Wes Streeting to meet BMA as public support collapses for resident doctor strikes

Exclusive: polling shows strong approval by voters for strikes has halved from 52% a year ago to 26%

Wes Streeting will meet representatives from the British Medical Association this week as he looks to avert five days of strikes by resident doctors.

The health secretary will meet the union amid a continuing pay dispute, despite having previously called the planned industrial action “completely unreasonable”.

The government has offered resident doctors – formerly known as junior doctors – a 5.4% pay rise this year, after a 22% rise agreed for the previous two years. But this has been met with anger among doctors, who say they have suffered years of pay restraint, which have left their salaries far behind where they were in 2008 in real terms.

The co-chairs of the BMA resident doctors committee, Ross Nieuwoudt and Melissa Ryan, said in a joint statement they were “happy to continue discussions to find a solution”.

They added: “We are glad that the secretary of state has taken us up on our offer and we look forward to constructive discussions, in the hope that we can make progress that would be sufficient to support suspending the planned strike.”

Evidence suggests, however, that public support for the strikes has collapsed, with barely one in four voters now backing their industrial action.

New polling shows previously strong approval by voters for strikes by resident doctors has halved from 52% a year ago to just 26%.

The fall may be linked to the fact that resident doctors in England got a 22% salary uplift from the Labour government soon after it took power in July 2024 but now want another 29% – spread over several years – to restore the real-terms value of their pay to what it was in 2008.

The new polling by Ipsos, shared exclusively with the Guardian, will increase pressure on Streeting to reach a compromise with the BMA before the planned five-day walkout on 25 July.

Two in five (41%) British adults oppose the strikes and 24% are neutral. Slightly more Labour voters (35%) back the doctors’ action than oppose it (32%), with 24% neutral.

“If resident doctors do take strike action this summer, it will be the first time for some years that they go on industrial action without broad-based support from the public, including from Labour voters,” said Gideon Skinner, Ipsos’s senior director of UK politics.

The survey findings also contain bad news for Streeting and Keir Starmer, the prime minister. More than two in five people (43%) think the government is doing a bad job at negotiating with the trade unions. This is an increase of 7% since Ipsos asked that question last October and almost twice as many as those who thought that (23%) last August.

“Although there is increasing criticism of the way the Labour government is handling negotiations with unions, Labour is not yet receiving the negative ratings that Rishi Sunak’s government saw [when 60% disapproved of its handling of union pay claims], while public perceptions towards the wider picture of public finances are also likely to be playing a part,” Skinner said.

A separate new poll by YouGov reported by the Times found that 36% of voters supported the doctors’ strikes while 49% were opposed.

When the Guardian interviewed the new BMA leader, Dr Tom Dolphin, last Wednesday, before Ipsos’s findings emerged, he acknowledged that public support had fallen and that voters “will wonder” why more strikes were looming.

“Doctors have been hugely grateful to the public for their support the whole way through this dispute but I completely understand how people might be feeling now, although there are plenty who do still support us.

“No one likes to have their lives and routines disrupted and particularly when it comes to health and wellbeing, we know people can feel worried.

“The public will remember what the last round of strikes meant for them and their families and now they’ve seen resident doctors getting a pay rise, people will wonder why it’s happening all over again. The reason why is that the [22%] pay rise was only part of the journey to restoring the value of our pay that we’re campaigning for.”

But he added that people would understand why resident doctors were pursuing such a large increase and said media coverage of it was encouraging “jealousy”.

Asked how seeking a 29% pay rise soon after getting a 22% uplift looked to the public, Dolphin said: “I think the public should expect their doctors to be valued properly. I think if you explain to people, when we do explain to people in individual conversations, about: ‘What would you do if you had had a 30% pay cut? What would you feel about it? How would you react?’, people do understand [the BMA seeking] that [pay ask].

“Fundamentally, when you talk to people about the unfairness of that and that loss of value, people get it. They understand and they would do the same if they could to restore that value.”

Another recent poll, by the Good Growth Foundation, found that even fewer voters endorsed the resident doctors walkouts – 23% – than the 26% identified by Ipsos.

Ipsos interviewed a representative online sample of 1,023 adults aged 18 to 75 across Great Britain on Wednesday and Thursday, just after news of the five-day strike emerged.

Streeting said: “Public support for strikes has collapsed, following the 28.9% pay rise resident doctors have received thanks to this government. Patients are begging resident doctors not to walk out on them.

“Instead of rushing down this unreasonable path, the BMA need to pause and think about the real risk of people losing trust in doctors and the damage that would do to our NHS and the entire medical profession.

“My plea continues to be for the BMA to listen to the public on this, and the majority of resident doctors who did not vote for these strikes. Call off these unnecessary and unfair strikes, work with the government to improve working conditions for resident doctors, and let’s keep rebuilding our NHS.”

Ryan and Nieuwoudt, said: “Resident doctors’ pay is down by more than 20% in real terms compared to 17 years ago. We’re sure the public would agree that they are not worth a fifth less, nor working a fifth less hard, than they were then.

“And we’re sure the public want a medical workforce and health service that’s there for them in the future, and don’t want doctors to leave the NHS or the country for better pay and conditions elsewhere.

“Paying a newly qualified doctor the £22.67 an hour they are owed is both fair and deserved. That we have had to resort to this to make ourselves heard is a failure that the government can easily fix.”