Junior doctors in England have voted to keep on striking until the middle of September in their long-running pay dispute, bringing a fresh wave of disruption to the NHS.
Those belonging to the British Medical Association voted overwhelmingly to stage further stoppages in addition to the 41 days of strikes held since last March.
They backed a further six months of stoppages by 98% to 2% on a 62% turnout. There was almost as near-unanimous support – 97% in favour, with just 3% against – for taking action short of a strike, such as refusing to work overtime, in pursuit of a 35% pay rise.
Their renewed legal mandate means that BMA junior doctors can take either form of action from 3 April until 19 September as long as they give the health trusts and GP surgeries they work for at least two weeks’ notice.
Announcing the ballot result, junior doctors’ leaders repeated their plea to Victoria Atkins, the health and social care secretary, to make them a “credible” new offer. That looks unlikely, as Atkins has ruled out increasing the money on the table.
NHS bosses said patients would have appointments and operations cancelled as a direct result of the next phase of the campaign. The medics are seeking a 35% pay rise as “full restoration” of the 26% drop in the real-terms value of their salaries since 2008.
The vote is “another worrying escalation in this lengthy dispute between the government and junior doctors”, said Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of the hospitals group NHS Providers.
Several rounds of talks with ministers and civil servants at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have failed to bridge the gap between the BMA’s demands and the government’s readiness to offer junior doctors enough money to persuade them to call off their strikes.
Dr Rob Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, the co-chairs of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, said it would be cheaper for ministers to settle the dispute than allow strikes to roll on.
“The government believed it could ignore, delay and offer excuses long enough that we would simply give up. That attitude has now led to the NHS wasting £3bn covering the strikes. This is more than double the cost of settling our whole claim,” they said.
This is the third time in a row that close to 100% of junior doctors have voted for strikes, despite the fact that most lose a day’s pay when they refuse to work.
The DHSC said: “It is disappointing that BMA members have once again voted for industrial action, when we have already given junior doctors a pay rise of up to 10.3% this financial year and made clear in previous negotiations that further investment was available.
“Overall NHS waiting lists have decreased for four months in a row, but further strikes will impede this progress, and more than 1.4m appointments and operations have now been rescheduled since industrial action began.”