To think that if NHS staff get a 1% pay rise that is nothing but an insult?

[Bluetoybox]

Given the joke of a pay rise given over the last 3 years, well below inflation in real terms anyway but where the Government also out and out lied by failing to mention that you'd drop an increment step to get your pay rise and now this after all the NHS have done in the last year!!! A decade capped at 1% before the 3 year review and now they want to send us right back to 1%
Absolutely disgusted!

And YANBU

@Fire7

The problem is there's simply no money. That was always going to happen after 3 lockdowns and having whole swaths of the economy and society closed for a year.

The government is funded by people working and paying taxes. That is what funds hospitals and nurses.

I think a lot of people who seem to think lockdowns are cost free are going to be in for a shock over the next few years.

This is just the beginning of the long-term consequences.

This. We are going to be paying for covid for a very very long time. I'm amazed that there was an increase at all, no matter how deserved.

As we are facing huge shortages in staffing in the nhs, social care and teaching I am sure loads of people who work in the private sector are ready to retrain and snap up the 'garanteed jobs for life', 'gold plated pensions' and all the other perks. Just sign up at your nearest uni and pay £9000 a year for at least 3 years- no job garanteed. Starting salary around £21 000 to 23 000. No overtime paid, about 20 hours extra a week on top of paid hours. Salary cap around 35 000 after many year, very experienced and making life changing decisions unless you head into management. Then in management you question all decisions because they cost too much. No bonus ever. No payrise above 1% after years of no pay rise because it would piss the public off because we bailed out the banks etc. and have to show solidarity.

I completely agree there isn’t any money to actually give better pay rises but there is resentment from the numerous years of paycuts from 10 years of less than inflation pay rises. That is the problem. We are lucky to have stable jobs but agree staffing levels are at an all time low as is morale.
Teaching and social care is the same. 3 teachers left my friends primary before Christmas! All left the profession to become private tutors. It’s only a 1 class intake too.

Yanbu at all but governments do this. Sadly I'm not surprised.

During the war on terror back when our armed forces were doing 6 to.9 month droplets in Afghanistan and their bodies were being repatriated weekly through Wooton Bassett they didn't get a pay rise but an increase in accommodation charges, so effectively had a pay cut.

I'm not at all surprised this has happened. They'll tell the press you should be grateful you got a pay rise at all.

@Racoonworld

Would any of you want to pay higher taxes so that NHS staff can get a decent pay rise? I’d be happy to myself, but many don’t seem to want to pay more. There isn’t the money currently, our country is in so much debt.

Yes. If it was guaranteed to go to public services like the NHS that deserve it, and not be squandered on shit like the aforementioned Track & Trace, or other mates contracts. I’m not NHS, but this ‘payrise’ is an insult.

There is money. They could raise the money tomorrow if they wanted to through equitable taxation.
They can find billions and billions to channel to their friends with no experience in the relevant areas. They’ve just spent £250 million putting articles in the Independent and the Metro to tell people that Brexit is going well. They’ve spent a further £350000 saving Patel’s hide and settling her case. If they wanted to find the money, they would.

I take unit back. The small prin5 of the budget shows Track and Trace getting a further £15 billion. Please don’t come on here to pretend there’s no money.

I take it back, I mean.

I don't think there is the money tbh.

The difficulty is that there are over 1 million people working for the NHS, so even a 1% pay rise, which seems so little, costs about £550 million. Which is about the same as adding an extra 1.25% onto tax.

The £2k bonus is an interesting idea. If that was paid out of a tax rise, you'd need to increase the basic rate of tax from 20% to 25% to cover it. But then everyone in the NHS who earned more than £50k a year would be worse off, as they'd be paying more in tax than their bonus.

A pay rise is money you have to find every year, so you need a regular way to fund it, which would end up being a tax rise.

I work on the nhs frontline and got Covid last March courtesy of a very selfish family who knew they had a relative in another hospital with Covid but chose not to say anything as didn’t want their op to be cancelled. Within 2 weeks, 8 of my team of 15 were wiped out, 1 of which is still recovering now. I’m not saying other keyworkers/private sector don’t work hard, my sister in law is a teacher so I know 1st hand the hours she has put in but we were put out there in the early days without masks and our health and well-being has suffered as a result. I am completely exhausted, I am managing 3 members of staff with quite serious mental health concerns and a 1% pay increase to be honest just doesn’t cut it. I would have preferred 2-4 weeks of furlough given the option but who cares.

So the Track and Trace system is worth roughly 74 years of the pay rise for the NHS.

Yanbu OP. It's a disgrace.

The test & trace money is a bit of a red herring.

fullfact.org/health/local-national-contact-tracing/

The budget it has is not the same as the actual spend & most of the money is spent on covid testing. Some of the tracing money is given to local authorities.

I read the article. One wonders why it needs an extra 15 billion, then, if so little has been spent. One also wonders why it was put in the hands of someone so woefully ill equipped in this particular sphere.

I have worked for the NHS all my life. But I’m office based and haven’t set foot in a hospital for years.

All through the pandemic I’ve been working from home (many unpaid hours in addition!) trying to maintain “business as usual”

I don’t really feel that anything I’ve done warrants a specific pay rise

However, every single person who has been at the front line through this - every nurse, HCA, doctor, domestic, Porter, pharmacy technician, administrator, EVERYONE; all those who has had to cope with huge numbers of sick and dying patients, with limited PPE, long hours, staff shortages and exhaustion, deserve a large pay rise in recognition of their dedication. If it hadn’t been for the NHS the entire country would have been in a far worse state than we find ourselves now. It’s the single biggest debt of gratitude since the troops were thanked in 1945, and they deserve more than a couple of minutes of clapping over 10 weeks.

NHS staff have kept their jobs and got a pay rise.

Everyone else takes a pay cut and / or loses their job.

The NHS staff are taking the piss, they have
got a better deal than everyone else.

Yeah, I agree. I'd guess they've looked at some sort of 'covid testing needs' model for 2021 and just added the number into a spreadsheet.
However bad a 1% pay rise for the NHS is, a headline of 'we've run out of money for covid testing during a pandemic' would be much worse.
Just my opinion though!

Really, NHS staff have a better deal than everyone else?

Don’t make me laugh, my sides are splitting

So, real terms pay cuts for the last decade +, huge vacancy rates, serious concerns over safe staffing levels, staff completely burnt out, shit conditions, AND trying to keep people alive through all that? And meet never ending targets? Oh! Then just throw a fucking global pandemic into the mix!

Yeah.....NHS staff have got it real fucking good....fancy applying?

But equally we have all seen staff dancing in empty hospitals - what a load of nonsense by you.

It’s an insult, especially when govt wasted £22 billion on a poorly performing test, trace and isolate program run by the private sector.

@Littlesnail "The difficulty is that there are over 1 million people working for the NHS, so even a 1% pay rise, which seems so little, costs about £550 million"

That's less than 2 weeks of the bus-side Brexit promise to NHS. How can that be a problem?

It’s so short sighted considering they’d get back most of it anyway. It amazes me that no one realises that better wages means more spending which would be a boost for the economy. Not to mention better retention of staff and less recruitment expenses.

A lot of people will be lucky to get anything, let alone as much as 1%. Other people will feel lucky just to have a job. Putting taxes up to fund higher rises will just put other people in more difficulty.

I think NHS staff should take a step back and realise how lucky they are - guaranteed work, and a pay rise to boot.

@TakeTheCuntOutOfScunthorpe
Nhs staff aren’t lucky, they majority been working in really difficult and stressful conditions.