Debate contribution: Junior Doctors’ Pay

Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on 21 May 2024.

MLA

Mr Alan Chambers

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

21 May 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Junior Doctors’ Pay

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4491917

Read the official Assembly record

Text

First, I pay tribute to all our junior doctors. It has been said many times that they are an integral part of our workforce. While that is true, we must not for one moment underestimate the sheer contribution they make to the health and welfare of patients. It is a simple fact that many of our local hospital services would not be able to function without them. That is why I fully acknowledge that they are a really important part of the workforce and that we need to do all that we can to support and encourage them in their role. Pay and broader terms and conditions are, inevitably, a really important part of that. Unfortunately, during periods of political stalemate, our junior doctors, just like our Agenda for Change staff and all our other HSC staff, lose out on timely decisions on pay. That is exactly what happened last year, but I welcome the fact that, following the restoration of the Executive, the Minister of Health moved almost immediately to give a commitment that last year's recommendations from the pay review bodies would be delivered. The implementation of the DDRB recommendations for 2023-24 gave junior doctors an average pay uplift of 9·1% and over 10% for first-year doctors, which compared very favourably with the average 2023-24 CPI inflation rate of 6%. I note, however, that the BMA junior doctors committee is sticking firmly with the call for full pay restoration. While that is absolutely understandable as a broader objective, we, as MLAs, need to be alert to what it means. Junior doctors are by no means the only group of public-sector workers who have seen a degrading of their real pay terms from 2008; in fact, I struggle to think of any such group that has not. That is what a decade of austerity at a national level does, and it has been made worse by a regular absence of political and budgetary certainty in Northern Ireland. Do those who demand full pay restoration for junior doctors also want to see pay restored to our police officers or teachers? More importantly in the context of today's debate, are they asking for a greater pay award to be allocated to our junior doctors than to their health colleagues? The last thing that the House should be doing is promoting disunity between, for instance, our Agenda for Change staff and junior doctors. A major pay increase would have unintended but major knock-on implications across the health service and the wider public sector. The reality is that there is no bottomless pit of money. Ironically, the other Executive parties that recently agreed the 2024-25 Budget seem to believe that Health has already got enough, but it does not. By his own admission, the Minister has not even got enough resource cash to keep funding existing cancer and time-critical treatments, yet, on top of joining every other populist call for funding, the proposers of the motion suggest that he somehow magics up the extra cash. My colleague the Chair of the Health Committee suggested that junior doctors may not get all that they are asking for and that forward commitments may satisfy them, but I ask the Minister to tell me how he can give commitments to anyone in the absence of multi-year Budgets.

551 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:33 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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