1% pay rise for NHS

[Whorty]

An interesting one .... my cynical view is the Tories have set it low to give them somewhere to go when the unions kick off. Whatever the % the unions were going to say it's not enough ... another example of nudge theory that is often used by the Tories?

Personally, I'd also like to see the nurse degree training costs scrapped. Seems so wrong to me that we charge nurses to get their training.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56301981

[ladymuck]

No other public role is getting a pay rise. It's anyone working in the NHS. 1% does have a paltry 'token' feel about it and I think HMG knew it was going cause outrage.

Part of me wonders, if faced with all the things money has to be spent on across the country, what people would be willing to pay for and where they would cut funding.

HMG could just borrow more to pay everything to everyone and then they may as well call themselves 'Labour Lite'

Regarding paying for degrees - it's a choice to become a nurse, much as it's a choice to become an accountant, civil engineer, art historian. Support, yes, but not give away for free.

[_V_]

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reque...onse.docx.html

Dear Karl Matt
Request for Information. Ref: RFI-202004-7
I am writing in response to your email of 06 April 2020. We have processed your
request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
Your Request
Please can you advise/confirm that the 3.1% pay rise (for 2020/2021) the MPs were
due in April 2020 went ahead or was it delayed due to Coronavirus situation.

My Response
I can confirm that the salary rise went ahead. Please see the announcement of 05
March 2020 on the IPSA website https://www.theipsa.org.uk/news/press-releases-
2020/5-march-2020-mps-pay-for-2020-21-and-staff-budget-review/

[ladymuck]

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reque...onse.docx.html

That did annoy me at the time. I generally am annoyed by MP pay rises that bear no resemblance to what's going on in the real world. They better not be getting anything this year.

[AtW]

Rishi is really the PM material

[Whorty]

No other public role is getting a pay rise. It's just the nurses. 1% does have a paltry 'token' feel about it and I think HMG knew it was going cause outrage.

Part of me wonders, if faced with all the things money has to be spent on across the country, what people would be willing to pay for and where they would cut funding.

HMG could just borrow more to pay everything to everyone and then they may as well call themselves 'Labour Lite'

Regarding paying for degrees - it's a choice to become a nurse, much as it's a choice to become an accountant, civil engineer, art historian. Support, yes, but not give away for free.

Given that we need nurses I don't think we'd be giving anything away for free. The fact that people want to be a nurse is a good thing, but the the potential nurses not being able to afford to train is so wrong.

When Mrs W was in the hospice we got talking to a student nurse. She was coming to the end of a 6 month placement at Salisbury hospital and hospice. During that 6 months she was still paying tuition fees and she was given zero payment for the 6 months work placement. How many other professions would be forced to work for free in order to get their degree?

[ladymuck]

Given that we need nurses I don't think we'd be giving anything away for free. The fact that people want to be a nurse is a good thing, but the the potential nurses not being able to afford to train is so wrong.

When Mrs W was in the hospice we got talking to a student nurse. She was coming to the end of a 6 month placement at Salisbury hospital and hospice. During that 6 months she was still paying tuition fees and she was given zero payment for the 6 months work placement. How many other professions would be forced to work for free in order to get their degree?

I totally disagree with working for free - that is completely wrong. In the same way that I don't think internships should be unpaid. 'Work experience' that you do for a week or two while at school is about the only thing that I can accept with being unpaid. Six months of actually doing the job you're training for should absolutely be paid.

I assume the tuition fees are, like many fees, for the whole course and there's likely to be payments being made that don't directly align with active teaching hours.

[ladymuck]

Here's an interesting alternate point of view.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/...get-a-pay-rise

...
The rise – and it is currently just a recommendation to the NHS pay review body – is indeed a mistake. In fact, it is a double mistake, but not in the way it is being presented. The first error is diplomatic and tactical. Any pandemic-year pay rise proposed for the NHS was always going to be dismissed as ‘derisory’. The Government would have done better to include the NHS within its policy of no pay rise for the public sector, keeping its 1 per cent powder dry for the inevitable later bargaining. Now, that 1 per cent is the floor and will – doubtless – have to be improved upon. As for the second error, well that was even to have countenanced an across-the-board pay rise for the NHS at all.

Any talk of NHS pay always focuses on nurses – the ‘angels’ on the ‘frontline’ working all hours for a pittance. But this picture is long out of date. Lost in the current furore is that pay for newly qualified nurses has risen 12 per cent over the past three years, and that the average annual salary for a nurse is around £34,000; not a fortune, but not bad – and augmented with cost-of-living allowances in London and the South-East.

As in most of the public sector there are grades and annual increments that are paid regardless of any freeze. Senior nurses can earn much more – indeed, they were mentioned as one of the groups that could be ‘caught’ by the Chancellor’s freeze on the lifetime allowance for pension pots. That limit, I remind you, is £1,073,100.

It is also worth noting that this 1 per cent recommended rise is across the NHS – which includes everyone from hospital porters to ancillary staff to managers and doctors. The NHS is not just about nurses, though it is their sympathetic image that inevitably fronts all the pay pleas. The pay of UK doctors, by the way, tends to be higher than that of their counterparts in much of the EU, so maybe they could donate their portion of the proposed rise to the staff who are lower paid.

...

[Eirikur]

350 million per week for the NHS it said on the red bus and the gammons fell for it

[AtW]

Rishi gets at least half of that percent via taxes, I think so estimate was even 75-80% comes back to Treasury