Junior Doctors’ Contract Negotiations Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Dennis Skinner
Main Page: Dennis Skinner (Labour - Bolsover)Department Debates - View all Dennis Skinner's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
Junior Doctors’ Contract Negotiations
Dennis Skinner Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Ben Gummer
The Government will be looking at Sir David Dalton’s recommendation and acting on it. He is right to point to the fact that the 1999 contract is imperfect—it was agreed back in 2008 that it had many failings, and that something needed to be done to fix it. That contract in its generality has helped to contribute to the lowering of morale in the junior doctor workforce, which Sir David Dalton has recognised, as has the Secretary of State. It is not just the way in which training placements are made and a whole series of other problems with the contract; it is also the fact that people have to work for long periods of consecutive nights and days, all of which is reduced in the latest proposed contract.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
Is the Minister aware that it takes two sides to call a strike? It cannot happen just because one side of the argument wants a strike. The Secretary of State has been looking for a fight with the doctors ever since he got the job. Does he realise that when I came here 45 years ago, I was getting time and a half for all-day Saturday, and double time, like other miners, for Sunday? Every time the doctors are replaced by agency nurses it costs the Government and the taxpayer a small fortune. Get the matter settled, and be decent for a change.
Ben Gummer
The hon. Gentleman has long prized himself as a champion of working people, yet the current contract and the proposed contract by the BMA, which I presume the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) supports, prefers junior doctors over porters, cleaners and junior nurses, and it gives them better rates of pay, and premium rates that could not be enjoyed by lesser paid workers under contracts negotiated by unions that the hon. Gentleman supports. Here we have it: the final morphing of the Labour party into a party that prefers professionals over porters. That, I am afraid, is the party that he is now a member of.