When Junior Doctors, now rebranded as Resident Doctors, received a 22% pay rise from the new Labour government in 2024, most of us felt that, as a one-off inflation-busting package, it was fair. We knew that health workers had seen their wages decline during the 14 years of Conservative misrule and, when you are sick, there is a view that doctors can never be paid enough. But in 2025, these same doctors are about to go on strike unless they receive a further 29% pay rise which, they say, is non-negotiable. My admiration for doctors knows no bounds, but this time I fear they have hopelessly misread the room.
The doctors’ union the BMA is demanding the basic salary for a first year doctor is increased from £38,831 to £47,308. For a doctor at the top of the scale the current salary is £73,992 which would increase to £90,989. It is worth emphasising these are basic contracted hours. The average salary, taking into account additional hours and working antisocial hours is a third more. We are not talking peanuts, here. Here are the facts.
Opinion polls appear to back up my assertion that doctors have badly misread the room. When doctors were on strike last year, some 52% of the public supported them. Now, it’s 26%. I am not at all surprised by this. Even low paid workers, who earned nothing like the salaries paid to Resident Doctors, felt they deserved a substantial rise. Now, the same low paid workers don’t feel the same. Low paid health workers, who would get substantially less than doctors should BMA demands be accepted, do not feel the same, either.
Another thing to bear in mind that there are big losers when doctors go on strike. Appointments are cancelled and, worse still, people die. You don’t want to go down the road of blame when people die waiting for care, but you know it will happen. In these straightened financial times, when people who are living on or close to the breadline – and there are many millions who are – it would make no sense for any government to accede to the BMA’s full demands. It is not exactly a decent strapline to say that “if you don’t give us 29%, we’ll be on the picket line while people are suffering and dying”. I’m afraid, though, that the current situation is getting uncomfortably close to just that.
You may think that a range of salary from £38,831 to £73,992 is relative peanuts and perhaps compared to some occupations it is. But over 14 million people, of whom 4.5 million are children, in the UK are living in poverty and I suspect they will not see it is anything like peanuts.
2025 has been a year in which I recognised more than ever the brilliance of health professionals in our NHS. I have lost so many friends and acquaintances, I have been barely able to keep up. And at every stage , the staff have been magnificent. But there comes a time, surely, when you have to say that yes, doctors deserve to be among the highest paid people in the land, but who doesn’t? Resident Doctors have been offered a 5.4% pay rise this year, which is still way above inflation. I know plenty of people who have been offered much less than that and some nothing at all.
Read the room, doctors. You’re among the best of us but you are asking way too much. No one else in the NHS got anything like 22% last year and no one is asking for, or expecting 29% this year, except you. It is making you look extremely greedy and frankly heartless and it’s time you got real. I supported the strikes last year, like most people I don’t support them this year. Sure, you deserve more, but patients also deserve more, by way of an NHS which was ravaged under the Tories. The BMA has made an almighty misjudgement this year. If you are not careful, the remaining 26% who support your bloated pay claim will soon fizzle away into nothing. And frankly you’d deserve no more.
