Where would the money come from to give all NHS staff a 12.5% pay rise?

[katieloves]

I cannot begin to think where cuts would be made to fund this when the economy already is in the state it’s in. How would you fund it?

@LemonSwan

I have no idea how they are saying someone on dividends of 1 million is paying less tax than someone on 15 or 30k. It just doesnt make sense.

If I get 30k on PAYE my take home is 24,062.16
If I take 30k profit on my company my take home is 23565 if dividends.

If I get 100k on PAYE my take home is 66,689.16
If I get 100k of profit into dividends the take home is 68263

I hardly think its a difference to get worked up about tbh

Stop using maths when there's conspiracies to solve on the Internet!

They are gonna need a payrise to pay for the counciling that alot of NHS staff will need!

My wife is already showing signs of PTSD, it's ok for people to say, well it's there job!

Nothing could prepare them for the amount of death people like my wife has witnessed, 90% of the deaths my wife has seen, nothing could be done, they just had to hold there hands

@LemonSwan

I have no idea how they are saying someone on dividends of 1 million is paying less tax than someone on 15 or 30k. It just doesnt make sense.

If I get 30k on PAYE my take home is 24,062.16
If I take 30k profit on my company my take home is 23565 if dividends.

If I get 100k on PAYE my take home is 66,689.16
If I get 100k of profit into dividends the take home is 68263

I hardly think its a difference to get worked up about tbh

Agreed not much difference but I thought the concern is companies not paying sufficient taxes not it’s employees?

To the poster who spoke about how they did their jobs in what they trained to do. Is not exactly true.
Our children’s wards nurses were sent to icu who had never been trained in adults, most of them didn’t choose to work in an ICU and had very little
Experience.

But surely now brexit has happened there’s loads of money for the NHS.................................oh wait?!

By not funding Trident?
By not funding HS2
By reducing the number of Lords and preventing governments from swing the numbers in their favour when govt. changes by creating more
M
By closing tax loopholes
By raising corporation tax
By raising the highest rate of income tax
By recouping the money from the failed track and trace scheme
By not allowing the people who were buying the shares to be the same who valued the shares in Royal Mail
By back taxing the monarchy and church for the last 500 years
By reducing the defence budget
By not having Brexit

Clearly the ship has sailed on some of these suggestions. But my point is that there is lots of money. It is just being spent on other things.

I personally would prioritise better health funding and education funding over all of the above, but clearly I am not in government.

I am an NHS worker and think 12.5% is simply over ambitious (at best).

I would say, however, that I the “well, the private sector are suffering right now, so we can’t be giving the public sector pay rises” platitudes annoy me. It often happens that private sector pay rates in equivalent positions are rising above or with inflation, when public sector do not or are frozen. Even when the country is economically prospering. It’s not unusual for pay rises to only come when there is a recruitment or retention issue.

I find the hypocrisy the hardest- praised to high heaven, but not when it comes to pay. There are thousands of vacant posts across the public sector- this was true before the start of the pandemic. The reasons are complex and pay is only part of that issue. But now, staff are exhausted and demoralised. I really worry about the rise mental health problems were are likely to face within our workforce (nevermind the country as a whole). And many of us are fed up of the hypocrisy of the government- we are wonderful/hero’s etc but not reflected in conditions of service or pay. I wonder what kind of pay rise the politicians will award themselves in the coming years?

Many want out of the NHS, I have never heard so many colleagues actively looking at ways out- whether that be to go to private sector; to leave the country; to leave their profession by retiring early or re-training. It’s not been good for a while, but it’s never been as bad as this. Maybe things will settle down if we get some breathing space. But, with so many infilled posts, and a huge backlog of work, I don’t know when we’ll get some respite. If there are tax rises and pay freezes, it’s just another push factor. It might be the straw which breaks the camels back for some.

With regards “where will the money come from?”- I think we all know that 12.5% is not going to happen. However, I would say we have the money to continue to support lots of businesses (of all sizes- including some very large companies who are still making profits) for a long time now- to the tune of billions of pounds- without any idea whether, come the end of restrictions, those businesses will still be viable. We’ve been throwing money hand over fist at these companies without any checks on their pre-covid solvency or financial health. How many companies will fold once the grants/furlough ends? I think it’s perfectly possible that we have been keeping a fair number of unviable business artificially afloat during the last year. I don’t think there was a good way to differentiate between businesses which were viable before lockdown and those that were not doing so well, nor would it be possible to anticipate which companies will survive once restrictions lifted, so I recognise that it had to be done. My point is, the country has had the money to spend on the private sector, but public sector will take the double hit of the increase taxes which I have no doubt are coming and will be on frozen/very low tax rises well beyond the time the public sector starts to see a rise. This always happens.

This has become quite abstruse.

However, the budget does continue to penalise middle income families, whilst being kind to very low and very high income. If a single earner breeches the higher income threshold, they lose child benefit. The Times has an article today (citing research by the accountant Blick Rothenberg) showing that someone earning just above £50k pays a marginal tax rate of 60% on their last bit of earnings.

In addition CGT really needs to be looked at. It should be paid at the highest rate of income tax but indexed (as it used to be). In addition, the primary residence should also be brought in, again indexed, to stop the incentive to use a house as a tax efficient savings vehicle. This could replace stamp duty.

However, on the main point, you cannot clap for a sector and call them heroes and then give them a sub inflation pay rise. 12.5% is ludicrous and clearly a highball bargaining counter, 3% could and should be afforded to front lines workers only. Pay freeze for overpaid NHS management would at least pay a part of it.

I see they found £200k to refurbish Boris's flat and gave their mates all the covid contracts skipping all the legal tender procedures.

I love the idea of being offered 1% and then asking for 12.5%.

It's an interesting negotiating tactic.

I do find Modern Monetary Theory interesting - but I find the whole idea of 'money', wealth creation, taxes, Government debt etc interesting - but not something I get as economists have different views on this.

Well, it seems NHS pay is a total of around 50 bio. I would guess 10bio of this or so is not front line. So 3% of 40 bio is only £1.2 bio.

And we still own a stake of £20 bio in RBS, a bank that still paid a (what they would term pitiful) discretionary bonus pool of £200 mio.

So that might be a solution...

First past the past post means you get either Tories or Labour. And people don't like Labour (certainly not real Labour) so Tories will get in again with votes from circa 20-25% of British adults. Nothing will ever change in England as it's a stitch up between all the ranks of the British establishment, from the old boys network to the billionaire press barrons to the landlord MPs to the first past the post system itself.

@katieloves

I just find this concept completely bizarre. Basically we keep printing money for exactly what we want. Will there not come a point when we have to pay it back?

It's negotiation - I'm not certain that NHS staff expect to receive a 12.5% pay increase but you have to put things into context as generalisation tends to creep in. Not all staff would expect or receive a pay rise at the upper end of the percentage being talked about and also, the 1% on offer, if it goes through, means that nurses are effectively well over 2 grand down on what they were getting back in 2010 when you consider inflation. There was a pay freeze for years and they've been playing catch up ever since.

Besides anything else, when people start wringing their hands about 'printing money' why do we never hear the same when the government spends loads of money, for example the settlement over the Priti Patel situation or these awarding of private contracts in relation to COVID?

Maybe by not chuffing £37 billion up the wall on a failed track and trace spreadsheet?

Brexit might have been got done. But it cost a fortune already and will continue to do so for at least a decade from today (IF all goes swimmingly after say 2030). It's not just the pandemic destroying the public purse.

Money for furlough track and trace etc ... has all been borrowed which will need to be repaid. It’s a one off.
It doesn’t make sense to borrow money ‘for day to day spending’. If we did that in our own household we’d be in trouble pretty quick. So that’s why can justify borrowing money for a one off, (which of course has saved jobs). But not borrow to give pay rises.
However, I’m pretty sure the money could come from elsewhere ... they do deserve a pay rise. But at what detrimental effect to other parts of the government spending? Take the money form social care? Universal credit? Pensions? I don’t know the answers.

Enshrine in law that our political 'representatives' are paid the same as the national average wage. Then watch the average wage increase exponentially 😏

Although test and trace was a horrible waste of money, it is being totally exaggerated here.

Apparently, only 4 bio has been spent so far and the majority of that was on testing, not tracing, which we need to do, so has not been wasted.

See below:

fullfact.org/online/test-trace-tunnel/

The Unions never worry about silly details like that! Magic money tree in Rishi's garden, perhaps?

[quote TheReluctantPhoenix]Although test and trace was a horrible waste of money, it is being totally exaggerated here.

Apparently, only 4 bio has been spent so far and the majority of that was on testing, not tracing, which we need to do, so has not been wasted.

See below:

fullfact.org/online/test-trace-tunnel/[/quote]
Then there’s a nice underspend there that could be used for something else. Why did it need another £15bn allocated in the budget??

@RaspberryCoulis
The richest 0.1% enriched themselves quite fantastically through austerity and through the pandemic. They clearly have a magic money tree in their garden which has continued to grow beautifully - entirely through their own work of course and without help from the suffering workers or infrastructure outside their gates.

[quote TheReluctantPhoenix]Although test and trace was a horrible waste of money, it is being totally exaggerated here.

Apparently, only 4 bio has been spent so far and the majority of that was on testing, not tracing, which we need to do, so has not been wasted.

See below:

fullfact.org/online/test-trace-tunnel/[/quote]
Oh, so where has the other £18 billion gone then, and why has another £15 billion been allocated?

Fact is, a lot of tory donors are going yacht shopping on that money.

You have an economic system in which the top 0.1% skim off about 10% of wealth before anyone else arrives in the room. The next top, say, 20%, reasonably well educated, well read, get a reasonable slice of the remainder to buy off their approval/complicity.

You then have 80% of the populace scrapping over half the pie. "Oh dear - austerity time".

Warren Buffet knows it. I'm on six figures and I know it it's a con. But amazingly you have people struggling by on 20k a year, decade on decade, who think all is fair in love and war and sometimes even vote for Boris Johnson and ilk. Human psychology is a fascinating thing.

Discontent is rising, that’s for sure.

More money in public sector workers’ pockets means more money they have to spend in the private sector, no?

@MeadowHay

Where was the money for furlough? For the benefits uplifts? For FSM throughout school holidays? For all the rates reliefs and so on that the government have put in through covid? Nobody was questioning where the money for that came from, but suddenly when it comes to NHS pay the money has suddenly ran out just before it comes to that? Odd.

There wasn't money for those things. It's insane how much we now owe, which is why we can't hand out massive pay rises to people for doing their jobs.