Resident Doctors: Industrial Action

Josh Newbury Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I thank my hon. Friend for what he says and for the experience he brings to bear. I hope his urging is heeded by the BMA. I can give him that assurance. I think its operational leaders will face some fiendish choices in the coming days and weeks if strike action goes ahead. They will have my full backing. Myself, the Minister for Health and the Minister for Care are working closely with both the NHS and the social care sector, but this will be extremely challenging, and that is why I urge the BMA to adopt that “one team, one NHS” approach that he urges them to adopt.

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

I too thank the Secretary of State for the lengths he is going to for resident doctors. As somebody who worked in our NHS before coming to this place, I know what a pressured time winter is for staff and patients alike. With strikes at this time of year, NHS staff will this week be taking calls from harried managers and cancelling plans to be with their families at Christmas to cover shifts, and of course patients will have their operations cancelled. Does he share my concern about the human impact of this planned strike?

[Wes Streeting]

That is the only thing I have been thinking about in recent days, and it is why I have offered to extend a strike mandate for the first time, even though the BMA has asked me to do that on previous occasions in different contexts. I think it is a sensible compromise, and it avoids that dreaded phone call to the NHS staff member who has to cancel their holiday plans for Christmas and go back to work. Most importantly of all, it avoids that dreaded phone call to the patient who has been gearing themselves up for that test or scan that they are worried about, or that operation or procedure that they have waited far too long for. Indeed, it avoids the dreaded situation of someone having to call 999 in an emergency uncertain about whether the ambulance is going to arrive on time and anxious about whether they will be waiting in a car park, in a queue, in the back of an ambulance or, indeed, on a trolley in a corridor.

It gives me no pleasure at all to acknowledge that the bleak situations I have described are in play today in the NHS. Activity is already being stood down, but even if this strike action were not looming, the NHS is not in a state that I would want myself, the people I love, the people I represent or anyone in our country to be treated in, because of the enormous pressures that it is under.

With that in mind, and after listening to the contributions we have heard from across the House from Members on both sides who are not anti-doctor or even anti-BMA, I urge the BMA to do the right thing—not just to adopt this deal, but even at this late stage to adopt the offer of mandate extension in order to put off till January the spectre of strike action, and to give their members time to think, vote and make a decision on whether to accept a deal that would make a meaningful material difference to their job prospects, to their careers and to the future of our national health service. It is not too late to change course. It is not too late for the BMA to change its mind, and there is never any shame in doing so for those who think that is right.

I thank all hon. Members for their contributions, and you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving us so much time on such an important issue.