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The British Medical Association is threatening to axe up to a third of its entire workforce to help it tackle a significant cash crisis.
The doctors’ union has placed 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy. That has triggered anxiety and fury among staff, who have accused the BMA of appalling behaviour and “hypocrisy”.
Disclosure of the move comes days after resident doctors in England who belong to the BMA voted narrowly to accept a pay deal that will increase the salaries of the best paid to a basic £77,348. They won their pay rise after 15 rounds of strikes which badly disrupted NHS care and cost it billions.
The BMA is losing millions of pounds every year despite its membership having hit a record 200,000 as a result of its vigorous campaigns in recent years – including strikes – for better pay.
It has decided to shed up to a third of its staff in England as part of a major restructuring of its operations intended to help reduce its recurring deficit. The BMA’s finances are so precarious that it has needed a total of £86.8m in subsidies since 2008 from the British Medical Journal, which it owns, in order to stay afloat, an average of £5.1m a year.
Most of the 600 staff belong to the GMB trade union, which claims the BMA has breached its own HR rules over the redundancies and sought to “gag” staff from speaking out about them. The BMA has not informed its membership about the reorganisation and the human cost involved.
A BMA source said: “BMA staff are very scared. They all think they’re going to lose their jobs. People are absolutely miserable. They’re paranoid about the threat of redundancy. It’s the worst reorganisation ever.”
One staff member said: “BMA leaders seem to think it’s one rule for them, another for everybody else. If a hospital treated its staff like this, we would come down on them like a ton of bricks, rightly.”
The BMA told the Guardian that as few as 20 staff would lose their jobs. It gave that figure even though it had been discussing the possibility of up to 10 times that number – 200 – being made redundant in recent talks with GMB representatives.
BMA staff are so incensed that GMB members there last month passed a vote of no confidence in Rachel Podolak, the union’s chief executive, who is leading the restructuring process. On a 72% turnout, 91% said they had no confidence in Podolak.
The reorganisation is also designed to help the BMA focus more on its role as a trade union campaigning on pay and workplace issues, and less on its other role as a professional association representing most of the UK’s medics. For example, up to 20 of the 45 staff who help produce reports for the BMA’s respected board of science and board of ethics are likely to lose their jobs.
The union is also cutting the number of industrial relations officer (IRO) posts from 23.5 to 14, even though those personnel help hospital doctors negotiate disputes with NHS management and run campaigns. Senior BMA figures say axing IROs is “madness” and at odds with the three key priorities of the union’s strategy for 2025-30 – “organising to win, campaigning to influence and enabling our success”. It also plans to get rid of three of its seven heads of region.
The chairs of 110 local negotiating committees, local BMA branches of hospital doctors, condemned the planned loss of IRO and head of region posts in a strongly worded letter last month to Podolak and Dr Emma Runswick,the union’s deputy chair of council.
The BMA’s consultants committee is so concerned about those officers being axed that it passed a motion criticising it. But the BMA hierarchy stopped it from being debated at the union’s annual conference last week.
A BMA spokesperson said it was making “important changes in how the BMA works to build on the successes of recent years and support our members [to] organise more and campaign better, especially in the workplace”.
While other cost-cutting has reduced its deficit by £4m, inflation has pushed it again to £5m, they added. “This means we need to reduce some of our fixed costs and continue to invest in sustaining our excellent membership levels.
“Any process which involves people leaving the BMA will always be difficult, but we have been engaging extensively with the GMB as our trade union partner since last year and more recently through a comprehensive process of engaging all affected staff.
“Final decisions have not yet been made on what changes will be implemented, however the proposals consulted on represented a reduction in the current headcount of the BMA by around 20 full-time equivalent staff. We expect the vast majority of those to be voluntary redundancies, which staff have been able to apply for in recent weeks.”
Gavin Davies, a GMB senior organiser, said: “GMB is aware of the redundancies currently being proposed within the BMA. Workers are understandably worried and we will work hard to avoid compulsory redundancies and financial hardship they inevitably bring. GMB is hopeful our negotiations with the BMA will find a solution.”
