The health secretary has called the junior doctors’ strike unnecessary and self-defeating during a visit to Reading.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, visited Prospect Park in West Reading in a rally for Labour councillors and activists.
He stopped by during a six-day junior doctors’ strike, undertaken by the British Medical Association (BMA), that has seen walkouts at the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
This strike is the fourth since the Labour government was elected in July 2024.
A year later, doctors held strikes in July, November and December 2025.
The latest strikes at Royal Berkshire Hospital began on Tuesday, April 7 and will last six days until Monday, April 13.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service asked Mr Streeting how the government intended to end the dispute.
He said: “I think the tragedy at the heart of the resident doctors dispute is that our approach is completely different to the Tories.
“The Conservatives shut the door to the BMA and refused to engage with them.
“Even with strike action, I’ve never closed the door to the BMA. When we came in, we gave within weeks of taking office a 28.9 per cent pay rise and the deal that BMA have just rejected would have given another 4.9 per cent rise on average this year, as high as 7.1 per cent for some of the lowest paid resident doctors, as well as the training opportunities and the cancellation of exam fees that leave them out of pockets for the tune of thousands, and they’ve rejected that deal.
“So this week’s strikes were totally unnecessary, totally avoidable, quite self-defeating, because the £300 million this is going to cost could have gone into doctors’ pockets and could have gone into the NHS.
“But we will do our best to keep the show on the road, to keep cutting waiting lists in spite of strikes, as we have done over the last year.
“But I’m not going to pretend that this is disappointing, and I think I need resident doctors to understand that I’m not pretending to have solved all of their problems in the first two years of a Labour government, but the BMA need to stop pretending that I could have solved all of their problems in the first two years.
“Look at the state of the public finances, look at the state of the public services, look at the state of the world, and then you understand why with Labour, we are moving things in the right directions, what we won’t be able to do is change the country overnight.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint. We are moving in the right direction, and I’d urge the BMA not to take us out at our ankles.”
Mr Streeting, the Labour MP for Ilford North, also visited Swindon during a day of campaigning.
According to a survey by the General Medical Council (GMC), of the more than 3,000 doctors asked, 30 per cent said that they were ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to relocate abroad in the survey published in April 2024.
