Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The new Labour government has offered junior NHS doctors in England a pay rise of 22 per cent over two years, in a deal agreed with union leaders to end a wave of strikes that has dragged on the health service.
Officials said the British Medical Association would put a proposal to junior doctors that would amount to a pay rise of 22.3 per cent. The figure is short of the 35 per cent demanded by the union but a sizeable advance on offers by the previous Conservative government.
An agreement to raise doctors’ pay over several years could finally break the deadlock that has led to medics striking 11 times, most recently earlier this month.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce the details of the offer in a statement later on Monday as she attempts to pin blame on the Tories for what she will call a £20bn fiscal hole in the government’s finances.
The deal is expected to include a backdated pay rise of about 4 per cent for 2023-24, on top of a 9 per cent rise already offered, as well as a rise of 6 per cent in 2024-25. The offer, which includes a £1,000 consolidated payment, was first reported by The Times.
Ben Zaranko, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, described the offer as an “enormous” increase that would start undoing the cuts in doctors’ pay seen since 2010.
Since junior doctors were a relatively small group, the additional cost to the public finances was “probably not more than £1bn”, depending on the details of the package, he estimated.
Even this could strain the NHS budget, he said, but added that “where this gets expensive is if this acts as a benchmark for some of the other staffing groups” — for example, if nurses sought a similar pay rise next year.
Downing Street declined to “get into detailed running commentary on negotiations” but said “the government is determined to do the hard work necessary to finally bring these strikes to an end”.
After five weeks of talks late last year, the medical union rejected the then Tory government’s offer of a 3 per cent pay increase, on top of a roughly 9 per cent rise already offered.
The BMA said at the time the proposal was not “credible” and did not address 15 years of inflation-linked pay erosion.
Labour has been confident of securing a deal after BMA members in Wales voted overwhelmingly last month to accept a government offer of an additional 12.4 per cent pay for junior doctors in 2023-24 — echoing terms of an agreement reached in Scotland last year.
The wave of industrial action by staff that began in December 2022 has compounded pressures on the NHS, with roughly 1.5mn operations and appointments cancelled since the action began.
There are meanwhile growing expectations of a deal with train drivers to end the worst strikes to hit the railway in decades.
Mick Whelan, general secretary of the Aslef union, said he believed a deal was possible “very quickly” and “hoped” for an offer from the government this week or next.
“I feel we have a massive opportunity to end the longest rail dispute in history,” he told the Financial Times.
No firm offer has been put forward by the government, but railway executives believe Aslef would accept a deal of about 10 per cent over two years, with no changes to working practices.
Aslef earlier this year rejected a 9 per cent two-year pay offer from the previous government, tied to significant changes to working conditions.
Credit: Source link
