Resident Doctors: Industrial Action

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

This is just not the time for a strike. As much as we have huge sympathy with many of the grievances of resident doctors, we understand that the next few weeks will be critical for how the next few months will be for the NHS, so I echo calls for the BMA to listen to reason. However, I spare a thought, and I hope the Secretary of State does, for the overseas doctors we rely on so heavily, because there is an acute workforce shortage. How, through this plan and this legislation, will the Secretary of State avoid creating a two-tier system that risks undervaluing the critical work that overseas doctors do to prop up our NHS?

[Wes Streeting]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for that contribution, which is really important on two fronts. First, she is absolutely right that this really is not the time for this kind of disruption, and I think the BMA knows that. I do not think that those I am dealing with are bad people. I think they are frustrated with me and this Government—they do not think we have gone far enough—and I am equally frustrated with them, and the fact that they do not recognise how far we have come, and how fast, but that is the nature of the dispute. With the extended mandate, there is an opportunity for us all to park this and, in the worst-case scenario, revisit it in January. I hope, even now, that the BMA will seize that opportunity. I think it would do it the world of good in the eyes of the public, and in the eyes of its members and the wider NHS family.

I am really glad that the Chair of the Select Committee raised the point about international medical graduates and the overseas workforce. The NHS has always been an international employer. We have been so fortunate as a country that, since 1948, people have come from around the world to help us build and sustain a national health service. Without them, it would collapse, and we never want to be a country that closes the door to international talent.

What is extraordinary is that many of those overseas doctors, when they see the competition ratios and compare our approach to that of their home country and other countries, think we have lost the plot. They cannot believe we do not already do this, so I think they will understand what we are doing and why. I hope they will be reassured that international recruits who have given service to the NHS will also be able to apply for specialty places, because we want to recruit and retain great talent, but they will also recognise how this is a game changer for the ratios for homegrown talent. I think they will understand that. I think they will respect that. Not least, I have been at pains as Health Secretary, given some of the ugly rhetoric that has come from one corner of this Chamber, to emphasise that, while some people in this House might tell those international recruits to go home, as far as we are concerned they are home.