an idea of how deeply entrenched both sides are right now.

The BMA is trying to reverse what it says is 17 years of underpayment. Mr Streeting will be furious that his plans to fix a broken NHS are being undermined, and he will not want to be held to ransom.