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Senior health officials have discussed banning UK doctors from going on strike, in a sign of growing desperation inside the government at resolving a three-year-long campaign of industrial action over pay.
Health secretary Wes Streeting has not ruled out the idea as pessimism mounts about the prospect of a deal with doctors in training, who are on a six-day walkout in England, the 15th strike in a long-running dispute.
High-level officials have raised the prospect of a ban on resident doctors staging strikes in meetings with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The feasibility and professional and political reaction to such a ban, which would trigger a backlash from unions and backbench Labour MPs, had been raised in the meetings, the people said.
Other officials stressed, however, that there was no formal policy proposal for a ban under consideration and that ministers still hoped for a negotiated solution with the British Medical Association, the main doctors’ union.
Streeting said this week he was not looking at a strike ban “so far” but reserved the option of returning to the idea if the pay dispute dragged on with no sign of progress. The current walkout began at 7am on Tuesday.
Discussions of a ban were prompted by frustration with the BMA, which some in government said they now feared would prove unable to stick to any compromise deal.
They said BMA negotiators had reached an agreement during talks last month, only to backtrack once it became clear it was unpopular with the union’s resident doctors’ committee. The BMA denies this.
Streeting made giving doctors a significant pay rise one of his first acts on taking office in 2024, in an effort to resolve a dispute that is hampering efforts to meet Labour’s pledge of reducing waiting lists.
The health department said in a statement: “As the secretary of state has made clear, the government is not considering banning doctors from striking.”
Doctors last month rejected a deal that ministers said would have led to a 4.9 per cent basic pay uplift on average, following a 29 per cent rise since Labour won power in 2024.
But the BMA insists pay must return to 2008 levels in real terms.
The government has previously relaxed restrictions on trade unions, which are some of the Labour Party’s biggest financial backers.
The Employment Rights Act repealed Conservative legislation that would have allowed ministers to set minimum levels of service during walkouts in the NHS, fire, education and transport systems.
Emma Runswick, deputy chair of the BMA’s governing council, said a ban “would be a totally unacceptable assault on the right to strike” and that doctors needed “the final option of industrial action”.
“The Labour Party claims it represents working people and originally emerged from the trade union movement, so any discussion around cracking down on unions and workers’ rights would be at odds with its very founding principles and should be a huge cause for concern for all unions,” Runswick said.
Significant numbers of Labour MPs, who hold Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s political future in their hands, would also resist any move to restrict unions’ power to strike.
Legislation would require cross-government agreement through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as well as Number 10, according to health officials.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, has said she would end the dispute by banning doctors from striking if she were in power.
Asked about a potential ban, Streeting told ITV this week: “There are other workers in the public sector, like the police, that are not allowed to go on strike. The right to strike is an important right. And we have not so far considered taking that right off the table for doctors.”
Voters have moved against the BMA walkouts, with polling by YouGov finding this week that 55 per cent were opposed and 37 per cent supportive, in a reversal of the pattern when industrial action began in 2023.
Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, the arm’s-length body that is being scrapped, has warned of a “long slog” of a year or more of industrial action and said he was looking at reorganising the health service to make it less reliant on junior doctors.
Data visualisation by Amy Borrett
