Scottish doctors threaten industrial action after pay dispute

The British Medical Association’s (BMA) Scottish branch today announced potential industrial action on the horizon. Resident doctors are threatening strike action after the Scottish Government “shamefully reneged” on an earlier pay agreement.

The BMA Scottish Resident Doctors’ Committee (SRDC) has voted to enter a formal dispute with the Scottish Government. The committee will now ask permission from the BMA’s UK council to carry out the ballot. It’s likely that we’ll see the results later this year.

Broken promises

Back in 2023, the Scottish government made an offer to make “credible progress” on pay restoration in each of the following years. Resident doctors agreed to the deal, which was largely credited with avoiding strike action in Scotland.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the UK, residents staged multiple walk-outs. This lead to major disruption in health services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Each year, an independent review body – the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration – make a recommendation on pay increases for medical professionals. Unfortunately, this year the Scottish government chose to make an offer below that recommendation.

A real-terms cut

After months of negotiations, Holyrood offered a 4.25% uplift. The BMA called this out as the lowest of any in the UK. Dr. Chris Smith, chair of the Scottish Resident Doctor Committee (SRDC), said:

In our pay negotiations this year, the Government has shamefully reneged on the deal we agreed in 2023, and we therefore have been left with no choice but to move forward with plans to ballot members for strike action in order to protect that deal.

This agreement was the only thing that prevented strike action by resident doctors in Scotland in 2023 and we remain the UK’s only resident doctors not to have gone on strike since it was agreed.

But that will be forced to change if our agreed deal is ignored. By going back on the deal, the Scottish Government has knowingly and severely increased the likelihood of us choosing the path of industrial action and the disruption to the NHS that will cause.

The residents are asking for a negotiated settlement. BMA Scotland have stressed that nobody wants to have to go on strike. Dr Smith went on:

There is time to avert this action, but we must see a real improvement on what the Scottish Government is prepared to offer, which is currently the lowest uplift of all resident doctors in the UK for 2025-26.

The offer this year is likely to be less even than RPI inflation, which means that it would have constituted a real-terms pay cut – we are already 17 per cent worse off than our peers were in 2008 and this would have made that worse.

It is completely unacceptable and it is clear that this is a far cry from the credible progress on the path to pay restoration that we were promised.

‘We are not asking for more’

Neil Gray, the Scottish health secretary, expressed disappointment that the doctors were entering the dispute. He also added that he didn’t recognise the BMA’s claim regarding the 2023 pay restoration agreement:

We have invested significantly in resident doctors’ pay over the last two years, agreeing an uplift of 12.4 per cent for 2023-24 and a cumulative uplift of 11 per cent for 2024-25.

These were the highest pay awards across the public sector that, I believe, were justified to begin the process of delivering on the 2023 agreement in good faith. We remain absolutely committed to honouring that agreement.

I would ask the BMA resident doctors committee to reconsider to allow their members to receive their deserved pay uplift for this year and to agree the second-year element.

However, Dr Smith stressed the importance of resident doctors taking a stand. He stated that this would not only benefit the profession, but would also help to ensure the delivery of a sustainable NHS going forward into the future.

He added:

As resident doctors we are the heart and are the future of the NHS medical workforce. But we risk losing many of us to other professions and countries if the government does not value us properly, with disastrous consequences for a health service already on its knees.

We are not asking for more – we trusted the Scottish Government in accepting the pay deal and are simply asking that they now deliver that deal.

Featured image via the Canary