Stephen Kinnock

That gives me an opportunity to highlight the fact that this Government have delivered a 29% pay increase for resident doctors. Although I absolutely accept that, prior to July 2024, over 14 years of dealing with an incompetent Government, they suffered from being underpaid and neglected, and we had to seek to fix that—we have done that in good faith and with good will—there have to be limits to what we can offer. The sky is not the limit; the limit is the deeply damaged and parlous state of the public finances that were left to us when we took over in July 2024, and the significant pressures across every aspect of Government. We implore the resident doctors and the BMA to come back to the table. The Secretary of State believed that he had a deal with the officers of the BMA, and those officers then took that deal to the broader committee. There is no doubt that that committee has ideological motivations, and it refused to accept the deal. We are now in a very challenging position. The Secretary of State has asked several times for a face-to-face meeting with the entire committee, and that request has been refused. We have to make progress, but I simply remind its members that most of our constituents would see a 29% pay increase as a pretty positive deal.