Opposition ask attorney general to intervene after health secretary fails to give conclusive reply to question about his legal right to impose contract terms

Labour has called on the attorney general to clear up the mounting confusion over whether the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has the power to impose a new contract on junior doctors. Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary, has written to Jeremy Wright asking him to clarify whether Hunt has the legal right to force 45,000 NHS trainee medics in England to accept new terms and conditions, which have already prompted four strikes.



Hunt deepened the uncertainty over his legal powers in the Commons on Monday when he again said that he was “imposing” the contract, even though both the government’s own lawyers and his department of health insist that he is merely playing a key role in its “introduction”.



Junior doctors reject call to maintain paediatrics during strike Read more

“We are imposing a contract with the greatest of regrets,” Hunt told MPs when answering an urgent question from Labour. He is facing a high court challenge from five junior doctors who claim he does not have the power to impose the contract.



In her letter to Wright, Alexander writes that government lawyers’ “failure to point to any specific power relied upon by the secretary of state appeared to suggest that a new contract was not being imposed, but merely approved”.



“This has caused considerable confusion, which today’s urgent question in the House of Commons only added to, as the secretary of state appeared to contradict the argument of the government’s legal department by confirming that he was imposing a contract.”



Hunt was asked by four MPs yesterday to identify the basis of his power to impose the contract, but did not do so, simply insisting that “the secretary of state does have that power and we are using it correctly”.



Alexander has asked Wright, the government’s chief legal adviser, to “set out explicitly where in the defined roles and responsibilities of the secretary of state it gives him the power to impose a contract on NHS employers”, and also why government lawyers did not identify the source of that power when it wrote last Friday to solicitors for the five junior doctors.



Junior doctors' strikes increasingly hard to justify, says regulator Read more

Hunt denied that the government had changed its policy from imposition to introduction “This house has been updated regularly on all developments relating to the junior doctors’ contract, although there has been no change whatsoever in the government’s position since my statement to the house in February,” he said.

Lawyers for the medical quintet challenging him in the high court claim that the provisions of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, in which the then health secretary Andrew Lansley set out to limit the health secretary’s power over the NHS, mean that Hunt was exceeding his powers by deciding on 11 February to impose the contract after two months of talks with the British Medical Association failed.