Thursday:
We are trying a new experiment in VIDEO BLOGGING.
Daddy Richard will be doing some news'n'views from his old home town, and for the start he has brought Daddy Alex along to go back to the very beginning, the place where he was born.
More to follow, you lucky people!
Richard: I’m Richard Flowers – and my husband Alex was born here, at Stepping Hill Hospital.
Alex: We both depend on the NHS. And we’re both grateful for all the things that they do.
Richard: We’re glad that the junior doctors have got their agreement – at last – but why do the Tories keep picking a fight with the NHS? Last time it was the nurses. This time it’s the junior doctors.
Why do they keep trying to rip up the NHS?
Alex: It’s the same with the schools, and even the BBC. I just don’t get why the Tories keep trying to break the British institutions that all the rest of us love.
Richard: The Liberal Democrats want to build a better future – invest in the NHS and work with professionals, not against them.
The big change that we want to make isn’t imposing bureaucracy or picking a fight.
We want the NHS to get better at delivering for mental health issues. And we’d put in the money to do it.
Alex: We all know people who suffer with mental health problems. But they’re not as easy to put into targets – or photo opportunities.
Richard: These are the priorities for the Liberal Democrats.
Not picking a fight with doctors.
But building a better future and a better deal for those who need it most.
Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Monday, November 24, 2014
Day 5076: When is 1% not 1%? When it’s 4%, apparently
Monday:
Today the NHS has suffered the indignity of a strike by thousands of nurses and midwives protesting that their pay has been frozen for years and all they are asking for is the 1% that was recommended by the independent review body and that the Government has reneged upon.
Except that’s not really true, is it.
The Government offered 1% to everyone who wasn’t already getting an automatic pay rise.
So if you’ve not had a rise in four years, it’s not the Government blocking the 1% on offer; it’s those people who want 5% rather than “just” 4%.
Nursing is a tough job. And a necessary one. Especially as we’re all getting older and more reliant than ever on the Health Service. And this year, we’ve been personally especially grateful to some good nurses, I can tell you. So who wouldn’t want to reward them well?
But it begins to look like their representation is, well, misrepresenting them.
Quite rightly, our nurses have the sympathy and support of the public, but they risk losing that if the public – many of whom have genuinely seen 0% increases, that’s a real terms (i.e. after inflation) decrease – discover that the NHS Unions insist on using such mendacious tactics as claiming that nurses have not had a pay rise when in fact nurses’ pay comes with a built-in increase every year.
More than a million NHS staff – except for doctors, dentists and some senior managers who are on a different scheme – are paid according to a system called Agenda for Change (you can tell it came in under Tony Blair, can’t you).
Under this arrangement, you are assigned to a “Band” based on your job and seniority level: nurses and midwives, for example, start from Band 5; sisters and senior radiographers are in Band 6; and so on. You then have “points” on the payscale and in the normal course of things you would expect to go up one point each year.
Here, from the Royal College of Nursing, are the current (agreed in 2013) pay bands.
So for a nurse in Band 5, you begin at point 16, which is a salary of £21,388 on the 2013 agreed rates.
Then in your second year you advance to point 17, and receive a salary of £22,016, an automatic increase of 2.9%.
In your third year this goes up to point 18 for £22,903, a 4.0% increase and so on up to your seventh year when you reach top of your Band. In fact it’s 4% increase all the way up to the top of the scale for Band 5 when a nurse can earn £27,901.
Similarly for Bands 6 and 7, the salary increase between different points varies from point to point but on average is 3.5% per year, to a top salary of £40,558.
(Bands 1-4, incidentally, who are assistants, secretaries and porters earning between £14,094 and £22,016, have average rises of 2.5%.)
The review body’s proposals, then, were to increase all of these pay points by 1%.
So the effect for a nurse going into their second year would be an increase from £21,388 (on the 2013 rates) to £22,436 (on the new 2014 rates) which is a pay rise of 4.0%. And pay increases of 5% for nurses in their second through seventh years.
The people who wouldn’t be getting an automatic pay rise are the people at the tops of the scales… to whom the Government is offering the 1% that they say they are striking for.
(So actually, the people affected by this are new NHS staff, coming in at the old starting rate rather than the new proposed one.)
There are 380,000 nurses in the NHS in the UK, earning at least £21,388 each or a total wage bill somewhere north of eight billion quid. That 1% increase will cost the NHS, will cost you because you pay for the NHS, at least eighty million pounds.
Or, in the emotive terms that people like to pitch this debate, 4000 nurses.
Not that nurses are paid brilliantly, but the £28,180 on offer (after 1% increase) to an ordinary ward nurse at the top of the Band 5 pay scale is above the median average national wage, and quite a lot more than quite a lot of people get, particularly people on sickness benefits who get hardest hit by NHS strike action, or people on minimum wage or zero hours contracts who lose money when they have to refuse work in order to turn up on time for their NHS appointments, and only get told when they get there that they’ll have to miss more work without compensation because their appointment’s been cancelled through NHS strike action.
Everyone is fed up with austerity. Everyone is tired of tightening belts. And it’s true that to get through the worst of the recession that they inherited, the Coalition did freeze all those pay rates that were over £21,000. The rates were kept the same for the first three years: 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13.
Although rates were increased for those lower paid NHS workers, on Bands 1 to 4, but not the nurses who were already better off than that. And, of course, you would still get an increase by progressing up the rates each year.
But, something I’ve just noticed from the RCN website: all pay rates were increased by 1% for last year (2012/13).
So that “not had a pay rise in four years” just cannot be true.
A nurse starting in 2010 on £21,176 would expect to be earning £24,799 in 2014, an increase of 17% or an average increase of 4% a year. Better than inflation in every year except 2010 when Alistair Darling’s devaluation and George Osborne’s VAT rise both hit.
In real terms, then, nurses are barely any better off. But try telling that to people who really haven’t had a pay rise in four years.
It’s said that the NHS is what the British have instead of religion these days. It’s an article of faith that we must preserve it, as much as it’s a standard mantra that the NHS is in crisis. Labour in particular have made a fetish of “their” NHS – “don’t let the Tories ruin it”, they cry when all other rational reasons to vote Labour fail them; any attempt to empower local people to vary provision to suit their needs is greeted with cries of “post code lottery” and results in power being snatched back to the Secretary of State; at the last gasp, any reform at all is answered with the desperate war cry of “privatisation”.
But locked-in inflation-busting salary increases are another reason, along with Labour’s privatization through the PFI door, why the “best health service in the world” is going to go bust in spite of having ring-fenced, real terms cash increases no matter what the damage that does to other spending commitments.
The NHS has been made a sacred cow by at least five major Parties (and UKIP) including, sadly, my own. And as with most cows, the debate seems to come with a quantity of bull.
Today the NHS has suffered the indignity of a strike by thousands of nurses and midwives protesting that their pay has been frozen for years and all they are asking for is the 1% that was recommended by the independent review body and that the Government has reneged upon.
Except that’s not really true, is it.
The Government offered 1% to everyone who wasn’t already getting an automatic pay rise.
So if you’ve not had a rise in four years, it’s not the Government blocking the 1% on offer; it’s those people who want 5% rather than “just” 4%.
Nursing is a tough job. And a necessary one. Especially as we’re all getting older and more reliant than ever on the Health Service. And this year, we’ve been personally especially grateful to some good nurses, I can tell you. So who wouldn’t want to reward them well?
But it begins to look like their representation is, well, misrepresenting them.
Quite rightly, our nurses have the sympathy and support of the public, but they risk losing that if the public – many of whom have genuinely seen 0% increases, that’s a real terms (i.e. after inflation) decrease – discover that the NHS Unions insist on using such mendacious tactics as claiming that nurses have not had a pay rise when in fact nurses’ pay comes with a built-in increase every year.
More than a million NHS staff – except for doctors, dentists and some senior managers who are on a different scheme – are paid according to a system called Agenda for Change (you can tell it came in under Tony Blair, can’t you).
Under this arrangement, you are assigned to a “Band” based on your job and seniority level: nurses and midwives, for example, start from Band 5; sisters and senior radiographers are in Band 6; and so on. You then have “points” on the payscale and in the normal course of things you would expect to go up one point each year.
Here, from the Royal College of Nursing, are the current (agreed in 2013) pay bands.
So for a nurse in Band 5, you begin at point 16, which is a salary of £21,388 on the 2013 agreed rates.
Then in your second year you advance to point 17, and receive a salary of £22,016, an automatic increase of 2.9%.
In your third year this goes up to point 18 for £22,903, a 4.0% increase and so on up to your seventh year when you reach top of your Band. In fact it’s 4% increase all the way up to the top of the scale for Band 5 when a nurse can earn £27,901.
Similarly for Bands 6 and 7, the salary increase between different points varies from point to point but on average is 3.5% per year, to a top salary of £40,558.
(Bands 1-4, incidentally, who are assistants, secretaries and porters earning between £14,094 and £22,016, have average rises of 2.5%.)
The review body’s proposals, then, were to increase all of these pay points by 1%.
So the effect for a nurse going into their second year would be an increase from £21,388 (on the 2013 rates) to £22,436 (on the new 2014 rates) which is a pay rise of 4.0%. And pay increases of 5% for nurses in their second through seventh years.
The people who wouldn’t be getting an automatic pay rise are the people at the tops of the scales… to whom the Government is offering the 1% that they say they are striking for.
(So actually, the people affected by this are new NHS staff, coming in at the old starting rate rather than the new proposed one.)
There are 380,000 nurses in the NHS in the UK, earning at least £21,388 each or a total wage bill somewhere north of eight billion quid. That 1% increase will cost the NHS, will cost you because you pay for the NHS, at least eighty million pounds.
Or, in the emotive terms that people like to pitch this debate, 4000 nurses.
Not that nurses are paid brilliantly, but the £28,180 on offer (after 1% increase) to an ordinary ward nurse at the top of the Band 5 pay scale is above the median average national wage, and quite a lot more than quite a lot of people get, particularly people on sickness benefits who get hardest hit by NHS strike action, or people on minimum wage or zero hours contracts who lose money when they have to refuse work in order to turn up on time for their NHS appointments, and only get told when they get there that they’ll have to miss more work without compensation because their appointment’s been cancelled through NHS strike action.
Everyone is fed up with austerity. Everyone is tired of tightening belts. And it’s true that to get through the worst of the recession that they inherited, the Coalition did freeze all those pay rates that were over £21,000. The rates were kept the same for the first three years: 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13.
Although rates were increased for those lower paid NHS workers, on Bands 1 to 4, but not the nurses who were already better off than that. And, of course, you would still get an increase by progressing up the rates each year.
But, something I’ve just noticed from the RCN website: all pay rates were increased by 1% for last year (2012/13).
So that “not had a pay rise in four years” just cannot be true.
A nurse starting in 2010 on £21,176 would expect to be earning £24,799 in 2014, an increase of 17% or an average increase of 4% a year. Better than inflation in every year except 2010 when Alistair Darling’s devaluation and George Osborne’s VAT rise both hit.
In real terms, then, nurses are barely any better off. But try telling that to people who really haven’t had a pay rise in four years.
It’s said that the NHS is what the British have instead of religion these days. It’s an article of faith that we must preserve it, as much as it’s a standard mantra that the NHS is in crisis. Labour in particular have made a fetish of “their” NHS – “don’t let the Tories ruin it”, they cry when all other rational reasons to vote Labour fail them; any attempt to empower local people to vary provision to suit their needs is greeted with cries of “post code lottery” and results in power being snatched back to the Secretary of State; at the last gasp, any reform at all is answered with the desperate war cry of “privatisation”.
But locked-in inflation-busting salary increases are another reason, along with Labour’s privatization through the PFI door, why the “best health service in the world” is going to go bust in spite of having ring-fenced, real terms cash increases no matter what the damage that does to other spending commitments.
The NHS has been made a sacred cow by at least five major Parties (and UKIP) including, sadly, my own. And as with most cows, the debate seems to come with a quantity of bull.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Day 4088: NHS – a Typical Liberal Compromise
Sunday:
Just back from the NHS debate and we've succeed in voting for EVERYONE! We agreed with Ms Dame Shirl the Girl that the amended bill was now better, and we agreed with Mr Dr Evan that the Lords can still vote to nuke it anyway!
Many good points were made, about the complexity of the new arrangements and that there is more centralisation going on under cover of devolving some other powers. And of course that none of the doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons or psi-judges who have looked at the bill actually want it.
BUT, Dame Shirl made the MOST telling point.
Hard Labour's 2006y bill – which we default to if we kill this one – laid the foundation for PRIVATISING the Health Service, with their PFIs and sweetheart deals for private clinics and paying for operations that don't even happen.
OUR bill, now we've amended it, STOPS LABOUR'S PRIVATISATION OF THE NHS.
On the whole, I think that the CORE of this bill is a GOOD IDEA that has been VERY BADLY IMPLEMENTED.
Giving the POWERS and the RESPONSIBILITIES for YOUR care to YOUR doctor is a GOOD THING.
But we should have done it VOLUNTARILY and we should have run LOTS OF TRIALS so that people could SEE if it worked.
And if it DID work, people would have been CALLING for the changes not shouting "traitor" at queues of people that they ought to be persuading. (ACTUALLY HAPPENED – good way to persuade people that!)
And if it DIDN'T we could have agreed to drop it based on the evidence.
Instead we have the mess Mr Landslide and Mr Balloon dropped us in.
"No top down reforms of the NHS" – it's almost like Mr Balloon wasn't paying any attention to what his ministers wanted.
At least the Lib Dems are listening!
PS: Got stuck in the lift with Mr Dr Vince this morning and it carried us away to the fifth floor instead of the ground. Still, if you're going to be trapped with the Business Secretary it's better to on your way to the top!
Just back from the NHS debate and we've succeed in voting for EVERYONE! We agreed with Ms Dame Shirl the Girl that the amended bill was now better, and we agreed with Mr Dr Evan that the Lords can still vote to nuke it anyway!
Many good points were made, about the complexity of the new arrangements and that there is more centralisation going on under cover of devolving some other powers. And of course that none of the doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons or psi-judges who have looked at the bill actually want it.
BUT, Dame Shirl made the MOST telling point.
Hard Labour's 2006y bill – which we default to if we kill this one – laid the foundation for PRIVATISING the Health Service, with their PFIs and sweetheart deals for private clinics and paying for operations that don't even happen.
OUR bill, now we've amended it, STOPS LABOUR'S PRIVATISATION OF THE NHS.
On the whole, I think that the CORE of this bill is a GOOD IDEA that has been VERY BADLY IMPLEMENTED.
Giving the POWERS and the RESPONSIBILITIES for YOUR care to YOUR doctor is a GOOD THING.
But we should have done it VOLUNTARILY and we should have run LOTS OF TRIALS so that people could SEE if it worked.
And if it DID work, people would have been CALLING for the changes not shouting "traitor" at queues of people that they ought to be persuading. (ACTUALLY HAPPENED – good way to persuade people that!)
And if it DIDN'T we could have agreed to drop it based on the evidence.
Instead we have the mess Mr Landslide and Mr Balloon dropped us in.
"No top down reforms of the NHS" – it's almost like Mr Balloon wasn't paying any attention to what his ministers wanted.
At least the Lib Dems are listening!
PS: Got stuck in the lift with Mr Dr Vince this morning and it carried us away to the fifth floor instead of the ground. Still, if you're going to be trapped with the Business Secretary it's better to on your way to the top!
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