Flawed contract brought in by Labour

THE contract allowing consultants to earn so much in overtime was drawn up by the Labour government and the British Medical Association in 2003.

It was criticised as a ‘nonsense’ by MPs on the Public Accounts Committee ten years later who found that their pay had increased by a quarter, while overall productivity had fallen.

The terms stipulated they could do ten sessions a week, about 40 hours in total.

They also stated consultants could refuse to work outside the hours of 7am and 7pm. This means that if hospitals need doctors to work out-of-hours, or do any work in addition to their agreed ten sessions, they must pay them very high rates.

Many hospitals would rather pay their own consultants to do extra work rather than employing less reliable agency doctors, who may be even more expensive.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt had pledged to redraw the contract by April 2017 to remove the opt-out clause. But he was delayed by the junior doctors’ contract which had to be repeatedly renegotiated.