Britain announces it will offer doctors and teachers pay rises of at least 6 per cent as thousands of medics begin a five-day strike.
The UK has offered pay rises to millions of public sector workers to end strikes sparked by a cost-of-living crisis, as thousands of young doctors quit their jobs for five days in protest.
The UK government has decided to accept recommendations for pay rises, Treasury Secretary John Glen said on Thursday, granting pay rises of at least 6 per cent to doctors and teachers.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government announced its decision after considering the recommendations of a number of independent wage review committees.
The wage increases are below the current inflation rate of 8.7 per cent but aim to fill the gap left by a wave of major industrial unrest over falling real wages across the UK.
Junior doctors will now get a 6 per cent pay rise and a £1,250 ($1,633.25) flat wage increase, while teachers would get 6.5 per cent. He also announced salary increases for the police (7 percent) and armed forces (5 percent).
Glen said there will be no new borrowing or spending to fund the increases, although the teachers’ pay rises will be funded through a reallocation of the education department’s existing budget.
The development came as Britain’s state-funded healthcare system faced its longest-ever strike, as tens of thousands of doctors across England began their latest strike.
So-called young doctors, who are at the beginning of their careers in the post-med school years, began their strike at 7am. Many of them were on picket lines outside hospitals across England, calling for a 35 per cent pay rise.
The British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ union, has called for an increase to bring young doctors’ salaries back to 2008 levels, taking inflation into account.
Meanwhile, the workload of around 75,000 young doctors in England has increased as patient waiting lists for treatment hit record highs amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Today marks the start of the longest single strike by doctors in the history of the NHS, but that’s still not a record to go down in the history books,” said BMA chiefs Dr. Robert Laurenson and Dr. Vivek Trivedi.
They called on the government to drop its “nonsensical precondition” of not speaking while strikes are announced.
Arjan Singh, a 27-year-old resident on a strike line outside London’s University College Hospital, said the NHS had “bet on goodwill and now this is the last chance to change that”.
He said his colleagues plan to travel to countries “that care about their doctors.”
“Physicians have realized that they are working in a global market and are not limited to this country,” he added.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay said: “This five-day young doctors’ strike will impact thousands of patients, endangering patient safety and hampering efforts to cut NHS waiting lists… A wage demand of 35 per cent or more is unreasonable and carries risks.” Inflation is fueled, making everyone poorer.”
Britain, like other countries, is struggling with high inflation for the first time in years.
The price surge was fueled first by supply chain issues resulting from the pandemic and then by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up energy and food prices. Although inflation has eased slightly from its peak of 8.7 percent, it is still well above the 2 percent target the Bank of England is targeting.
The government’s latest offer, after more than a year of elevated inflation, is likely to anger unions, which have said school and hospital budgets cannot bear the cost of wage increases without cutting spending elsewhere.
Sunak, who faces elections next year and is doing poorly in opinion polls, has pledged to halve inflation and ministers have stressed the risk that excessive wage increases would undermine that goal and lead to rising prices.