Reply to: 1% pay rise for NHS

[_V_]

Nurses might be only getting 1%, but at least there are some winners in the public sector.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presente...s-pay-dispute/

[Snooky]

Most things I buy are up 10% to 30%. Regular consumables in general are up 20%, as a guess.

ONS figures for Jan 2021 give RPI as 1.4% and CPIH as 0.9%, significantly different to your 20% guess.

This is of course relies on the "basket" chosen to represent those measures. Do you think the basket components are unrepresentative (and if so, how) or do you think the actual measurements reported by ONS are incorrect?

I haven't noticed hugely different prices for anything I've bought, compared to a year ago, but I realise my buying profile may not fit the general trend.

[AtW]

Interesting that pushing through private sector IR35 rollout in the middle of a pandemic/lockdown hasn't dampened your enthusiasm one bit. I think quite a few "actual contractors" are not quite so enthusiastic.

I was sarcastic

[TwoWolves]

Rishi is really the PM material

Interesting that pushing through private sector IR35 rollout in the middle of a pandemic/lockdown hasn't dampened your enthusiasm one bit. I think quite a few "actual contractors" are not quite so enthusiastic.

[SueEllen]

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?

This is why you talk all the teens and 20-somethings you are related to out of such professions.

Anyway the argument is to hide a B***** screw up over food.

[Lance]

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?

They can afford it (training) as it is a government backed and guaranteed loan. And a nurse may well not pay it all back. The student loan break-even salary = £27,500 | AJ Bell
It is a deferred taxation.
The alternative to the student paying it is for the tax payer to pay for it. How fair is it that people who don't go to university fund the people that do? To make tuition free would be a regressive tax policy.

It is unfair right now to the students in that they are working with older co-workers who didn't have to pay. I don't have an answer to that.

A lesser known impact of free health tuition......
My wife lectures in health care, and one of the biggest problems they had was total wastes of skin and organs getting onto their courses as they were 'free'. Now that they're not the quality of the intake has improved.

The entire higher education industry is going to change though. Why would a teenager go through all that, for an often worthless degree (yes media students, and social scientists, I'm looking at you), when they can get a paid apprenticeship. Paid apprenticeships often get proper qualifications as well.

As for the 1% pay rise. Nobody else is getting one. And everyone has more cash now anyway as they can't go out or on holiday. It's not like they're badly paid. They're just not well paid.

[agentzero]

It is easier to think about the surrounding information of the pay rise. Inflation is not 0.88% or 0.9% as is being stated. If economists were intelligent they would check their receipts for costs last year. I am buying normal items and 90% seem to be more expensive than 2019 and 2020, with food being the main indicator. Most things I buy are up 10% to 30%. Regular consumables in general are up 20%, as a guess.

This is the reason 1% for nurses isn't great. Don't confuse averages with the pay scale. If people earn under £25k I think a 5% pay rise would have been a good 'thank you'. When you consider that the rich have been sat at home still earning and many people have been furloughed and legally permitted to work in one or more jobs, well, I do pity what the NHS workload has been the last year.

[ladymuck]

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

Such a trite and boring thing to come out with. Thank you for adding absolutely nothing to the discussion. Like usual.

[AtW]

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

[Eirikur]

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

[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.

...

[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.

[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?

[AtW]

Rishi is really the PM material

[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.