Labour will not be able to give junior doctors a full pay rise “on day one” of a new Government, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has said.
Speaking to Good Morning Britain, Mr Streeting said that he would “not be able to afford” the 35 per cent pay claim being made by the British Medical Association (BMA).
Industrial action by junior doctors in the BMA has severely disrupted NHS services since January 2023. The last strike, in February, led to 91,048 appointments, operations and procedures being postponed.
Junior doctors in England will go on strike the week before the general election after mediated talks with the Government collapsed, the BMA announced on Wednesday.
Medics will walk out from 7am June 27 until 7am on July 2, the union said.
Talks had recently reopened with a view to ending the long-running dispute over pay between medics in training and the Government.
Mr Streeting told GMB on Wednesday: “We’re going to have to work together and negotiate on pay and recognise, as was the case with the last Labour government who inherited a similar mess.
“Getting to fair pay is a journey not an event, and I am willing to negotiate on pay and those wider conditions that junior doctors are working.”
He added: “I’m willing to sit down and negotiate on those wider conditions so that junior doctors are genuinely valued and and look forward to a career in the NHS rather than thinking about whether they’re going to stick it out because things are so terrible.”
Last week, the co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors’ committee, Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, told union members that the general election had “fundamentally changed the landscape”.
In an email seen by the Times, they wrote: “The government has a responsibility to the public to settle the dispute and still has the ability to do so. A general election shouldn’t be used as yet another excuse. There will be an emergency meeting next Tuesday evening [May 28], at which we hope to have a best and final offer from the ¬government to put to your committee and ultimately you.”
In other developments, Mr Streeting said that Labour would use AI-enabled scanners and the private sector to help cut waiting lists.
On Tuesday, Labour pledged to spend £1.3billion to help cut the NHS backlog, which currently stands at 7.54 million.
Mr Streeting told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We will use their capacity in the independent sector, because there are plenty of people in this country who are now opting out of the NHS who are able to pay to go private and I’m not prepared to see working class people left behind, while operating theatres are left empty in those hospitals.”
