Tag Archives: pay

NHS across UK spends £10bn on temp staff because Tories won’t pay staff properly

The pay trick: by reducing pay for medical staff on NHS payrolls, Tories have pushed them out, making it impossible for the service to cope with demand – and then they have paid private agency workers huge amounts to cover the shortfall in staff. If they simply paid NHS staff an equitable amount, the problem would go away.

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Ministers are facing calls to tackle the NHS’s chronic lack of staff as figures reveal that the bill for hiring temporary frontline workers has soared to more than £10bn a year.

Hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK are paying a record £4.6bn for agency personnel and another £5.8bn for doctors and nurses on staff to do extra “bank” shifts to plug gaps in rotas.

Widespread short staffing has increasingly forced the service in all four home nations to hand colossal sums to employment agencies to hire stand-in workers. In England alone, the bill for agency staff, particularly nurses and GPs, has risen from £3bn to £3.5bn over the past year – a 16% rise.

The NHS in England currently has 42,306 vacant nursing posts.

There’s a simple reason the NHS is having to employ agency workers at exorbitant cost: the Tory government insists on under-paying regular staff.

Junior doctors now need a 35 per cent pay increase to reach real-terms parity with what they were getting in 2010 when the Tories came into government and started slashing everybody else’s pay (but not their own).

Nurses are suffering a similar shortfall.

And NHS bosses have the nerve to blame problems in the service on the strike action these dedicated medical professionals are having to take, simply to raise awareness of the plight that they – and the fat Tories in Westminster – have put them in!

With wages that are insufficient to cover their living costs, doctors and nurses are having to seek alternative employment – most commonly with the higher-paying health services of other countries or, ironically, with the agencies that are charging the NHS so much (including fat profits for their bosses, of course).

The answer, of course, is to bring doctors’ and nurses’ pay back up to what it should be. With agency fees so high, such a decision should pay for itself.

But the Tories don’t want to do that.

Conclusion: the Conservative government is deliberately starving the NHS of staff. They intend to destroy its ability to cope with public need in order to force people to pay for private, less effective and less professional treatment.

That is not the action of a government that has the best interests of the UK’s citizens at heart.

Remember it at the next election.


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Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer

Relative values: older people think the young are richer than them because they’re paid in pounds rather than pennies – but inflation means those pounds don’t pay for as much as the pennies did and, in real terms, younger people are paid less than their senior counterparts were at the same age.

Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer – as laid out in simple terms by Gary Stevenson.

He has released a video clip explaining why older generations are mistaken in claiming younger people “never had it so good”, to quote Harold Macmillan.

While it is true that young people may start their working lives earning more money – in pounds and pence – than older people did, the simple fact of inflation means the pounds they are paid simply doesn’t go as far as the pennies their elders received.

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But the fact that – on paper – they are receiving more means employers can pay them less in real terms and claim they’re being over-generous – and get away with it because people look at the simple numbers rather than the real-terms value.

Here’s Gary:

The theory Gary puts forward is proved by the fact that, after World War II, a single earner was able to buy the mortgage on a house and pay the living costs of everybody living in it – no matter how big the family, and now everybody of working age has to be slaving away all the hours they can work, and still can’t make ends meet.

But the UK as a nation is not getting poorer – either in money terms or real terms.

This means the cash that would have gone to working people in the post-war era is now going somewhere else. Gary says it’s going to the rich and that makes perfect sense because rich people own the companies that employ working people and can therefore dictate how their firms’ profits are divided.

It is these rich people who are impoverishing the vast majority of us in the UK – and getting away with it by lying that we are actually getting richer, generation by generation, when in fact the action of inflation and the wage stagnation they inflict on us mean that we are actually getting poorer.

The answer is for government to tax the rich so that these pay policies make them no better-off, or to impose laws that demand a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid in any business.

Neither of the main political parties seem interested in this. We may speculate about the reasons for this – is big business holding politicians to ransom: “Keep our salaries high and wages low or there’ll be no cushy job waiting for you after you get voted out”? – but it won’t make any real difference. It is what it is.

We see that in Labour’s new ‘campaigning bible’, that is full of soundbites and empty of initiative.

From what This Writer has seen, it contains nothing that could possibly induce a member of the voting public to conclude that a Labour government will improve their standard of living.

The reason for that is simple: it doesn’t address the issues facing us – like the illusion of improvement that Gary has identified.


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Tory line on why they won’t negotiate with junior doctors is gibberish

Steve Barclay: watch him stutter through his nonsense argument against negotiating a better pay deal for junior doctors.

Listen to the nonsense that issues from former Health Sec Steve Barclay’s lips when he’s challenged on why his government won’t negotiate with striking junior doctors, while they’re on strike.

I don’t actually agree with Peter Stefanovic about Susanna Reid; she could have been much more incisive.

The issue is that the government says it will not negotiate on pay with junior doctors while they are involved in strike action. It will only talk if they call their strikes off.

But if they call their strikes off, then the government won’t have any reason to negotiate on pay with junior doctors. So it won’t; it will merely continue to impose punitive real-terms pay cuts.

“There was a catch, and it was Catch-22.”

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As a member of the public, you need to be aware of this Tory government tactic, and of how unfair it is.

Doctors’ pay has been eroded by more than one-third – by Tory governments – in the years since they took over responsibility for the health service in 2010. By comparison, Tory MPs’ salaries have remained at the same level, in real terms, as they were in 2010.

The only way the Tories would have a tenable argument against increasing junior doctors’ pay by the 35 per cent needed to return it to parity with 2010 would be if their own pay had also tumbled. It hasn’t, so they don’t.

Do you remember the Tory mantra from the general election of 2010? It was “We’re all in it together.”

Could there be a stronger argument than this that they were lying?


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Tories announce ‘biggest cut in net migration’ and we’re punching holes in their plan

Rishi Sunak and his priorities: who would have thought that stopping the boats would contradict his plan to reduce inflation?

The following is misleading.

If you’re announcing a plan to cut net migration into the UK, then it hasn’t happened yet. The following tweet is therefore misleading.

There’s no way of telling whether these measures will actually bring inward migration down.

Also, there’s the issue of unforeseen consequences.

First, here’s another misleading message from Rishi Sunak. See my response to understand why it’s wrong:

Again, to remind you: The treaty with Rwanda that James Cleverly was sent to sign has nothing to do with stopping criminal gangs from transporting refugees (or whoever) across the English Channel.

It is merely an attempt to bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling that Rwanda is not a safe place to send them once they have arrived in the UK.

Now, about those unforeseen consequences…

When Sunak says he will “end abuse via the Health and Care Visa, he means he will prevent care workers moving to the UK for employment from bringing their families. This will also apply to overseas students.

This will turn away expertise that the UK needs.

Tory voices like that of Brendan Clarke-Smith are already whispering that foreign workers will still come, because the UK is “a fantastic country”:

Is it?

It seems unlikely that highly-qualified people, who could earn a better living anywhere else in the world, would willingly give up their kith and kin to work in a country that will not appreciate their efforts and that – certainly in the case of health and care – treats its own people so badly.

No worries, though! Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick reckons workers from the UK will fill the gaps:

He said UK businesses would no longer have the option of hiring cheap labour from overseas, meaning they would have to “invest in the domestic workforce”.

Why should they?

Big businesses are more likely to preserve their profits by moving out of the UK altogether and hiring all that cheap foreign labour abroad, where it’s still cheap.

And small or medium-sized enterprises are not likely to be able to afford the kind of investment Jenrick is suggesting.

He went on to appear on Sky News, supporting the remaining point in the five-point plan – ensuring that people sponsoring dependents, who do come with them to the UK, can support them financially:

So the overall implication of this plan is that it is an attempt to nudge businesses into paying higher salaries to people working in the UK.

This appears to be an attempt to steal a policy from Reform UK, whose leader Richard Tice had already spoken in favour of higher wages and investment in people:

Opinion polls have suggested that right-wing voters are, themselves, migrating – from the Tories to Reform UK. This anti-immigration policy may be an attempt to woo them back.

But – perhaps crucially – this is a policy turnaround for the Tories, who have previously argued that increased pay for working people is inflationary:

TL;DR: this supposedly anti-immigration policy seems to be intended more as a way of stemming the flow of voters to Reform UK. Its stated aim of increasing pay contradicts Tory policy on inflation and is more likely to move businesses out of the UK than bring investment in.

Why do useless Tory MPs think they deserve so much more pay than life-saving docs?

Who would have thought that this cartoon could be re-used? Now, as when he was Health Secretary, Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has doctors on the rack. He’s not going to pay them the 35% cost-of-living increase he owes them – but he and his colleagues have been happy to take a 42% rise for themselves.

Take a look at the clip below, in which Steve Brine MP, Tory chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, says junior doctors do not deserve the 35 per cent pay increase that would be required to give them parity with their pay in 2010:

Now read this:

Conservative MPs have been worse than useless to the UK since 2010.

They have plunged the country into five times the debt it had in 2005, with nothing to show for it but a crashing economy and nose-diving public services, including a National Health Service that is constantly on the verge of collapse due to intrusive privatisation and over-demand due to the effects of all the Tories’ other policies.

Junior doctors, working within that crashing health service even as it crumbles around them, are far more valuable – for the obvious reason: They are genuine life savers.

But it is the Tory MPs who hold the purse strings.

They could have refused the recommended pay rises that have been offered to them since 2010 but they haven’t. They have taken the money. They have also taken huge wodges of cash in donations from businesspeople, along with the advice of those donors on what to do. You can form your own conclusion about the value of that advice to the majority of us.

And while taking all that filthy lucre – a higher proportional increase than the amount the junior doctors have lost over the same period of time – the Tories have told junior doctors that they do not deserve a pay rise equal to the increase in the cost of living.

No wonder medical professionals are quitting the NHS as fast as they can.

There is a word for MPs like Mr Brine. It begins with a ‘C’ – but it sure isn’t ‘Conservative’.


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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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Housebuilders rise to top of FTSE100 now YOU have to pay for pollution they cause

Housebuilding: the Tories have been looking for something on which they can blame their failure to build enough new homes – and have found it in the form of legal protections for river life. So they are scrapping those protections and forcing you to pay for pollution prevention measures.

Exactly as This Site predicted only hours ago, evidence is showing that a Tory government decision to scrap “nutrient neutrality” rules that protect river life from harm caused by housing developments is creating huge profits for builders.

Meanwhile, the cost of cleaning up their mess is set to fall on the public purse.

Here’s the evidence about building firms:

And The Guardian is saying the following about how the bill for their pollution will now be paid:

Taxpayers will pick up the bill for pollution by housebuilders, government officials have admitted, as rules on chemical releases into waterways are scrapped.

The government has said it will double Natural England’s wetland funding to £280m in order to show it is trying to meet the requirements of its legally binding Environment Act.

This extra £140m will come from the public purse, the government confirmed. When asked by the Guardian whether this meant the taxpayer was now picking up the bill for pollution caused by developers, a government official responded “yes”, adding that while “the polluter pays principle is very important”, it was having too many adverse impacts on small- and medium-sized housebuilders.

So there you have it.

You paid for the privatised energy companies’ enormous profits. You paid for the privatised water firms to pollute our rivers. And now you are to pay for mitigation of the already-private builders’ attempts to kill off any remaining life in our waterways – if such mitigation ever happens.


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MP severance pay to double as hundreds of Tories face losing their seats. Coincidence?

Okay, it’s not a backhander… in fact it looks like a bung to Tory MPs facing ejection from Parliament – in plain view of the entire United Kingdom.

Is anybody not calling ‘foul’ on this one?

Here are the headlines:

The details, from The Guardian:

Departing MPs will get bigger payouts for winding up their offices, with the sum doubling to £17,300, the UK parliament expenses watchdog has announced.

MPs who lose their seats or choose not to stand will be paid for four months after leaving office to enable them to wind up their casework and other duties – doubling from the current period of eight weeks.

MPs who lose their seats also qualify for “loss of office payments” – at twice the rate of statutory redundancy pay – and the winding-up payments come on top of this.

They have to demonstrate that they are using their time to work on winding up their offices. MPs’ staff can also qualify for such payments. Ministers get different severance payments for loss of office, with a cabinet minister receiving £16,876.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) made the change after reviewing arrangements for payments following the next election… prompted by the boundary changes and end of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in 2022.

Some doubt the sincerity of IPSA’s behaviour:

… and This Writer is one of them.

I’d say IPSA has just delivered proof that it is not fit for purpose.


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Economists please note: high inflation may be A POLITICAL CHOICE

This is fine: the image above was originally about climate change but it may be applied equally well to Rishi Sunak’s attitude to the economy. Political policy in the UK for the past 40 years and more has been to impoverish you, together with all the poor people who voted for him and his ilk, thereby allowing it to happen.

All the Tory talk about getting inflation down seems to have confused some people who have failed to consider that high inflation may actually be Conservative government policy.

Look at the usually-excellent Simon Wren-Lewis’s latest Mainly Macro piece, in which he takes issue with left-wing opinions about his current diagnosis of the inflation problem.

He reckons the answer is for private sector wage rises to come down, probably by way of reducing economic demand which will lead to a reduction in the workforce – and, thereby, a recession. This opinion appears to be shared with the Bank of England, whose continual interest rate hikes seem to be an attempt to force the UK’s economy to go backwards.

The problem with that is simple: ordinary working- and even some middle-class people are struggling to make ends meet. Many simply can’t and are going into debt. His solution to the inflation problem will bake that inability to afford the cost of living into the UK economy.

With the Tory government lying to us that workers’ wages are the cause of high inflation and the Bank of England doing as described above, there seems to be only one logical conclusion to draw:

High inflation is a Conservative government policy. It is intended to drive the UK’s lower-paid citizens deep into poverty so you cannot afford the necessities of life.

Just roll that around your mind for a moment.

Think about the real causes of inflation: huge increases in the prices of energy and food, and huge increases in the salaries of FTSE100 executives.

The government could, in theory, neutralise these inflationary pressures through taxation – but the theory fails in practice: as Professor Wren-Lewis notes, the energy firms are multi-national corporations whose profits are received overseas, so there is nothing the government can do about them.

Looking back through history, we see that the reason overseas shareholders have been able to take control of our formerly-nationalised utility firms (energy isn’t the only subject area to have been treated this way, of course; water springs instantly to mind) is privatisation.

The answer should be re-nationalisation – but the Tory government (and also Keir Starmer’s STP – Substitute Tory Party) won’t countenance that; it is against their ideology. This indicates, again, that high inflation that drives you into poverty is a political choice. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer want you to starve.

In the private sector, we see that the salaries of FTSE100 executives have risen by an average of 16 per cent in the last year alone, despite the fact that there has been no real growth in production in the last 15 years since the Great Recession. The money for their pay rise has to come from somewhere and the logical source is the pay packets of employees; they are taking the rises that should go to you.

That’s if they haven’t increased the prices of their goods or services, of course. If they have then they are still taking the rises that should go to you, while also increasing prices so you can’t afford what your employer sells.

The answer – the way to stop this irresponsible upward drain of corporate funds into executive bank accounts – is to tax executive pay at a rate high enough to make this practice unviable. Again, both Rishi Sunak’s Tories and Keir Starmer’s Tories have refused to do this so – again – we must conclude that the executive wage inflation that puts us all into poverty is a political choice.

Professor Wren-Lewis rightly points out that, where employees have won wage increases intended to match inflation caused mainly by high energy prices, their employers have put prices up; this indicates that shifting the real-terms wage cut onto the profits of other firms won’t work and just generates more inflation.

Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to discuss the reason real wages in the UK have not grown in the last 15 years. As already mentioned above, besides the energy and food price hikes, it is the fact that productivity growth has been extremely weak. There have also been two large devaluations of the Pound.

The low productivity – and one of the depreciations – were caused by Brexit. This is another political policy of the Conservative government that is also supported by Keir Starmer’s STP and may therefore be seen as further proof that the party of government (and that of Opposition) intends to impoverish you as a matter of policy.

Brexit also makes causing a recession more attractive to the government and the party that wants to form a government. Neither of them want inflation to continue running rampant forever; it would eventually wipe out the gains they have made for their very rich friends, so they’ll want to bring it down.

The way to do that, according to Prof Wren-Lewis, is to reduce the demand for goods produced by most firms, as this will lead to a reduced demand for labour; firms then lay off workers, meaning more people are seeking employment, meaning in turn that jobseekers will be more likely to accept a job that pays lower wages.

Before Brexit, politicians could always rely on an influx of cheap labour from Europe. That isn’t available now, so they consider recession to be the only alternative. Remember: their future is safe.

Demand is already coming down because people simply can’t afford to buy as much as they used to, due to the real-terms wage cuts they have suffered. The Bank of England’s interest rate rises are hammering that change home.

We may therefore conclude that recession, job losses, further deprivation and misery are all policy points of the Conservative government, and of Keir Starmer’s STP.

Professor Wren-Lewis ends his piece by quoting Bertrand Russell: “Ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”

Sadly, he fails to follow his own (and Russell’s) advice.

The truth that the facts bear out is that privatisation, executive pay rises, Brexit, austerity (the other driver of the Pound’s depreciation) and interest rate rises are all intended to push the majority of UK citizens into poverty.

Other solutions besides reducing demand by causing a recession and mass unemployment are available – but the low-quality politicians with whom we have accepted that Parliament should be filled are not interested in them; their only concern is filling their own bank accounts.

Our concern must now be to put a stop to this.


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Huge pay rise for bosses while workers struggle. Who’s causing inflation?

The real cause of inflation: prices have been rising to give chief executives of companies massive, inflation-busting pay rises.

It’s nice that the Tories aren’t even trying to present themselves as electable any more.

They have spent so much time and energy telling us that our wages have been driving inflation up that it is impossible for them to backtrack, now we can see that the real cause is the naked greed of company executives.

And they won’t take the logical steps to rectify the situation. Firstly, they need to legislate to stop the privatised utility firms (especially energy and water) engaging in brazen profiteering because they can always force the government to increase its subsidy to them.

Tories insist on supporting privatisation, meaning they refuse to allow privatised utilities to go back into public ownership and are forced to increase public funding for them whenever the millions and billions they hand to shareholders seem likely to drive them out of business.

Secondly, they need to do as Owen Jones suggests in the following clip:

“Tax them.”

Doesn’t it seem strange that, with the UK straining under the biggest taxes we’ve had in 70 or 80 years, the government is refusing to take money from those who are most able to bear that load without suffering any serious harm to their way of life?

So it seems to This Writer that they are actually doing the decent thing (albeit unrepentantly), admitting that they’ve done wrong and – by sticking with the policy – giving up.

They’re as good as saying, “We know we’ve done wrong. We’re going to keep on doing wrong until you remove our ability to do so.”

I, for one, can’t wait to get on with it.


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