Junior doctors intend to hold a fresh strike ballot, which could lead to them continuing to disrupt NHS services across England by staging strikes until September.
The British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee (JDC) has “well-advanced” plans to undertake its third ballot for industrial action in the long-running pay dispute.
The move is likely to inflame even further its already highly strained relations with Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, who on Monday called the BMA “unreasonable” and its 35% pay claim “simply unaffordable”.
Junior doctors have gone on strike for 34 days since last March, in 10 separate stoppages lasting between three and six days each. The current strike began at 7am last Wednesday and ends at 7am on Tuesday, and has been the longest in the NHS’s 75-year history. It is thought to have forced hospitals to cancel up to 200,000 appointments and operations.
The BMA is nearing the end of its second six-month legal mandate for strike action, which expires on 29 February. The leadership of the JDC plans to announce soon that it is holding a third ballot, which, if enough junior doctors back further strikes for it to comply with trade union law, would allow them to call strikes from the start of March.
Junior doctors have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action in the two previous ballots the BMA has held. The first, in February, saw 98% back strikes on a 77% turnout. In the second, held last summer, 98% voted to continue striking, this time on a 71% turnout.
The planned ballot, which will be announced soon, will ask the BMA’s 47,000 junior doctor members to indicate if they support action short of a strike, such as an overtime ban, or a renewed series of strikes.
Union sources say that support among junior doctors for continuing their campaign remains strong, even though medics taking part lose some of their salary each time they do so.
JDC leaders hope that a large turnout, and another strong display of support for more strikes, will strengthen their hand in any future negotiations with Atkins.
However, she used a statement to MPs on Monday to renew criticism of the BMA since talks with them collapsed before Christmas amid acrimony. “The BMA’s headline demand of a 35% pay rise is simply unaffordable for taxpayers,” she said.
Giving junior doctors the huge rise they were seeking, to help restore their salaries to 2008-09 levels, would stoke inflation and be “totally out of step” with other public sector pay awards, she said.
NHS bosses hope the end of the six-day strike will lead to a fresh attempt to find a solution. Atkins urged the JDC to “show they’re serious about doing a deal”. Offering to reopen talks, she added: “If they come to the negotiating table with reasonable expectations, I will still sit down with them.”
However, it is unlikely that any announcement about the possibility of both sides sitting down again will come this week, until the dust from this latest strike has settled, sources say.
The JDC has denied Atkins’s claim that it walked away from the pre-Christmas talks. Instead, she failed to produce a final offer by the agreed deadline of early December, it said.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, accused Atkins of in effect letting the latest strike go ahead by doing too little to reach agreement with the BMA.
“Not only did the health secretary allow talks with the junior doctors to collapse. Not only did she refuse to reopen negotiations until tomorrow, when the damage will have been done.
“At the 11th hour, as junior doctors stood on the edge of this strike action, she chose to push them straight into it,” he told MPs in reply to Atkins.
