Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)

My Lords, the BMA pay claim has been ridiculous right from the start, and I share my noble friend the Minister’s outrage at the decision to carry out these strikes at a moment when the health service is on its knees, certainly in Birmingham. We are in a critical situation: the service is working under huge pressure, and ambulances are finding it very difficult to discharge patients at A&E because we cannot get the flow of patients through the system. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, I wondered if my noble friend the Minister shares my view. I remember the 2014 junior hospital doctors’ dispute. Although that was ostensibly about pay, what came through was frustration at the way training and working lives were organised, with inflexible placements and utterly insensitive rota allocations. It made junior doctors’ working lives increasingly difficult. This was 2014. Does my noble friend the Minister think that part of the reason we are here now is that nothing was done to respond to the substantive issues juniors raised at the time, and that at some point, there will be a constructive way forward? I am convinced that tackling the way junior and resident doctors are treated in the health service will have to be at the heart of what we do.