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4 hours ago
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The NHS’s three main groups of hospital doctors in England are threatening to coordinate strike action in a dramatic escalation of their campaign for higher pay.
The British Medical Association said on Tuesday it would ballot consultants, and specialist, associate specialist and speciality (SAS) medics about joining resident doctors in taking strike action aimed at improving their earnings.
“Should the ballots be successful, the government risks having all doctors working in secondary [hospital] care in England taking industrial action during the same period,” the BMA said.
Consultants want better pay and shorter hours, while SAS doctors are seeking increased basic pay, improved overtime rates, more annual leave and better career opportunities.
Resident – formerly junior – doctors are due to start a six-day strike next Tuesday, 7 April, just after the Easter weekend.
Their representatives are continuing to talk to the government to try to find a resolution to their long-running pay and jobs dispute, ahead of a deadline to accept ministers’ last offer.
Dr Shanu Dattu and Dr Helen Neary, the co-chairs of the BMA’s consultants committee, underlined the union’s hardening of tactics, saying that “in the short term, ministers must ask themselves whether they can afford to have all hospital doctors with a mandate to take industrial action at the same time”.
Coordinated action would bring havoc to the NHS, even if potential strikes by those three groups of doctors occurred one after the other rather than simultaneously.
The Department of Health and Social Care responded to the BMA’s move by highlighting that consultants already typically earned £147,000 a year.
“Consultants and specialist, associate specialist and specialty doctors are highly skilled and valued NHS staff. They are some of the best paid workers in the country,” it said.
“Last year consultants earned an average of £147,000, and they have just been awarded another above-inflation pay rise. Basic pay for new senior doctors has increased by about 28.5% across the last four years. These are not grounds for even considering strike action.”
The BMA’s decision to ballot consultant and SAS doctors was prompted by the government’s decision last week to give doctors in England only a 3.5% pay rise for 2026-27, which the union called “inadequate” and “a crushing blow to doctors”. That was the percentage increase recommended last week by the review body on doctors’ and dentists’ remuneration, which advises ministers on pay for those professions.
The new ballots will run from 11 May until 6 July. That timescale leaves time for talks to try to avert either group walking out.
The 3.5% award was also a factor in the BMA’s resident doctors committee’s decision last week to reject what it said was the DHSC’s final offer to end their dispute, which recently entered its fourth year.
It has been seeking a 26% pay rise, spread over several years. It declared its six-day strike in response to what it said was the government having “shifted the goalposts” after weeks of productive negotiations.
The Guardian reported that the sudden breakdown of those negotiations was prompted by a disagreement over when resident doctors would receive all £700m of extra “progression pay” which Wes Streeting, the health secretary, had agreed to give them to help meet their pay demands.
Streeting said it should be given over the next three years but the BMA were seeking the full amount in the new NHS operational year, which starts on Wednesday.
There are about 66,000 consultant doctors and 16,000 SAS doctors in the NHS in England. The BMA represents about 36,000 and 7,000 of those groups respectively.
The BMA set out on Tuesday what both groups were hoping to receive. Consultants want higher pay to help mitigate what they claim is the 25% erosion in the real-terms value of their salaries since 2008-09. They also want a shorter working week, higher pay for working out of hours and more “protected”, or non-clinical, time in order to do training, research and improve services.
SAS doctors want their usual working hours to end at 7pm, with anything after that counted as “out of hours” for overtime, rather than 9pm as at present. They also want more annual leave and an increase in the number of specialist roles in NHS hospitals.
The DHSC said: “We have been having constructive conversations with the consultants committee and have invited them to work with us on contract reform, so it is disappointing that the BMA has escalated in this way.
“We would urge senior doctors [to] work with us to continue to rebuild our NHS together, rather than considering disruptive strike action that patients do not support.”
