PM: Junior doctors are wrong to strike over Xmas

JUNIOR doctors are wrong to embark on ‘damaging strike action’ over pay during the busy Christmas period, Rishi Sunak said yesterday.

The Prime Minister hit out at plans for the longest walkout in NHS history as union leaders tried to defend their demands, saying ‘all’ they were looking for was a 26 per cent rise.

Medics will again go on strike for three days this month and six more at the start of January.

It comes after British Medical Association chiefs rejected a pay offer in their long-running row with the Government.

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Sunak piled pressure on the striking doctors, stressing that ‘every other part of the public sector’ which had taken industrial action had now resolved its dispute with the Government.

Nurses, physiotherapists and

‘Medics looking for a 26% rise’

paramedics have called off strikes following pay deals, while consultants will vote on an offer their leaders have accepted.

Mr Sunak added: ‘ The junior doctors are taking action in the face of a recommendation of an independent body of a 9 per cent pay rise on average, the highest increase across the entire public sector. The Government has gone beyond that in conversations with them and they have still decided to take damaging strike action. It is wrong.’

But Dr Robert Laurenson, the co-chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, told LBC radio: ‘ The [extra] 3 per cent offer was completely insufficient to actually begin to address 26 per cent pay erosion that doctors have faced over the last 15 years. All we’re looking for is for that 26 per cent to be restored so we go back to a 0 per cent change from 2008.’