Lawyers acting for campaign group Remedy have forced the government to put plans to exempt deaneries from employment agency legislation on hold.
But the BMA has warned that this is only a delaying tactic and will not in the longer term prevent the government from declassifying deaneries as employment agencies.
Remedy’s lawyers challenged the way the Department for Business carried out the consultation on the exemption. Both Remedy and the BMA opposed the move, arguing that it would deprive juniors of key employment protection rights.
They would like juniors to be provided with more information when applying for jobs, such as its location, hours of work and pay, and stop them feeling obliged to accept their first job offer.
The government has now offered to hold a new consultation and to seek opinions on training and recruitment. It has also invited Remedy to join with the BMA in negotiating a code of conduct for good employment practice by deaneries.
Remedy’s head of policy Dr Richard Marks said the proposed exemption had been
delayed - possibly indefinitely. “This delivers a major blow against a concerted effort by government to limit the employment rights of doctors. We anticipate further attempts in the future and will do everything to resist them if they are unfair,” he said.
Dr Shree Datta, chair of the junior doctors committee, said the decision to hold a new consultation was good news for doctors caught up in this year’s recruitment process.
But she warned there was no indication that the government had abandoned its plans to declassify deaneries as employment agencies. It was still pressing ahead with plans to establish a code of conduct it intended to replace the protection provided by the employment legislation. Two meetings to discuss the code have already been held.
“This is going to be a real battle for the next few months because we will need to make sure we negotiate the best deal for juniors and that the code of practice has teeth. Both Remedy and the BMA will be working to make sure that deaneries will be held to account if they don’t do things correctly,” she said.
A Department for Business spokesman said: “We want to ensure that all interested parties have an opportunity to comment on the issue of medical deaneries and employment agency legislation and that these comments are taken into account before the department reaches the correct decision in the public interest. To ensure this, the department will be consulting again and will notify stakeholders in due course on the timing of this consultation.”
The BMA is asking for any juniors who have suffered from poor employment practice to contact them to help them argue their case for a robust code of conduct.
Read a blog on the issue.
Tags: Deaneries
My concern is for junior doctors with health problems that has meant that they have been on long term sick. When they need to return perhaps with significant adjustments or retraining in a new speciality, will this removal of deaneries as employing bodies mean that we have doctors “lost in the system” with no organisation willing to assist in returning them to practice. Occasionally some basic funding from the employing organisation[ e.g. deanery] will be followed up with substantial financial support from the Department Work Pensions [ DWP] Access to work programme, which can be enough to start the road to recovery. If the deanery does not assist in the process the funding from the DWP will not follow, then Juniors will continue to be financially,emotionally, physically,socially be penalised as well as their families and the general public.
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