A Labour MP has hit out at the resident doctors for going ahead with their “reckless” five-day strike despite offers from the Government.
Speaking to GB News, Care Minister Stephen Kinnock criticised the British Medical Association members for continuing in their walkout to “inflict maximum damage” on the National Health Service just before Christmas.
Despite the NHS suffering an influx of “super flu” cases across the country, resident doctors have voted overwhelmingly to walk out over the next five days.
The BMA members also rejected Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s offer to delay the strikes until the new year, which Labour said they “would have facilitated”.
Asked about their overwhelming decision to reject Mr Streeting’s latest offer, Mr Kinnock told GB News: “With regards to the resident doctors and the BMA, I have to say we’re deeply disappointed by the decision that they’ve taken.
“We’ve given them a 28.9 per cent pay rise, they’re coming back and asking for 26 per cent more. That’s just not living in the real world.”
Noting the Labour Government has vowed to implement “emergency legislation” in light of the strikes, Mr Kinnock added: “We’ve also said we’ll do emergency legislation to solve this issue around foreign trained doctors being prioritised over British trained doctors.
“One of Boris Johnson’s brilliant ideas, which has to be sorted out. But the emergency legislation we’ve offered on that, they rejected.”
Labour MP Stephen Kinnock tears into resident doctors for going ahead with ‘reckless’ strike
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GB NEWS / PA
Noting their decision to reject the Health Secretary’s offer to move the strikes to the new year, the Care Minister stated: “We’ve said we will facilitate them doing their strike in January rather than doing it now, just before Christmas at the peak period of pressure for our NHS.
“But It’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that they’ve just decided to inflict maximum damage on our NHS, and that is irresponsible, it is reckless and it’s dangerous.”
Asked by host Ellie Costello about the Government’s latest unemployment figures, Mr Kinnock said it is a “deep-seated problem” that will “take time to fix”.
He explained: “We’ve actually created 380,000 new jobs since we came into office in July 2024, and we were the fastest growing economy in the G7 for the first six months of this year. So there is definitely an important work happening to grow the economy and create those jobs.
Resident doctors will walk out for five days
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PA
“The problem is around economic inactivity. We saw the welfare budget balloon under the Conservatives by about £88billion, and a lot of that is about writing people off.”
He added: “Young people should be in work, people who can work should be working, and that’s why we’ve got Alan Milburn doing a review into getting more young people back into work. We’ve got a guarantee now that 18 to 21 year olds must be in employment, education or training.
“And we’ve also got the Stephen Timms review looking at the role that disability benefits are playing in terms of this issue around economic inactivity. So it is a real problem. We’re grappling with that problem, but it is a deep seated problem that’s going to take some time to fix.”
Outlining his planned reforms of the dentistry industry, Mr Kinnock told GB News: “I’m really pleased to announce the significant reforms we’re making to the NHS dentistry contract. When we came into office in July 2024, NHS dentistry was on its knees. We’ve got to fix it, piece by piece.
Mr Kinnock told GB News that the strikes will inflict ‘maximum damage’ on the NHS
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GB NEWS
He added: “One of the big problems with it was that NHS, the dentists, are not incentivised to do complex and urgent work on the NHS. So we’re changing that by massively increasing, frankly, the fee rate that is paid to NHS dentists to do urgent work from about £42 now for a unit of urgent activity, up to £75 for that fee. And we’re also creating a complex care pathway.”
“So for people with a whole range of issues with their oral health, rather than sort of having to come back and forth and doing a kind of patch up job, there’ll be a complex care pathway package of between £250 and £700 for the dentists to ensure that that that work is de-risking.
“Aand they know that they can really give the patient the care that they need to deal with abscess, gum disease, broken teeth, the severe and acute issues that people are facing. And that is about prioritising.
“We’ve got people taking their own teeth out with pliers, travelling 100 miles for an appointment, five to nine year old children going into hospital to have their rotten teeth removed, that’s got to stop.”