Health secretary claims many junior doctors don’t support BMA leadership organising latest strike – UK politics live

Good morning. Junior hospital doctors in England are on the second day of a three-day strike. And they are planning a six-day strike in January. Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, has been doing a broadcast round this morning and, as well as starting her willingness to resume talks on pay and conditions if the strikes are called off, she also sought to drive a wedge between the BMA’s junior doctors committee and the thousands of medics it represents.

She said “many, many” doctors do not support what the BMA is doing, and she encouraged them, in effect, to make this clear to their union leadership.

(It is worth stressing, of course, that “junior doctors” is a misnomer. The term covers hospital doctors below consultant level. Mostly they are not people just out of medical school. Many have years of experience, and they provide the backbone of medical staff in hospitals.)

In an interview with the Today programme, Atkins said:

The junior doctors committee decided the date of their strikes. They decided to do it three days in the run-up to Christmas and they have also now picked the worst week in the NHS’s calendar [the first week in January] to be on strike.

There will be many, many doctors listening to this who will be deeply uncomfortable that their committee has called these strikes at this time. And I would encourage anyone who feels like that, quietly, to consider whether this committee is representing their views.

I know, for example, that consultants and nurses and other doctors who aren’t on strike are today, yesterday, and will be over January, coming in, doing extra shifts to ensure that that level of care is provided for patients. And they are being expected by the junior doctors’ committee to pick up the slack of their strikes.

Atkins said that she had shown she was prepared to be “fair and reasonable” in pay negotiations. Referring to a deal agreed with speciality doctors last week, he told the Today programme:

Having managed to find fair and reasonable offers for consultants and for specialty doctors, I would say the proof is in the pudding, if you see what I mean. I have shown that I’m willing and keen to find agreements.

She said she wanted to make an offer that covered conditions, as well as pay. She told BBC Breakfast:

It’s not just about pay, of course this is really important and indeed this year alone, junior doctors have already had a pay rise of around 8.8%, the most-junior of doctors, the first and second year of doctors, they’ve had the highest pay rises within the range up to 10.3% because we understand as a government, we’ve heard what the doctors are saying to us.

But I also want to do more than that, I don’t just want to look at pay, I also want to look at their conditions because when I walk around hospitals, when I talk to doctors, they tell me one of the things they want to feel is valued. And I absolutely understand that and I want to work with them to enable that to happen.

But she also said that, for talks to resume, the strikes would have to be called off. She told Sky News:

We have always said if there are strikes happening at the moment affecting patients, affecting the public, we will not negotiate but the moment they call them off, I will be back round that table.

Parliament is in recess and, politically, we should be in for a quiet day. But Keir Starmer is in Estonia, near the border with Russia, visiting British troops at a Nato base, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is going to Switzerland to sign a mutual recognition deal for financial services and Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, is taking FMQs for the final time this year in the Scottish parliament.

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