Johnson proclaimed far and wide that he was taking back £350m a week from the EU to spend on the NHS. That Cummings propagated lie was a major factor in him winning the referendum. His offer of a 3% pay rise to those that saved his life, while putting their own lives at risk, after six years of Jeremy Hunt squeezing the life out of them is, IMO, insulting. To compound the insult the 3% is to come from the current NHS budget.
Wouldn’t Starmer be wise to hitch labour’s wagon to the worthwhile cause of getting a decent pay rise for the heroes of the pandemic?
The slogan could be simple, “Where the £350M Boris?”.
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The UK Police aren’t too enamoured at their shit offering either… a pay freeze FFS!
It’s quite unusual for Chief Constables to be vociferous over this type of thing as the Northamptonshire CC has been.
I’m not usually a fan of the Wail on Line but this time they have it about right…
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I’m happy to consider raises far above the rate of inflation for public services, and far, far above what people who work for private employers get. But only if public pensions from here going forwards are not on defined benefit basis.
Employers in the private sector realised 20-25 years ago that they simply can’t afford to give their employees defined benefit pensions. Private employers have shut these down or blocked them from new members and new accruals on DB basis in a mass exodus ever since
Defined benefit became just too expensive to fund for private employers. So any pension scheme with a job now is not defined benefit, but money purchase. Money purchase still costs a lot to fund,
but a fraction of what the persistent
liabilities of the old defined benefits schemes cost.
So we have a situation where private employers and employees are having to fund defined benefit schemes of public employees that they and their own employees can’t afford to fund for themselves. This does not seem fair.
So I’m happy to consider NHS and other public service pay rises, noting that the NHS has a huge weight of non-frontline employees in roles far from any contribution to the Covid effort, but I want accrual of defined benefit based pension benefits to stop right now in public services as it’s so fundamentally unfair.
I’ll duck now as I’m aware quite a few contributors on here are the beneficiaries of government (ie public service) pensions.
I understand your point of view @KarenLot
But what cannot be escaped is the fact that many in the public sector were content, shall we say, to accept lower remuneration now in favour of better pensions later so calling a stop to DB based pensions in the sector right now would be grossly unfair to them (not unlike the unfairness of the WASPI women’s state pensions debacle perhaps).
OTOH, if the practice were to be stopped (if it hasn’t already) and better conditions of pay and pension entitlement were to be associated with that decision, then the Trades Unions might show some content towards the measure.
I can’t agree with that. Whilst there are some clearly who do not face the same threat as say a Nurse, Doctor or Paramedic might, in practice they all make a significant contribution to the total effort and they still come into direct contact from time to time with affected people.
I’m reminded when saying this of an incident in France where a clerical officer leaving a police station recently was murdered on the doorstep of the station (or close by in any event) by some ill-intentioned scroat so for her, the risk factor was equal to that of a substantive Officer leaving the premises in “mufti” whether “on duty” or not.
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I’m glad you said that Graham. For around the past 20 years pay, conditions and especially job security have been better in public sector than private.
I’m talking about the vast majority of working people - not Prime Ministers and very senior public servants who do cross over to top positions in the private sector after their public career.
I wouldn’t feel so strongly about the continuance of the unfairness of private sector having to support defined benefit pensions in the public sector they can’t afford anymore for themselves, otherwise.
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On the NHS Graham the amount of waste, ineffective overmanagement etc… has occasionally been commented here and even people in the NHS I’ve spoken to over the years have told me about this. So sorry that weight has to be removed and then I’d agree with you.
As someone commented recently, think it might have been Guy? @NotALot , we’d all be happy to chuck £20 billion more a day into the NHS and be taxed for it but it would just disappear without trace.
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Just to be clear, I want to do it the way private sector has had to, all existing defined benefit commitments on money paid in so far to be honoured. But further accrual on money purchase basis only. If that’s too expensive then the private sector then goes to a stage of refusing new members and then has closed DB schemes.
The figures are truly frightening as to what DB schemes cost vs money purchase (DC) schemes. Remember there is no money saved backing this it’s mortgaged on future taxpayers. I can’t even begin to guess but ISTR saw somewhere it’s a noticeable percentage of future UK GDP that’s mortgaged even to pay public sector defined benefits owed up to this point.
Unless the UK is going to become Guano Island we just can’t support it.
yes it would… the NHS is a bottomless money pit. £20m or £200m no difference!
Over time the NHS has been a political football and successive Governments have “tinkered” with the structure but always it ends up with the same result - chaos. The people often charged with making change happen regrettably are the self same people who seek to gain from it - self preservation if you like, so nothing substantial occurs. It usually ends up with the same players in the same - but renamed - positions in the same - but renamed - organisations (with big fat golden handshakes and re-bonjour’s to boot!)
Remember the 70’s and Barbara Castle? The headlines of the day were “we have a fear, our tier will disappear” - that was the suggestion to rid the NHS of either Regional Health Authorities or Area Health Authorities and have one “super” authority installed.
In later years Trusts were established and perhaps this only served to increase, not decrease the administrative function layer and add to the overall cost at the expense of the “real” deserving players…
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