Restoring junior doctor pay in Scotland

Junior doctors’ pay is set through an established process involving an independent UK-wide pay review body – the Doctors and Dentists Review Body (DDRB).

The annual increase is entirely a matter for Scottish Ministers to decide whether to implement the DDRB recommendations. While they will always take the DDRB report into account, they are not bound by either the recommendations or any decision made elsewhere in the UK.

The BMA is calling for reform of the DDRB process so that pay increases can be recommended independently and fairly, protecting the recruitment and retention of junior doctors in Scotland.

Long-term wage trends

Between 2008/09 and 2021/22 in Scotland, the bonuses for trainee doctors resulted in a real-terms pay (RPI) reduction of 23.5% for foundation year (FY) doctors and 23.9% for specialist resident (StR) doctors.

Much of this long-term decline in pay occurred in the decade after the 2008 global financial crisis, in which, against a backdrop of government budget cuts, junior doctors routinely received 1% pay rises and sometimes had their pay frozen.

The irony is that over the past few years annual wage increases have finally started to slightly outpace inflation, which gave hope that the trend was going in the opposite direction, until the recent spike in inflation over the past 12 months, which the 4.5% increase in 2022 has failed to reflect at all.

In 2022, the BMA asked the DDRB for a 2% pay rise above RPI inflation (basically the rising cost of living), which was 11% in April and is now 12.6%. In the meantime, the DDRB recommended a 4.5% pay rise, which the Scottish government decided to implement for all doctors in June 2022.

This amount is significantly lower than we had requested and represents a significant real pay cut – around 6.6% based on April 2022 inflation figures – rising to 8.1% based on inflation at the time of writing.