The NHS is finally on the road to recovery – I urge doctors not to go on strike

I’m often told that people are sick of hearing about the appalling legacy of 14 years of Conservative government. But it is the real-terms pay cuts, the erosion of working conditions, and the deterioration in patient care seen over more than a decade that still make the lives of NHS staff so hard.

The Darzi investigation, published last September, was very clear where the blame lies for the crisis in the NHS: it was the Tories’ austerity, mismanagement, and a botched top-down reorganisation that broke the health service, not its workforce.

But there is no fix to the crisis in the NHS that doesn’t include rebuilding the morale of the staff who run it. That’s why, since coming into office, this government has been determined not just to improve care for patients, but also to rebuild the pay and conditions of the 1.5 million people who deliver that care.

My Conservative predecessors hadn’t bothered to meet the resident doctors for more than three months before the election. I called them on day one, met them in week one, and within three weeks had negotiated a deal to end their strikes.

Despite the fiscal black hole we inherited and a flatlining economy, chancellor Rachel Reeves has put public sector workers first and awarded an above-inflation pay rise for all NHS staff for two years in a row now. That includes a 5.4 per cent pay rise for resident doctors.

The result is that resident doctors have seen their pay increase by 28.9 per cent compared to three years ago. The average starting salary of a full-time resident doctor is now around £38,800 – up nearly £9,500 since 2022/23.

This wasn’t inevitable. Both the Conservatives and Reform opposed the pay deals and the changes to employers’ national insurance, which helped fund them. We have taken a lot of flak for that decision, but it was the right move to start turning our NHS around.

I have been clear since opposition that we wouldn’t be able to fix the issue of pay overnight. This will have to be a journey, not an event. But another above-inflation pay rise of 5.4 per cent is yet another step in the right direction.

The pay award will be in payslips two months earlier than last year, and we’ll give the pay review bodies enough notice to make their recommendation in time for the start of the next financial year.

I also know that pay is not the only complaint resident doctors have about their professional lives. They are rightly angry about the way they are treated by their employer. So am I.

I have heard cases of doctors sent on placements to the other end of the country at just a couple of weeks’ notice. Others haven’t been able to book time off to attend a family member’s wedding a year in advance of the event.

The NHS can be a bad employer at the moment, which ends up being bad for taxpayers and patients, too. We spend hundreds of thousands of pounds training people, only to treat them like crap and cause them to leave to work in another health service or another career altogether. The extraordinarily high levels of staff turnover in the NHS are in no one’s interest.

When these problems arise, I want to work with resident doctors and other staff members to fix them.

Last summer, we inherited a ludicrous situation where trainee GPs were graduating into unemployment because there were more of them than there were jobs. This, at the same time as many patients are not able to get an appointment.

I listened to the Royal College of GPs and the British Medical Association, reformed the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme, invested around £100m, and so far, we have recruited an additional 1,700 GPs. A good result for staff and patients.

Bottlenecks like this are blocking resident doctors’ career progression.

In 2020, the Conservative government decided to remove the priority route for domestically trained NHS resident doctors to advance onto specialty training courses, putting them in direct competition with medics around the world.

Suddenly, competition for courses went from two to one to six to one, blocking the routes for NHS resident doctors to progress in their careers.

As part of the deal with resident doctors last summer, we launched a review into bottlenecks, and I will announce changes to unclog those bottlenecks later this summer, while ensuring international graduates already serving in the NHS aren’t disadvantaged.

I know too that all NHS staff are suffering from the moral injury that comes with being unable to provide patients with the care they deserve, because of the broken system in which resident doctors work.

It will take time to fix, but over the past 10 months, we have taken the first steps in our shared mission of rebuilding the health service.

Working together, we have provided the investment and reforms staff needed to deliver an extra 3.6 million appointments and cut waiting lists by 200,000. One hundred thousand extra patients with suspected cancers have been diagnosed or given the all-clear within four weeks, compared to last year. Lives are being changed for the better.

There’s a long way to go, but the NHS is finally on the road to recovery.

I am urging resident doctors today: don’t set this progress back. Strikes should always be a last resort, and three above-inflation pay rises in a row means we are far from that. Instead, let’s keep pulling towards recovery.

Be in no doubt, we are in the fight of our lives to rescue and rebuild the NHS.

For us progressives, the prize of victory is immense.

First, we would have changed the lives of the people we came into politics to serve: those who can’t afford to go private, who must rely on the NHS when they fall ill, and who deserve world-class healthcare.

Second, we would have shown that progressive politics can work, that things can get better, and that the principle that “when you fall ill, you should never have to worry about the bill” is just as relevant today as it was in 1948, when the NHS was founded.

The vultures on the populist right are circling, willing us to fail. If we do, they will argue that the founding principles of the NHS have failed. We must not give them the opportunity to dismantle our health service and replace it with an insurance system. Those are the stakes.

If we get this right, we can be the generation who took the NHS from the worst crisis in its history, got it back on its feet, and made it fit for the future – a health service that patients and staff can be proud of.