Tag Archives: low

Low pay at Border Force creates ‘breeding ground’ for corruption, watchdog says | Civil Service World

Border Force: presumably the staffers in this image were not on the take – but how many of their colleagues are – due to low pay?

This is interesting: not only is low pay bad for physical and mental health, but it also breeds corruption:

Aprobe into Border Force’s ability to identify and respond to corruption among its own staff has found work is hampered by “confused” civil service leadership structures, while poor pay and a lack of engagement are acting as a “breeding ground” for criminal behaviour.

Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Neal’s investigation into so-called “insider threat” focused on the risk that an “unscrupulous minority” of Border Force staff will abuse their access to data, property, and contraband to commit criminal acts.

The investigation was conducted between January and March and its findings were presented to home secretary Suella Braverman at the end of May, however Neal’s report was only published yesterday – and in redacted form.

So it seems that, deprived of a way to profit from their actual job, Border Force employees consider it acceptable to abuse the privileges of their work in order to make cash on the side.

And the corruption doesn’t end there: not only has publication of the report on this criminal activity been delayed for more than three months, but when it was finally published, some information was left out.

What’s the matter, Suella Braverman? Are the facts simply embarrassing for you – or damning about you?

Source: Low pay at Border Force creates ‘breeding ground’ for corruption, watchdog says


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Research shows the Tory government is responsible for low fertility in the UK

Big baby: apparently, under the Tories, the only babies we’re likely to see are overgrown juveniles like Boris Johnson.

I was wondering why so many TV adverts were about aids for… ehm… erectile dysfunction.

Now we all know the answer:

According to the accompanying article in Byline Times (from 2021 but still relevant today),

Not only have there have been major cuts to the benefit system in the 2010s but they have been targeted particularly at low-income families with children.  The benefit freeze, cuts to housing benefit, and most of all the two-child limit [on child benefit] all impact such families disproportionately.  Analysis by Howard Reed and myself for the Equality and Human Rights Commission suggests that the overall impact of changes to the tax and benefit system costs poor families an average of about £5,000 a year, about a fifth of their total income. On top of that, cuts to local authority funding have disproportionately fallen on Sure Start and other children’s’ services.

Developments in the labour and housing markets following the financial crisis have exacerbated these pressures.  The combination of high and rising house prices – again, driven in part by government policies like Help to Buy – with stagnant real wages has made it much harder for lower and middle-income young couples to buy a house unless they get significant financial support from their parents.  That in turn – given the UK’s cultural norms about homeownership and the nuclear family – makes starting a family much harder. And while the UK has made huge strides towards gender equity in the workplace, there is still a very large “child penalty” for mothers – but not for fathers.  Unsurprisingly, an increasingly well-educated generation of women is unwilling to accept this.

Much attention has – rightly – been paid to the analysis of Sir Michael Marmot and others, which has demonstrated the connection between austerity and a general slowdown in the rate at which life expectancy is growing – with actual falls for some low-income groups. But it looks increasingly plausible that austerity has equally had an impact at the other end of the life course: not just shorter lives, but fewer babies.

So we’re not having children because the government has made it practically impossible to raise them (and, looking at the education system, impossible to ensure that they have all the opportunities they should be able to take).

As the article predicts, this will have serious detrimental effects on the nation’s future prosperity.

It seems the Tories are determined to wreck everything they can affect – and that even includes our sex lives.


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ULEZ expansion is lawful – confounding both Rishi Sunak AND Keir Starmer

Cleaning up London’s air: the ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emissions Zone) will affect fewer than one in 10 cars but may deliver a remarkable improvement in air quality.

The High Court has delivered a timely message of support for measures to defeat global warming – by supporting London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s bid to extend the ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emissions Zone) to all of the capital’s boroughs.

Five Conservative-led borough councils had launched a legal battle to stop the extension but in what’s being described as a “landmark” ruling, Lord Justice Swift said he was “satisified” that the proposals were in the London Mayor’s “powers”.

The measure currently covers only areas within the North and South Circular Roads, but the ruling opens it up for extension to all of London’s boroughs from August 29.

It isn’t spectacularly extreme; to avoid the charge, diesel cars must generally have been first registered after September 2015, while most petrol cars registered after 2005 are also exempt.

Drivers of vehicles passing through the ULEZ area that do not comply with emissions standards are charged a daily rate of £12.50.

The decision is a blow against Rishi Sunak’s Tories, after their winning candidate in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election last week, Steve Tuckwell, said the vote had been called a “referendum on ULEZ”.

Opposition party leader Keir Starmer also clashed with Mr Khan over the policy.

Here’s what Mr Khan had to say about the ruling on TV:

He also published a statement:

Here’s a pertinent comment:

That’s the important take-away from this storm-under-a-petrol-cap: fewer than one-tenth of vehicle owners will be affected by the ULEZ expansion.

That means both Labour and the Tories have been flinging blame about nothing.

It also means that Keir Starmer needs to find another excuse for his loss in London, if he still wants to deflect attention away from his own failings as an Opposition party leader.

Sunak’s low effective tax rate speaks volumes about Tory policy

Rishi Sunak: why doesn’t the richest man in the UK pay a tax rate comparable to the rest of us?

Yesterday This Site discussed the fact that Rishi Sunak pays an extremely low effective tax rate – lower than the majority of working people in the UK.

Here’s a bit of evidence that I got my sums right:

Why does he pay such a low rate?

I don’t mean, how is it calculated – we went through that yesterday. I mean, what is the thinking behind ensuring that the UK’s richest man does not pay an equal proportion of his wealth, in taxes, to the average worker?

The answer is easy: In order to starve the beast.

The beast being, in this case, public services.

Look at France. That country is on fire because its government wants to ease the tax burden on its richest people by raising the pension age.

Here, rich people don’t have that burden because they pay low taxes. This makes it possible for a rich person’s government to argue that keeping the pension-age at 65 for men and 60 for women (or even at 65 for both) would increase the tax burden unreasonably.

What they don’t tell you is that, if they operated a truly fair, progressive system, that burden would fall on them and their rich fellows who simply aren’t paying their fair share now.

Rishi Sunak should be paying the average tax rate – certainly by 2025-26 when it is predicted that the rest of us will be paying 35 per cent.

Don’t you agree?


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Universal Credit isn’t enough to live on – and the DWP is making it more conditional

Research has shown that people can’t afford to live on Universal Credit – and the Department for Work and Pensions is responding by making it harder to hold onto a claim.

The DWP’s policy was recently articulated as ensuring that work always pays more than living on benefits – and this is increasingly a problem for poverty-stricken individuals and families, because wages are being pushed through the floor.

The reason for this is to maximise profits for big firms; if they keep their wage bills down, they can pass more profit to their shareholders.

They don’t care about employees’ ability to pay bills because they make most of their money abroad – or the bill-payers are practical hostages, with no alternative options for the services they are being pushed into poverty to buy.

That’s why this has happened:

Universal Credit payments are well short of the amount needed for people to afford essentials, two of the UK’s most prominent anti-poverty organisations warn.

Joint research… by the Trussell Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that the standard allowance is £35 too low for a single person and £66 for a couple.

Nine out of 10 people on low incomes are going without essentials, the JRF found.

Researchers estimates a single person needs at least £120 per week, while couples have to have at least £200 a week, just to afford essential items.

You might expect the DWP to change direction. You’d expect wrong.

The latest development from the government department is to make receipt of UC conditional on jumping through even more hoops than people already do.

Individuals working at least 15 hours per week and couples working 24 hours or more between them will be moved from the ‘Light Touch’ group to the ‘Intensive Work Search’ group.

They will have increased scrutiny placed on them to find work and develop a career. It also means they are expected to search for opportunities to take up more or better paid work and research new career options.

Combined with a previous increase in September, this will mean around a quarter of a million more people will have been moved into ‘Intensive Work Search’.

Failure to meet the new conditions will mean sanctions and possible denial of the benefit altogether.

The DWP and its ministers talk up the change as though it’s an opportunity; it isn’t.

It is merely piling more stress onto people whose minds are already overtaxed with simply trying to make ends meet.

Source: Universal Credit ‘at least £35 too low for buying essentials’ government told and DWP issues new rules for people working while receiving Universal Credit – all you need to know</a


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A third of public sector workers are set to quit over low pay, says TUC

Pittance: key workers have put up with pathetic pay rises – if their pay can be said to have risen at all – for far too long and are ready to quit because of it.

Around one third of key workers in the public sector (32%) have already taken steps to leave their profession to get a job in another field or are actively considering it, according to new TUC polling published today.

According to TUC analysis, that means around 1.8 million public sector workers are seriously thinking about quitting their jobs for good.

In both education and health and social work, the proportion of key workers who have taken steps to leave or are actively considering it is around the same, at about a third of the workforce (34% in education and 31% in health).

The new TUC polling, conducted by YouGov, comes as the union body warns ministers that public services are facing a “mass exodus” of key workers unless ministers deliver “decent pay rises” for key workers.

The government imposed significant real terms pay cuts on key workers in the public sector earlier this year, sparking a wave of ballots for industrial action across education, health and local government this autumn and winter.

Unison, RCM, NASUWT and NEU started balloting their members this week.

Pushed to the brink by low pay

The government’s decision to hold down pay for key workers in the public sector is worsening the public sector recruitment and retention crisis, according to the TUC – highlighting the new poll findings.

Almost half (45%) of key workers in the public sector say the government approach on pay has made them more likely to leave their job in the next one to three years.

For workers in health and social care, the number rises to 50%.

Of those that say they have taken steps to leave or are considering leaving, around half cite low pay (52%).

Feeling undervalued (47%), a poor work life balance (33%) and excessive workloads (31%) are also major factors.

Latest data shows that NHS England is operating short of almost 130,000 staff due to unfilled vacancies. This represents a vacancy rate of 9.7 per cent.

In the education sector, one in eight newly qualified teachers (NQTs) leave the profession after one year in the job, with almost one-third of NQTs (31%) leaving within their first five years.

The union body says that these unfilled vacancies, on top of a decade of underfunding, has left public services “cut down to the bone” – placing huge amounts of pressure on public sector workers.

Brutal decade of pay cuts

The union body says key workers across the NHS face another year of “pay misery” after more than a decade of having their wages held down by successive Conservative governments.

Recent TUC analysis shows that many frontline staff in the NHS will see their pay packets shrink this year in real terms:

  • Nurses’ real pay will be down by over £1,100 this year
  • Paramedics’ real pay will be down by over £1,500 this year
  • Hospital porters’ real pay will be down by £200 this year
  • Maternity care assistants’ real pay will be down by £600 this year

The TUC says that this year’s pay cuts come on top of a brutal decade of pay cuts for key workers in the public sector.

Recent analysis by the union body shows that in real terms:

  • Nurses’ real pay is still down £4,300 compared to 2010
  • Paramedics’ real pay is still down by £5,600 compared to 2010
  • Porters’ real pay is still down by £1,300 compared to 2010
  • Maternity care assistants’ real pay is still down by £3,200 compared to 2010

In the education sector, teachers have already lost around a fifth of the value of their pay due to government pay cuts between 2010 and 2021, according to the NEU.

The real term pay cuts imposed this year will see the majority of teachers’ pay worth 25% less than it was in 2010, according to NASUWT analysis.

NAHT analysis suggests school leaders’ pay is down 24%’ since 2010.

Support urgently needed for key workers

The TUC is calling on the government to urgently prioritise key worker pay and public services funding in their fiscal event on 17 November.

The union body says ministers must:

  • Give key workers in the public sector cost-of-living proofed pay rises
  • Raise the minimum wage to £15 an hour as soon as possible
  • Invest in public services – reversing the impact of rising inflation and ensuring the spending measures set out in the 2021 comprehensive spending review are not only delivered but improved upon

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:

“Key workers in the public sector helped get the country through the pandemic.

“But many are now at breaking point because of a toxic mix of low pay, unsustainable workloads and a serious lack of recognition.

“After years of brutal pay cuts, nurses, teachers, refuse workers and millions of other public servants have seen their living standards decimated – and now face more pay misery.

“It is little wonder morale is through the floor and many key workers are considering leaving their jobs for good.

On the prospect of industrial action, Frances added:

“If there is large-scale public sector strike action over the months ahead, the government only has itself to blame.

“They have chosen to hold down public servants’ pay while giving bankers unlimited bonuses.

“Ministers must change course. Without decent pay rises for key workers in the public sector, we face a mass exodus of staff.

“And it would be bad for our economy. As the country teeters on the brink of recession, the last thing we need is working people cutting back on spending even more.

“More money in the pockets of working people means more spend on our high streets.

“Enough is enough. It’s time to give our key workers in the public sector the decent pay rise they are owed.”

Source: Around 1 in 3 key workers in the public sector have taken steps to leave their profession or are actively considering it | TUC

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Tories look abroad for care home staff as shortage leaves residents’ basic needs unmet

Help! One can imagine the person inside the care home saying that to their relatives.

Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay is looking abroad for employees to plug the gaps in care home staffing. Didn’t we quit the EU to stop people from foreign countries coming to the UK and taking our jobs?

Details indicating the scale of the problem are here.

Workers have been walking out to take less stressful, better-paid jobs in supermarkets, hospitality, hairdressing and factory work, according to care home managers.

Common reasons for quitting are low pay worsened by high inflation, and burnout.

Social care reforms focusing on capping costs for service users have been criticised for failing to address the staffing shortage or increasing pay.

So Barclay is going to foreign countries, asking people there to come to the UK to work incredibly hard ministering to people’s needs – for very little pay.

What’s in it for them?

Source: Staffing crisis leaves many English care home residents’ basic needs unmet

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Has Boris Johnson manufactured a way to blame poor people for catching Covid-19?

Money: Tories use it to force people into actions they would not otherwise take – like going to work after being told to self-isolate due to a risk that they have Covid-19, because otherwise they could not afford to feed their families.

This is absolutely despicable:

A “perfect storm” of low wages, cramped housing and failures of the £22bn test-and-trace scheme has led to “stubbornly high” coronavirus rates in England’s most deprived communities, an unpublished government report has found.

A classified analysis by the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC), produced last month, concluded that “unmet financial needs” meant people in poorer areas were less likely to be able to self-isolate because they could not afford to lose income.

In two of the UK’s worst-hit areas, Blackburn-with-Darwen and Leicester, the study found that more people seeking financial help to self-isolate had been rejected than accepted. It said: “This could increase the likelihood for individuals to be unable to comply with self-isolation requirements as a result of their unmet needs.”

The report, marked “Official Sensitive”, and seen by the Guardian, will pile pressure on ministers to improve government support for the millions of people who do not currently qualify when they are ordered by law to quarantine at home. Dido Harding, the head of NHS test and trace, has estimated that at least 20,000 people a day are not complying fully with isolation orders, allowing the virus to spread.

So: people are on lower incomes because Tory policies have pushed wages down.

Now, when they desperately need government help to bridge the gap between their earnings (or 80 per cent of them if these people are on the furlough scheme) and their needs, they find the government has turned its collective back.

(It seems it has far too many crony companies to subsidise, in return for no service at all; Dido Harding, mentioned in the Guardian article, knows all about that.)

So they find they can’t comply with orders to self-isolate; in order to feed themselves and their children, they have to keep going to work.

Then they return home, where poverty means they have to live in homes that are too small for the number of people in their families, and – if they’ve contracted the virus – they pass it on very easily.

It is a complication of the Covid crisis that has been created entirely by Conservative governments.

No wonder they haven’t published the damning report.

Of course, without the fairly essential piece of knowledge that wages have been pushed down by the Tories, this story could be damning against the poor victims instead.

I’m sure you can picture the headlines in the yellow press (The Mail, The Express, The Sun): Greedy grafters ignore experts to spread killer Covid or some such twaddle.

The report remains unpublished at the time of writing (to the best of my knowledge) so I don’t think for a moment that Boris Johnson and his ghouls will feel any need to improve government support for people who are told to self-isolate.

It’ll be interesting to see whether they try to condemn the people they have impoverished, though.

Source: England’s poorest areas hit by Covid ‘perfect storm’ – leaked report | World news | The Guardian

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Johnson’s popularity hits record low – but Bercow says he won’t quit as he’s not ‘accountable’

Speaking out: John Bercow (here piectured at the Bingham Lecture), one of the straight-talkers of recent Parliamentary history.

Boris Johnson won’t quit as prime minister because he leads a government that doesn’t believe in accountability for its failures.

That’s the verdict from former Commons Speaker John Bercow after a poll of Conservative Party members put him second to last among cabinet figures with a record low satisfaction rating of -10.3:

The prime minister recorded a net satisfaction rating of -10.3 in a survey of party members, coming in second to last among cabinet figures.

The prime minister recorded -10.3 in ConservativeHome’s latest cabinet league table, coming in second to last among cabinet figures.

His rating was better only than that of his education secretary Gavin Williamson, who scored -43.1.

I have to include this bit:

Johnson’s rating is likely to be dipping in part because of his initial handling of the pandemic and the number of deaths the UK has suffered.

The urge to be sarcastic and say, “Oh really? Well I never!” is very strong. Of course it’s because he has failed in the principle duty of government which is to protect the people of the United Kingdom.

@RussInCheshire has been brutally funny about it in his regular The Week In Tory tweets:

I’ve quoted some extra tweets in the thread because they support the idea that Johnson doesn’t believe in accountability for himself or his government: he treats us with contempt by repeating a promise that he has already broken; he failed to punish a man (again) for breaking Covid-19 restriction because it was his dad; he treated the deadly threat of Covid-19 as though it was nothing to get het up about; and his own MPs – who are het up about it – turned on him in an expression of frustration at their utter inability to instil in him any sense of responsibility at all.

So we come to former Commons Speaker John Bercow’s appearance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain today (October 6), in which he delivered the home truth we all knew but nobody else seemed willing to say:

(Death Secretary = Matt Hancock, if you didn’t know.)

As if to prove Mr Bercow’s point, Rishi Sunak turned up on Tory mouthpiece BBC Breakfast to sell a load of old tripe to us about Covid-19 tests. He was not challenged on his lie and was therefore not held accountable for it:

Ultimately, the fault for the government lies with us, the people of the UK.

With every new disaster I am reminded of the Joseph de Maistre line, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”

The UK had a chance to elect a government that would have been much better than Johnson’s, and didn’t.

I’m thinking particularly of the former “Red Wall” constituencies who switched to Johnson because a majority of people there wanted Brexit at any cost.

Well, they’re getting it. I wonder how many people have to die before they accept that the cost is too high, and their current defiance means my guess is that they will probably have to lose some of their own relatives, or face a risk to their own lives, before the message sinks in.

Source: Boris Johnson’s popularity falls to record low among Tory members

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One in eight childcare workers in England earns much less than the minimum wage

We thought this window-writing was by a child in care. It seems it might have been by a carer instead.

This research shows all the hallmarks of Tory employment policy: early years workers – predominantly female – are considered to be of low worth and paid less than the minimum wage, and have few career options – and the Covid crisis is likely to make matters worse.

It’s Conservative policy, remember: they have victimised women since they got back into office in 2010, with the so-called austerity policies attacking women far more than men.

One in eight childcare workers in England earn less than £5 an hour, according to new research which warns that low pay, high workload and a lack of career development are having an adverse effect on the sector.

The Social Mobility Commission (SMC) report says… as many as 13% of childcare workers are paid under £5 an hour.

The workforce included apprentices, students on placement, volunteers as well as childminders, hence the low hourly rates.

Staff turnover is high at 13%, with one in six leaving their posts within a year, and 37% quitting within two years.

The report also highlights a lack of training opportunities for those who enter the workforce, which is 96% female, with just 17% of early years workers in receipt of job-related training.

Workload is high and the job carries considerable responsibility – more than one in 10 (11%) full-time early years workers reported working more than 42 hours per week, compared to 3% of retail workers.

It’s cognitive dissonance; the job is clearly highly-responsible and stressful, yet the remuneration is pitiful and there are no associated benefits.

Does this not indicate a political decision by the Tories?

That party’s notorious “nudge unit” has long been tasked with pushing people into particular decisions by making the alternative unacceptable.

Apparently they don’t want children to have professional care while we go to work.

Clearly we’ll all have to stay at home instead – or stop having children so we can go to work.

But if we stay home, what will happen to the economy?

And if we stop having children, well, there aren’t enough people working in the economy to support the current number of senior citizens, and that will only get worse if the working population diminishes – as it must in that eventuality.

So it seems that, by allowing childcare workers to be treated so badly, the Tories are deliberately trying to trash the UK economy.

And some of us voted them into office with a landslide in order to do that.

Were these voters ill, or insane, or suffering mass hysteria?

Source: One in eight childcare workers in England earn less than £5 an hour | Childcare | The Guardian

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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