A senior cabinet minister has urged health unions to take the government’s pay offer “seriously”, after union leaders said the proposed deal would drive doctors out of the profession and could lead to further strikes.
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, defended the offer of an average 8.8% pay rise for junior doctors, a day after the government accepted the recommendations of the public sector pay review bodies.
Keegan said the pay review bodies had taken into account how much money would be needed to recruit and retain NHS staff without adding to the UK’s stubbornly high inflation rate. The British Medical Association however called the offer “a huge missed opportunity”, while the Royal College of Nursing said it highlighted the unfairness of the separate offer to nurses of 5% plus a one-off payment.
Keegan told Sky News on Friday morning: “Trying to give public sector workers pay rises, but also trying to make sure that we halve inflation – this is not easy.
“The independent pay review bodies have done a very thorough analysis, and they look at recruitment and retention, they look at similar professions … I think it’s only fair that [the BMA] should look at that and take that seriously.”
Her comments came as junior doctors in England began the second day of their five-day strike in a pay dispute and the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, told ministers: “Doctors are in this for the long run.”
Prof Philip Banfield, the association’s council chair, told LBC the chances of further doctor strikes were “very high”. He pointed to the Scottish government’s offer of a 12.4% increase for junior doctors this year. Those in England are being offered around half of that, and are due to take part in the second day of a planned five-day stretch of industrial action on Friday.
“It’s equally possible that a UK government with higher access to funds could make that kind of negotiation possible as well,” Banfield said.
“So I don’t believe that this is all over. I do believe that doctors are in this for the long run because we are seeing so much harm come to patients every day because of the underfunding of the NHS.”
On Thursday, cabinet ministers welcomed the decision by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to accept the public sector review bodies’ recommendations to grant pay rises of between 5% and 7% for the next financial year.
In recent weeks, Downing Street had refused to guarantee Sunak would accept the recommendations once they were made. But on Thursday, the prime minister said the government would be able to afford to meet them using money from existing departmental budgets rather than by borrowing more or raising taxes. He added, however, that there would be no further talks with unions over pay.
Teaching unions said they would recommend that their members accept an offer of 6.5%, which Keegan insisted on Friday would not be taken from existing school budgets, but instead from anticipated underspends which would otherwise have gone back to the Treasury.
“The Treasury has worked with us … [and] they’ve given us the flexibility to take anticipated underspends and to move them into teachers’ pay,” she said.
Keegan urged junior doctors to accept the deal on the table, saying that anything extra would add to inflation. “Junior doctors are not unusual, we have all got the impacts of inflation,” she said. “It’s been really quite quite difficult to agree a pay increase without adding to inflationary pressures.”
In a separate interview about the problem of high levels of pupil absences in schools, meanwhile, Keegan said it was partly the responsibility of headteachers to ensure children were in class. “[Headteachers] do have a duty,” she told Sky News.
“We all have to play our part. Sometimes you have to go [to the home] or sometimes you have to text the parent in the morning. Sometimes you just have to do whatever is possible.”
• This article was amended on 15 July 2023. An earlier version said the pay offer for junior doctors was for a 6% rise. When an additional consolidated £1,250 payment is taken into account, this equates to an average rise of 8.8%.
