Calls for ACAS to end doctors’ strike rejected
Downing Street has again rejected calls for conciliation service Acas to be brought in to broker a deal with junior doctors.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said on Wednesday evening that a third party was needed to bring the Government and the British Medical Association (BMA) together for talks to halt any future strikes.
But the Prime Minister's official spokesman yesterday said: 'There are no plans for this.
'In the first instance, the Health Secretary is ready to speak directly to the BMA, as soon as they pause strike action.
'That is something we have had in place for all other talks with unions and has been honoured by other unions.
'As the Health Secretary has said before, we need to move away from the starting position of 35 per cent.'
Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, also told MPs yesterday that third-party mediation was 'not the Government's preferred route, that is not something we would be taking up'.
The BMA asked the Government last week to enter talks with Acas to end the dispute over pay. Acas said it is 'well prepared and ready to help'.
Chairman of the BMA council, Professor Philip Banfield, told BBC Radio 4's Today that the union was not 'entrenched' in its position and 'there is no number set in stone' when it comes to a 35 per cent rise.
'Do we have any preconditions? No, we don't. This is all coming from the Government side who want to negotiate from a position where they have already decided what the answer is.'
Asked about the BMA pay demand for 35 per cent, he said: 'People are tied up on this 35 per cent figure.
'There is no number that is set in stone here - it is the principle of restoring pay that has been lost in its value. In order to discuss how that is achieved, it needs people to sit around the table.
'This Government does not want to sit around the table. It does not want to have any kind of independent arbitration of this because it's worried that it might cost it money.'
Professor Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairwoman of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, urged both sides to show some flexibility. She said 'patients are suffering' as the dispute continues. 'But also (in) this dispute, which nobody wants, the doctors are suffering too,' she added. 'What worries us as an academy - and we are very much not a trade union, we are the membership body for doctors - is that there doesn't seem to be any preliminary talks about talks.’
Health chiefs fear the prospect of unions including the BMA and RCN co-ordinating strikes or holding them in sequence, which would have a massive impact on the NHS.
Ambulance workers from Unite have said they will walk out alongside nurses and teachers on May 2. An RCN nurse strike is already scheduled from April 30 to May 2 following a ballot which rejected a 5 per cent pay deal.
Some 483,085 hospital appointments and procedures in England have been rescheduled due to strike action since December.