I'm a clinically practising GP and also work in a UK medical school.
The training jobs situation is complex and multifactorial (apologies for the long post!):
Previously we did prioritise UK doctors for training posts. The current situation has arisen because, for many years, UK NHS Trusts were unable to fill many of their training posts. This was because UK graduates wanted to go off to Australia/ NZ/Canada for a few years, or wanted to train part-time, or wanted to do trust grade/locum posts until a very specific post became available. Trusts had to jump through a lot of hoops to employ an IMG, so it was disincentivised. Training posts have a significant service delivery element, so it had become very difficult to run safe rotas, especially in areas of most need (outside of the SE and major cities). The Conservative government had threatened for some time to open up these posts so that IMGs (international medical graduates who have passed stringent UK medical exams and language tests) would have equal standing, and eventually they did it.
I don't think the DoH had any grasp of just how many experienced, well educated IMGs would apply for training posts - they are outcompeting our UK grads because they have years more experience, so on a points-based application/interview they can easily get the job, and there is also the phenomenon of the application portal getting saturated before UK grads have had chance to apply. This policy needs reversing and quickly, but there is a little bit of me that thinks that UK doctors have been very happy to take advantage of the international jobs market when it suits them, and were very happy to go off to Australia rather than take a job elsewhere in the UK, but don't like it when the privilege is reversed.
There have also always been bottle necks in training in different specialities from time to time, partly because workforce planning in the NHS has been non-existent forever, and partly because many surgical and some medical specialties are very competitive, not everyone who wants to have that career will be able to, or they may need to move around the country to train, and that has always been the case and was accepted by doctors. If you were offered a post in a competitive specialty that was at the other end of the country, you would always have had to take it and be thankful. This is especially true of many surgical specialities. Many of us, myself included, have had to make the choice between moving away to pursue a more competitive/smaller speciality (most surgical specialities, O&G, cardiology, some smaller specialities), or staying local and going into something (usually GP or Psychiatry, or A&E) that is easier to get into.
NHS jobs are made where there is a population need, not where doctors necessarily want to live and work. There would be an outcry if we were using taxpayer's money to make more jobs in the SE/ major cities than are needed, and fewer in the provinces, to accommodate the preferences of doctors. New UK graduates are guaranteed a foundation training place but, again, it may not be where they want to be geographically. This is the case in other countries also. Yes this is harsh when people have to move away from their support network, but being a doctor in training has always been very hard.
There is also the situation that a PP refers to of doctors who have completed training being unable to get consultant posts. Again, for surgical specialities this has been the case for as long as I can remember - there would be an expectation of a post-CCT fellowship, often abroad, or a higher degree, before you'd be competitive for consultant posts.
For GPs and generalist hospital posts, availability of jobs comes and goes in waves and is due to the funding landscape at the time. When I got my CCT in 2007, only two doctors in my training cohort of 60 were able to find substantive jobs straight from training! We then had years and years of there being loads of jobs because people preferred the flexibility and higher pay of locum work. The jobs market has tightened up considerably in the past 2 years, not because the work isn't there, but because there's no money/space to employ people.
The GP locum market dried up completely within months when the ARRS funding (specifically for nurse practitioners/ physician associates etc) became available and practices had an incentive to fill their empty rooms with essentially free HCPs rather than expensive locum doctors. The empty substantive posts then all filled within a few months, as long-term locums couldn't find work and scrabbled to get into substantive posts. This has been great for practice - GP numbers have stabilised for the first time in many years - but we have the ridiculous situation of GPs who are unable to find work on one hand, and the GPs who are in jobs being overworked to the point of burnout on the other, because there are still not enough GPs for the complexity of the workload and there is now a huge supervision burden in practice, because NPs and PAs are (in some practices) being asked to see patients that are too complex for their training.
The labour government is hearing all this, the BMA and the Royal Colleges are lobbying hard, but it takes time and attention to sort all of this. So far we have had sticking plasters (such as ARRS funding being allowed to employ newly qualified GPs), but they are busy writing their 10-year NHS plan, and re-working the long term workforce plan, both due later this summer, and we won't get much else out of them until that point. History suggests that this situation will get resolved, but it is hard on the people who are caught up in the mess at the time. I narrowly escaped the MTAS debacle of 2007/8, which affected many of my peers, but we are all now working as GPs and Consultants. I would advise anyone in this situation to take whatever job they can, even if that means moving elsewhere in the UK for a couple of years, or doing a fellowship post, or going abroad, and bide their time.