Junior doctors earning £100k to strike over pay

Telegraph

4 days ago

Junior doctors striking over pay are earning as much as £100,000 a year, The Telegraph can disclose.
The medics, who voted this week in favour of mass walkouts owing to salary demands, have already been given a 28.9 per cent pay rise under Labour, but the British Medical Association (BMA) is now calling for a further increase of 29 per cent.
Senior doctors have criticised the BMA for damaging the medical profession with its five-day walkout, which will start on July 25.
The plans are causing a growing generational rift between junior doctors – now called resident doctors – and consultants, some of whom worked 100 hours a week before the European working time directive introduced a 48-hour cap.
One senior figure said the five-day strike seemed ' disproportionate ' and accused the BMA of not 'reading the room'.
Another senior doctor accused the current generation of a 'sense of entitlement' despite being extremely well rewarded.
A junior doctor on a 40-hour week, including a full 'on-call' rota, currently earns more than £100,000 a year, before finishing training.
Pay boosts under Labour mean junior doctors have seen earnings rise by 28.9 per cent, bringing basic starting salaries to £38,831 a year.
But there are significant boosts to pay from on-call working, which can typically take average earnings for this group to around £53,000, without any locum work.
By the time doctors reach the last stage of training, called ST8, basic starting salaries are £73,992 a year. This means an ST8 junior doctor working a 40-hour week, with a full on-call rota, including one in six weekends and one in eight nights, can expect to earn £101,369 per annum. Polling shows just one in five people back the strikes, when given details of recent pay awards.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, told the Commons earlier this week: 'With the greatest respect to resident doctors, there are other people working in our public services who are feeling the pinch more than they are.'
He said pay could be boosted if they were prepared to consider cutting pension entitlements, which are so generous that consultants say they face too great a tax burden.
One NHS leader said many senior doctors felt the BMA was 'damaging the medical brand', which could undermine faith in the profession more widely.
On Thursday, medical leaders warned junior doctors they may 'never recover' the trust of patients if they go on strike again.
Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the outgoing NHS England national medical director, said doctors must consider 'how difficult it might be to recover public trust' if they go ahead with strikes.
Lord Darzi of Denham, a surgeon who led an independent review of the NHS last year, said he feared the public's trust might 'never recover if the BMA go ahead with strikes that are plainly unjustifiable.'
While many consultants are expressing concern about the impact of the strikes, some are asking for up to five times their hourly rate to cover shifts during the walkouts, he said.
The BMA intends to hold an 'indicative' ballot on the appetite of consultant doctors to hold their own walkouts, but senior medics are less convinced of the case.
Tensions are also growing between doctors and other staff groups.
NHS leaders said the short notice before the strikes showed 'a lack of respect to colleagues' who will be expected to stand in.
Lord Robert Winston, the professor and renowned IVF pioneer, has resigned from the BMA over the planned strikes.
The 84-year-old, who has been a member of the union since 1964, told The Times: 'Strike action completely ignores the vulnerability of people in front of you.
'Doctors need to be reminded that every time they have a patient in front of them, they have someone who is frightened and in pain. It's important that doctors consider their own responsibility much more seriously.'
Senior figures think many medics may be unwilling to forego earnings to strike and are becoming increasingly aware that the public is turning against them.
Hospital bosses believe fewer junior doctors will take to the picket line than ever before when the walkouts start.
Fewer than one in three have voted to strike, with just 55 per cent of the BMA's 53,766 eligible members voting in the ballot.
Almost 25,000 junior doctors are not BMA members, and a separate union – the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association – has told members they have no legal right to walk out if colleagues do.
Junior doctors have taken part in 11 strikes since 2023, only stopping industrial action when they were awarded a 22 per cent pay rise by Labour, which has since been topped up.
But participation had already fallen substantially. By the last walkout, on the eve of the general election, 23,001 doctors joined at the peak of a five-day strike, down from more than 29,000 at the height of the first of them in March 2023.
Prof Karol Sikora, the oncologist, wrote in The Telegraph condemning the strike. He said he was 'truly shocked' by the demands from the BMA.
He urged Mr Streeting not to cave in to the demands, saying the NHS had lost a 'spirit of togetherness' which meant he and other doctors were happy despite poor pay and 'ridiculously long hours'.
Dr Clare Gerada, the former president of the Royal College of General Practice, said: 'The BMA opposed the NHS at its founding. Now, with more strikes planned, it risks hastening its collapse. Every delay and cancelled op strengthens those who argue the NHS no longer works. We must fight for the NHS – not just for ourselves.'
Prof John Ashton, a professor, consultant and former public health director, said the BMA 'had been taken over by Trots' – a colloquial term used to describe a socialist who subscribes to the political ideas of the Marxist revolutionary and Soviet Union politician, Leon Trotsky.
A Government source said: 'Most resident doctors didn't vote to strike, and other medical unions are distancing themselves from the BMA resident doctors committee's unreasonable approach.
'The BMA is looking increasingly isolated. We're hopeful that most reasonable resident doctors won't go along with these unnecessary and unfair strikes, and put their patients before the BMA.'
Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, the co-chairmen of the BMA resident doctors committee, said: 'In terms of doctors being part of an on-call rota, the value of allowance is a percentage of the full-time basic salary and frequency.
'However, regarding The Telegraph's specific example, there will be very few resident doctors regularly working the number of hours needed to earn a salary of that level. They'd need to work around fifty hours a week plus every other weekend, which is not sustainable.
'The planned industrial action is not about hypothetical individual examples, it is about restoring the pay of all resident doctors in England to where it was in 2008, in real terms, paying them their worth, recognising their value and making them want to stay and work in the NHS, not abroad.'