Northern Ireland Doctors Call Strikes Over the Missing Budget
Resident doctors will stop work for twenty-four hours on Friday 20 November and consultants will run a much-reduced service the following Monday. The Executive is seven months into the financial year without a budget, so a 3.5% rise recommended by an independent body and accepted by the health minister cannot be paid. Doctors elsewhere in the United Kingdom received it in April.
This is what a budget vacuum looks like once it stops being an abstraction. Public sector managers have adapted to emergency procedures, money still flows, services are delivered and wages are paid — but a rise that has been recommended, accepted and funded everywhere else in the country cannot be handed over, because there is no budget to hand it over from. Clodagh Corrigan of the British Medical Association put the union’s position in five words: “I don’t know how long you’d like us to wait?” The association met the health minister a fortnight ago and says it was told there would be no rise before Christmas “if at all”. A nurses’ strike may follow. The thing to watch is whether the November dates force a budget or simply demonstrate that one is not coming, because the dispute is not really between doctors and the health department at all — the department agrees with them. It is between the Executive and itself.