Health secretary Wes Streeting has admitted the NHS treats doctors “like crap” but urged medics not to strike in the latest row about pay.
Resident doctors, formerly junior doctors, are being balloted for strike action after anger over the government’s latest pay offer of a 4 per cent pay rise for most doctors, which unions say is too low.
Mr Streeting has warned that industrial action would push back the progress made on reducing waiting lists and should be a last resort.
Writing exclusively for The Independent, he said: “The NHS is finally on the road to recovery. I am urging resident doctors today: don’t set this progress back.
“Strikes should always be a last resort, and three above-inflation pay rises in a row means we are far from that. Instead, let’s keep pulling towards recovery.”
Mr Streeting acknowledged that pay was not the only thing doctors were unhappy about, admitting that the NHS can be a “bad employer”.
He said: “They are rightly angry about the way they are treated by their employer. So am I.
“The NHS can be a bad employer at the moment, which ends up being bad for taxpayers and patients too. We spend hundreds of thousands of pounds training people, only to treat them like crap and cause them to leave to work in another health service or another career altogether.”
“The extraordinarily high levels of staff turnover in the NHS are in no one’s interest. When these problems arise, I want to work with resident doctors and other staff members to fix them,” he added.
Ballots began arriving on Tuesday, following the pay announcement last week, which will see resident doctors receiving an additional £750. This equates to an average pay rise of 5.4 per cent for 2025 to 2026.
The British Medical Association (BMA), the union representing doctors, argues that this increase is not sufficient to address the impact of previous pay freezes.
The ballot will run until 7 July, and if doctors vote in favour, strike action could take place between July and January next year.
It comes as the NHS waiting list rose for the first time in seven months in March, hitting 7.42 million – up from 7.4 million in February. Waiting lists peaked in September 2023 at 7.8 million.
Weeks after Labour was elected to office last year, Mr Streeting settled the previous ongoing pay dispute with doctors, which lasted from March 2023 to September 2024. A deal was agreed that meant the average starting salary of a full-time resident doctor is now around £38,800 – up by £9,500 compared to 2022-23.
Following the independent pay review body recommendations, the government offered resident doctors an average pay award of 5.4 per cent for 2025 to 2026.
This year’s pay increase, recommended last week, is above the rate of inflation, which jumped to 3.5 per cent in April, up from 2.6 per cent in March and the highest since January 2024.
Mr Streeting said: “I have been clear since opposition that we wouldn’t be able to fix the issue of pay overnight. This will have to be a journey, not an event. But another above-inflation pay rise of 5.4 per cent is yet another step in the right direction.
“The pay award will be in payslips two months earlier than last year, and we’ll give the pay review bodies enough notice to make their recommendation in time for the start of the next financial year.”
Responding to the health secretary’s comments, the BMA’s resident doctors committee co-chairs Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt said: “While it’s good to see the health secretary recognise, in his own words, that the UK treats doctors ‘like crap’, if he isn’t going to do anything about it then it doesn’t help very much.
“First and foremost, he cannot escape the need to set out a tangible plan to restoring our pay that we’ve lost over the last 17 years, which is still more than 20 per cent lower in real terms than it was then, with recent uplifts decimated by inflation.
“Meanwhile, we have the absurd situation where the UK is spending a fortune training doctors, yet they cannot get a job or specialty training place later in their career – at a time when patients are in desperate need of care and waiting lists remain at almost-record highs.”
They added: “As we’ve made clear, our door is open, and likewise, we’d too urge the health secretary not to push back progress on waiting lists, by not listening to the workforce that has worked so hard to bring them down.”
As the ballot opened, the chairs said: “Last week the government finally told us what it would do to restore the pay of doctors: almost nothing ... As ballots once again fall through doctors’ letterboxes, we are simply saying: the NHS does not have that time. Waiting lists are too high, too many people can’t see their GP, too many patients are being treated in corridors.”
This story was updated at 12:16 with a comment from the BMA.
