BMA (Contract Negotiations)

Debate between Helen Jones and Rachael Maskell

Monday 21st March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for defending the university in his town. I am sure that he is right.

Any experienced negotiator will say that beginning negotiations by insulting the staff is never a good tactic. That is part of what the Government have attempted in muddying the waters: first, by drawing conclusions from the research that are not there, and secondly, by not being clear what they mean by a seven-day NHS. They have constantly said, “We need a seven-day NHS”. What they fail to tell us is whether they want a seven-day emergency service, which we already have but everybody accepts that it could be improved, or a seven-day elective service, which will require a huge investment not only in doctors and nurses but in diagnostics, support staff, lab technicians and so on. That failure to be clear has made doctors very wary of what the Secretary of State is trying to achieve.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

There is also a real issue around capacity for a seven-day service. If elective surgery is increased over the weekend, where will those patients go, because hospitals are already at capacity?

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and she is right.

The Government need to make clear what they are trying to do, then they need to negotiate with the staff in good faith. Unfortunately, there is not much good faith around at the moment. That is why 90% of junior doctors have said they would consider leaving the NHS if the new contract is imposed on them. I do not think for one minute that 90% of junior doctors will go, but the Government have proceeded—as they do in a lot of cases—as if those junior doctors had nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, in this case they do: they can go to Scotland, or to Wales; or they can go and work abroad, where their skills are in high demand and where they will find, in many cases, they are paid more and work fewer hours than they do here. If even a small percentage of junior doctors go, what will the Government do to fill the gaps? We already have gaps in certain specialities, such as A&E, and paediatrics. What is the Government’s plan?

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Jones]

It is a real failure, given the commitment of doctors and other staff to the NHS.

This dispute is taking away energy and focus from dealing with the real problems facing the NHS. The NHS is under huge pressure and many trusts have big deficits, yet the service as a whole is still expected to make over £20 billion worth of so-called efficiency savings, which no one with real knowledge of the NHS thinks can be made without cutting services. One in 10 people in A&E now wait longer than four hours for treatment, which is the worst result for a decade.

There is also huge pressure from the Government’s ill-conceived cuts to local council budgets, which has led a slashing of social care and which the Government were warned at the time would have an impact on the NHS. The real problem those cuts are causing is more admissions to A&E, often of elderly people who have had falls or who have become ill because of lack of care. There is also the problem at the other end, whereby people cannot be discharged because there is no care package in place for them.

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again; she is being incredibly generous with her time. Does she agree that it causes real concern that the specialisms that require people to work longer and unsocial hours are also the ones that are most difficult to recruit for, and that the contract is therefore putting clinical safety at risk?

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend is quite right, and I will come on to that point later. There are staff shortages in the NHS that the contract may well make worse.

In the end, as in any dispute, the issues can be resolved only by negotiation, and in truth the two sides are not all that far apart. Huge progress was made when Sir David Dalton was brought into the talks, but there are still outstanding issues to be resolved. For instance, the Government trumpet a 13.5% increase in basic pay. What they do not say is that that increase will be paid for by cuts elsewhere. For example, payments that are made as a reward for length of service will go. I have yet to hear from the Government their assessment of what impact that change will have on retaining staff in the NHS, or how it will work for members of staff who take time out, whether for academic study—we need doctors who are both academics and good clinicians—or for maternity leave. What will happen to women who work part time, and so on? If we lose a number of women doctors in the NHS, the service will be in a great deal of difficulty.

Guaranteed pay rates when people change specialties are also going. In the past, if someone changed specialty later on in their career, their pay was guaranteed. That will not be the case any more. That change is bound to have an effect on recruitment in areas where we are already short of doctors, and I have seen no real impact assessment of that yet.

Of course, the big issue for many doctors is the change to standard time and premium time. The Government are increasing standard time from 60 hours a week to 90 hours a week. In the past, doctors were paid extra for working between 7 pm and 7 am, and for working at weekends. Standard time will now increase to run to 9 pm on weekdays and 5 pm on Saturdays. Doctors who work more than one in four weekends will get a premium payment. It is difficult to work out the effect of that change on individual doctors; it depends on how many weekends they work now, what their specialty is and so on.

The Government’s pay guarantee lasts for only three years, and given the Secretary of State’s remarks, junior doctors fear that the change is a back-door way of introducing longer hours. It certainly makes it cheaper to roster doctors at weekends. The Government say they will fine hospitals that roster people for more than a certain number of hours, but the doctors say that offer is not good enough. That is not an unbridgeable gap; it could be resolved. However, the result of what has happened and the Secretary of State’s comments is distrust and suspicion among doctors about what his real motives are. That is combined with a disastrous drop in morale in the NHS. The latest NHS staff survey shows that the percentage of junior doctors reporting stress has risen from 20% to 35% in five years. The proportion of staff saying that they feel pressurised to come into work when they are ill has gone up from 16% to a whopping 44%.

That loss of good will and drop in morale matters, because NHS staff are known for going the extra mile, working longer than they are paid for and doing things they do not have to do. That extends from the consultants who come in on their day off to see certain patients to the nurses and support staff who bring in a birthday card for an elderly person who has got no one else. I well remember that when my son was born, I was there for three shifts in the maternity department. After he was born, the registrar from the first shift came back to see me, to check that I was all right and to see whether I had had a boy or a girl. It is impossible to put a price on such things, and the Government risk losing all that and doing huge damage to the NHS if they do not solve the dispute.