Junior doctors, also known as resident doctors and who make up a large share of the medical workforce, were offered an average 5.4% pay rise but are asking for 29%, which they say is necessary to address years of salary erosion in real terms.

Health minister Wes Streeting called the strikes “completely unreasonable” in a statement after the five-day walk-out was announced.

He had said in a letter to the British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, earlier that the government could not go any higher on pay this year.

“The NHS recovery is hanging by a thread, and the BMA are threatening to pull it,” he said.

“The BMA should abandon their rush to strike and work with us to improve resident doctors’ working lives instead.”

The doctors had accepted a 22% pay rise last year covering 2023-2025, which had ended months of previous strikes.

The new strikes threaten to once again disrupt thousands of appointments and procedures at Britain’s hospitals just as the government said it had started to improve services at the state-funded National Health Service.

“Without a credible offer to keep us on the path to restore our pay, we have no choice but to call strikes,” the co-chairs of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee said in a statement.

The BMA said it had met Streeting today but that the government wanted to focus on improving the non-pay elements of doctors’ work.