Keir Starmer gives resident doctors 48 hours to call off strike or lose training offer

Keir Starmer has threatened to withdraw an offer of thousands of extra NHS training posts if resident doctors in England do not call off a six-day strike after Easter.The prime minister has given the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, 48 hours to ditch its plans for industrial action or the government will pull the current offer from the table.Last week, the BMA resident doctors’ committee rejected an offer that would have given doctors a pay rise of up to 7.1% this year, without putting it to members for a vote.Writing in the Times, Starmer labelled the BMA’s rejection of the deal “reckless” and said it “benefits no one”. He called for the BMA to allow its members to vote on whether they want to accept the deal.He wrote: “Last week, the BMA resident doctors’ committee rejected a historic deal. They now have 48 hours to reconsider. For patients, for the NHS, and for the doctors they represent – they should.”The deal would have meant another above-inflation pay rise, reforms to pay progression, reimbursements for the cost of Royal College exams and an extra 4,500 additional speciality training places over three years.Of these jobs, 1,000 would have opened for applications this month, but “will be gone if this deal isn’t put to a vote on Thursday”, the prime minister said.He added: “Those measures were not chosen randomly, nor were they imposed from above.“They are the result of months of collaboration with the BMA, who engaged constructively throughout. At every stage, we listened to one another, recognising that above all else, we shared those same foundational goals.“That is why walking away from this deal is the wrong decision. It is a reckless decision. And doing so without even giving resident doctors themselves the chance to vote on it makes it even worse. Because the truth is this: no one benefits from rejecting this deal.”The union, which is to stage a strike from 7 to 13 April, is demanding “full pay restoration” to 2008 levels, the equivalent of a 26% pay rise.The chair of the BMA’s UK resident doctors committee, Dr Jack Fletcher, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve been willing and have been talking constructively for the last two months and at the very last minute the government has shifted the goalposts of the pay offer.“I am very happy and willing to sit down and talk constructively once again. We’ve made clear to the government what it would take to essentially to get back to where we were – which was back to before this shifting of the goalposts.“Making threats about withholding jobs from doctors and essentially stopping doctors from caring for patients is not a realistic or credible way of ending this dispute – it will end in a negotiation room.“I’m happy to sit down with the government at any point to try to negotiate a settlement but I don’t think that’s done by writing in newspapers and issuing threats unilaterally, I think that’s done in a negotiation room in a constructive way.”On the decision not to put the deal to members, he said: “We discussed this with our committee who are elected to represent our members. Their representatives have considered this offer. We don’t think it goes far enough on pay so we decided not to put this to our members.​”