British Medical Association announces 24-hour strike on 10 February after talks with government fail to reach agreement over new contracts

Jeremy Hunt is digging in for a series of strikes by junior doctors after peace talks intended to end the long-running dispute broke down and the NHS began preparing for a second walkout next week.



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The health secretary is resigned to junior doctors continuing to take industrial action, but he hopes that fewer medics will participate and is willing to impose the contract that sparked huge protests by trainee doctors if no deal is agreed.

The British Medical Association (BMA) confirmed on Monday that junior doctors in England would stage a second walkout next Wednesday, 10 February, for 24 hours from 8am, despite all sides agreeing that negotiations had produced good progress on key issues.

But the BMA decided not to proceed with a planned all-out strike between 8am and 5pm that day in case they lost the public support they have enjoyed until now. Instead, they will again withdraw from providing all care except emergency services, such as A&E, maternity care, intensive care and emergency surgery.

Thousands of planned operations and outpatient clinics will be postponed, like they were in the first strike by many of the 45,000 junior doctors in England on 12 January.

A source close to the talks said: “Jeremy Hunt’s strategy now is to exhaust the junior doctors, hope that more of them turn up for work during next week’s strike and hope that the industrial action fizzles out and then impose the contract in August.”

Talks that had been running since 1 December broke down, with both sides blaming what it portrayed as the other side’s intransigence for the failure to reach an agreement over whether some or much of Saturday should become part of a junior doctor’s normal working week.

The BMA angrily criticised what it said was ministers’ unhelpfully “entrenched” stance on Saturday working in the talks.

Dr Johann Malawana, the chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, said: “The government’s position – based on ideology rather than reason – risks souring relations with an entire generation of junior doctors, the very doctors who the secretary of state has acknowledged as the backbone of the NHS.

“The government’s entrenched position in refusing to recognise Saturday working as unsocial hours, together with its continued threat to impose a contract so fiercely resisted by junior doctors across England, leaves us with no alternative but to continue with industrial action.”

Malawana said that, despite two months of talks, “we have seen no willingness on their part to move on a core issue for junior doctors up and down the country”.

Sir David Dalton, the chief executive of Salford Royal NHS foundation trust who Hunt recently appointed as the government’s lead negotiator in the talks, agreed that Saturday was “the key area of difference” preventing a settlement. But he claimed that the impasse was because the BMA had broken a previous pledge to negotiate on the issue.

He said it had promised to do so on 30 November, when the Advisory, Conciliation and Advisory Service (Acas) became involved, but had refused point blank to do so recently, Dalton said in a letter to Hunt updating him on progress. “It is very disappointing that the BMA continues to refuse to negotiate on the issues of unsocial hours payment,” he said.

The normal working week for junior doctors, for which they receive basic pay, is from 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday. Hunt initially wanted to extend that to 10pm on weekdays and include 7am to 10pm on Saturdays.

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Recent concessions by Hunt and Dalton – that normal or “plain time” could end at 9pm on weekdays and 5pm on Saturdays – proved insufficient to sway the BMA. The doctors’ union wants all of Saturday to continue to attract lucrative overtime payments.

Dalton said there was no point in any further talks until the BMA agreed to negotiate on “principal outstanding issues”, notably pay for Saturday working.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “It is regrettable that the BMA is proceeding with further unnecessary industrial action. Sir David Dalton’s published summary of negotiations shows how close we are to agreeing a deal and demonstrates our strong desire to resolve the key substantive issue of pay for unsocial hours, as both parties agreed to do with Acas back in November.

“As Sir David recommends, we want to settle this so that we can improve the standard of care for patients at weekends.”



