Jeremy Hunt blinks first in junior doctors dispute with agreement to halt work on implementing new contracts

Health Secretary says the Government is ‘willing to play our part’ in resolving the dispute

Dave Prentis, UNISON general secretary visits a British Medical Association picket line at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton (PA)

Talks between the Government and the British Medical Association will resume for the first time since February after both sides agreed to a five-day truce in the long-running junior doctor contract dispute.

In a potentially significant breakthrough, the Government agreed that all work to implement the new contracts, which will require more weekend working, will be suspended from Monday.

For its part, the British Medical Association (BMA) will delay any decision about further industrial action.

The proposal was initially made by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. The BMA accepted it, and while the Department of Health had initially said it was “too late” to stop the implementation of the contracts, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has now written to the Academy to say the Government was “willing to play our part”.

He said that the Government had already indicated its willingness to talk to the BMA about non-contractual issues – which could include wider funding requirements for the NHS.

However, he said that discussions of the contract should focus only on unresolved issues of Saturday pay and unsocial hours and not revisit areas already agreed.

“Any talks should not proceed unless we have written agreement from the [junior doctor committee of the BMA] that they will agree to negotiate substantively and in good faith on this single biggest outstanding area of disagreement and that they would ratify and recommend any negotiated agreement to their members,” he wrote.

The BMA has said it will engage in talks, indicating that they have accepted the Government’s terms.

Dr Johann Malawana, chair of the BMA’s junior doctor committee said: “Junior doctors have said since the outset that we want to reach a negotiated agreement, and have repeatedly urged the Government to re-enter talks.

“As suggested by the Academy, we are keen to restart talks with an open mind. It is critical to find a way forward on all the outstanding issues - which are more than just pay - and hope that a new offer is made that can break the impasse.”

Dr Malawana had been due to meet his committee on Saturday to discuss the BMA’s next steps in opposing the contract, with indefinite strike action and mass resignations understood to be under consideration.

The new working conditions were due to be imposed from August, without the approval of the workforce, after the Government unilaterally decided to end negotiations with the BMA, claiming that the union’s unwillingness to engage on key points – in particular Saturday pay – had made a negotiated settlement impossible.

More industrial action from junior doctors followed, including the first all-out junior doctors’ strike in the history of the NHS, which, despite Government warnings, concluded without any reports of major patient safety incidents.

Announcing the Government’s decision in the House of Lords, health minister, Lord Prior, said: “We are willing to pause introduction of the new contract for five days from Monday should the junior doctors committee agree to focus the discussion on the outstanding contractual issues, namely unsocial hours and Saturday pay.”

Striking a conciliatory tone, Lord Prior said there was now a recognition in Government that the dispute had become about more than just the terms of the junior doctor contract.

“It is about how junior doctors are trained, how they are valued, how they are integrated into hospitals and into the workforce,” he said.

“These are much broader issues than those addressed in the contract. The Government is fully aware of that and once this dispute has been settled we can start to resolve those bigger, deeper, more fundamental issues.”

The new contract requires more weekend working, without existing bonuses for working Saturdays, but with a 13.5 per cent basic pay rise.

The proposals are part of the Government’s commitment to a ‘seven-day NHS’. However, junior doctors are concerned that without additional funding to back up the new terms, the current workforce will be spread too thinly over the working week.

Doctors are also concerned over plans to replace automatic annual pay increases with increases based on time served; a measure which the Government’s own impact assessment concluded would disproportionately impact on women doctors who need to take time off for maternity leave.