LONDON (Reuters) -Junior doctors in England have voted in favour of taking strike action, their trade union said on Tuesday, threatening Britain’s hospitals once again with disruption just as the government said it had started to improve services.
Junior doctors, also known as resident doctors, voted for industrial action after they were offered an average 5.4% pay rise by the government, far below the 29% they say is necessary to address years of salary erosion in real terms.
The fresh threat of strikes comes after the doctors accepted a 22% pay rise last year covering 2023-2025, ending months of previous disruptive strikes.
Junior doctors say that due to the long-term erosion of their pay and after several years of high inflation, they still need a 29% rise this year to help restore it to levels last seen in 2008.
“Doctors have spoken and spoken clearly: they won’t accept that they are worth a fifth less than they were in 2008,” Melissa Ryan and Ross Nieuwoudt, the co-chairs of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors committee, said.
The mandate allows industrial action to take place until January but the BMA said there was “still time to avert” it.
The government’s fiscal targets mean it has limited headroom to offer bigger pay rises, particularly after it was forced to reverse cuts to the welfare budget last week, and amid a warning of a growth downgrade from the official economic forecaster.
Junior doctors, who are qualified physicians, often have several years of experience and make up 25% of Britain’s medical workforce.
NHS Employers, the group representing leaders in the health service, said any strikes could result in “tens, if not hundreds, of thousands” of procedures being disrupted, leaving patients in pain or discomfort.
Strike action could also derail the progress Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government has begun to make in improving the state-run, publicly funded National Health Service (NHS).
After a first year in government marked by unpopular spending cuts and some costly policy reversals, healthcare is an area where Starmer has claimed some success.
A spokesperson for the department of health said the threat of strikes was disappointing, and that Health Secretary Wes Streeting wanted to work with unions to improve working conditions and avoid the strike action.
(Reporting by Sarah Young and Sachin Ravikumar, Writing by Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
