Resident Doctors: Industrial Action

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has just made a very good case as to why the offer which has been rejected would have been so helpful. On the issue of pay, our door has remained open to the BMA and to reasonable, realistic solutions to resolving the dispute, on which we have been repeatedly clear. I know the noble Baroness did not say this, but I say more broadly that there can be no suggestion that the BMA was not aware that we can go no further on pay this year. Resident doctors have already had a good deal on pay—an average 28.9% rise over the last three years—but pay expectations have to take account of the fiscal position and the impact across the whole of the NHS and beyond. I am glad to hear that noble Lords are in agreement with that approach.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the BMA pay claim has been ridiculous right from the start, and I share my noble friend the Minister’s outrage at the decision to carry out these strikes at a moment when the health service is on its knees, certainly in Birmingham. We are in a critical situation: the service is working under huge pressure, and ambulances are finding it very difficult to discharge patients at A&E because we cannot get the flow of patients through the system.

Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, I wondered if my noble friend the Minister shares my view. I remember the 2014 junior hospital doctors’ dispute. Although that was ostensibly about pay, what came through was frustration at the way training and working lives were organised, with inflexible placements and utterly insensitive rota allocations. It made junior doctors’ working lives increasingly difficult. This was 2014. Does my noble friend the Minister think that part of the reason we are here now is that nothing was done to respond to the substantive issues juniors raised at the time, and that at some point, there will be a constructive way forward? I am convinced that tackling the way junior and resident doctors are treated in the health service will have to be at the heart of what we do.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend, and I share his view. I am sure he will be very familiar with this, but it is worth reminding ourselves that in the Statement we are debating, the Secretary of State said last week:

“On jobs, I have much more sympathy with the BMA’s demands. I have heard the very real fears that resident doctors across the country have about their futures; it is a legitimate grievance that I agree with”.


As the Secretary of State outlined and my noble friend referred to, we have inherited

“training bottlenecks that … leave huge numbers of resident doctors without a job … UK graduates”

used to compete

“among themselves for specialty roles; now, they are competing against”

the rest of the world.

“That is a direct result of the visa and immigration changes made by the previous … Government post-Brexit, and … compounded by the”


then Government’s

“decision to increase the number of medical students without also increasing the number of specialty training places”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/12/25; col. 429.]

This has not just come about, and I am grateful to my noble friend for reminding us of the history of this.