For all those who support the strikes

[chopc]

Where do you think the money will come from for all the pay rises? Are you personally willing to pay more tax?
We all saw during the pandemic it is the poorly paid essential workers that kept the country going and they totally deserve more money than the claps they got. However will YOU be prepared to contribute to the pot ?

If not where do you think the govn will find more money from?

Agreed. Such a stupid point to make. There are only 650 MPs. They could up their salary to £1m each and it would still be a tiny overall cost in proportion. I don’t think they deserve a payrise but the cost of them is very small because they are so few.

I would gladly pay more tax to feel confident that if I needed to call an ambulance, one would come. I don’t feel that at the moment.

But regardless, there is always money for the things governments want to spend on. For this government that’s giving money to their mates and benefiting themselves. Liz Truss’s decisions have cost us all far more than proper public sector pay rises would. Not funding the public sector properly is an ideological decision by people who don’t use it and believe people like them should get richer while everyone else stays in their boxes.

Disagree they are more efficient. They are usually run on the backs of staff who tolerate the dire pay because they often offer family friendly hours and jobs that fit round the kids are not easy to find.
So you have underpaid staff doing what they can with a shoe string budget. It's nothing to aspire to. Charities bid for funding is competitive so it's a race to the bottom cost base wise and this does not improve services they do.
As a society we need employers who offer good pay and conditions, if all there are to choose from is gig economy jobs and crap pay options we all lose.

No. I wouldn't. I wouldn't be happy with more money going to the NHS until an overhaul is done and the model changed.

I heard on the radio yesterday that abolishing tax breaks would make £6.7 billion and the increase the nurses want would only cost £1.6 billion.

In theory, yes, I would support higher taxes but I truly don't believe that underfunding of public services is the issue here.

Public services are grossly mismanaged at both government and service level. The wastage is obscene and until we have a grown up conversation about this and the part that we as the public also play (missed NHS appointments for example) then things will not improve.

Not a popular view I suspect but I wonder whether public sector workers would be prepared to sacrifice their defined benefit pensions for a pay rise? With the government paying around 25% in pension contributions on top of their salary, perhaps one solution is award significant pay rises but reduce the pension?

I am more than willing to pay more tax.

FPNI

I get your point OP and until recently I would have accepted that taxes would need to rise or money would be diverted away from other services to pay for the payrises.

Now I think there's so much money wasted by the government they should get on with tackling that and fund any payrises out of the money saved. However I expect that's asking too much of them!

Examples:
The lack of staff at HMRC resulting in repeated phone calls and letters to get the simplist of tasks done generating more paperwork and leading to errors in collecting tax in the first place.

Money wasted on handouts to railway companies that don't deliver a good service regardless of whether they make a loss or profit.

Academy schools (why filter money to the executive team at the expense of teachers and teaching assistants? You need them to run the school you greedy lot!)

Making student nurses pay for their own tuition fees and not getting the universities to increase places is a complete own goal and reversing this policy would have probably have helped existing nurses too by generating more staff to fill vacant positions.

I think the people running the country are incompetent. I looked at jobs on the civil service website and a lot of them involve gathering data to improve services which probably gets talked about by people in suits when it's plainly obvious where the waste is. The law makers love introducing more procedures and policies so implementing any real change is like wading through treacle.

How much more would you be willing to pay?

yes I would.

I would also support 'working to rule' for caring staff (which should imo be the norm not exception).

I support the nurses yes.

I support the rail workers, who are concerned about public safety if National Rail only has a driver on board. I don't believe it's all about wages with those strikers but that's what we all immediately believe when we hear strikes. Also removing ticket sellers, how many times have the machines at the station broken down where you are?

Nurses are not just facing yet another real terms cut. It's the understaffing. The under funding.

If the whole total lack of PPE during the worst days of a pandemic doesn't show that money is being spent in the wrong way in hospitals, nothing will.

And yes, stop giving MPs sickening levels of expenses. Stop allowing them to be paid eye watering sums for sitting occasionally in a local MP surgery pretending to care when someone comes to them to complain about buses.

Stop allowing the likes of Michelle Mone to effectively help themselves to billions collectively. If someone on UC over claims by a few quid they are sanctioned and made to feel like a criminal. Yet time and again massive fraud occurs but it OK cos it's a mate of a Tory.

Make the likes of BP and British Gas pay proper taxes. Along with Amazon, Google etc. It's lies that they will pull out the country of they're made to pay properly. It would cost them a stupid amount to do that and not have a market in the UK.

There are ways to make it easy to pay these people properly. The government just doesn't want to.

This isn’t much of an increase anyway - if this rate was accepted there wouldn’t be an issue

Let’s see the maths then. Which ‘tax breaks’? Over what period?

Yes; I'd pay more tax. I want to live like Sweden.

How much more?

The people who say that they want us to be like Sweden are often those who would like free childcare. When you ask them how much extra tax they personally would be prepared to pay to bring about this utopia, they either say that they have young children and can’t afford to pay more, no, it’s the rich who should pay, not them. Or they change the subject and start ranting about how the government, in their opinion, wastes money. Rather like this thread actuation fact.

At a simplified level, increase tax = increase cost to businesses. So instead of lower /no profit they increase prices. Therefore continuing inflation and wiping out spending power of pay rise. Or companies move to lower tax countries and therefore jobs are gone.

Pay is the least of some peoples concerns here. Most healthcare workers are striking as much for patient safety and better working conditions, having spent years propping up the NHS with unpaid overtime at great personal cost.

But while we are it it: was having a chat with a colleague where we worked out that a nurse on average pay would take home a maximum of just 92p- £1.08 depending on years of service for giving 5 minutes of resuscitation. Wouldn’t even buy 4pt of milk these days and isn’t hugely above NMW. Especially if you factor in the huge student loans lots of newer staff have to pay off as they took away bursaries and tuition grants for NHS roles a few years ago.

Paying essential healthcare workers less than they need to live and work in order to save money is a false economy. The underfunding of the NHS in this way is tactical.

I don’t know where the money would come from: that’s the governments responsibility to determine. Perhaps they could start with that £350million a week…

Supporting the right for activism is so important.

Not a popular view I suspect but I wonder whether public sector workers would be prepared to sacrifice their defined benefit pensions for a pay rise? With the government paying around 25% in pension contributions on top of their salary, perhaps one solution is award significant pay rises but reduce the pension?

this. With bells on. I’m sorry but the way things are portrayed is too simplistic. The pension cost taxpayers an absolute fortune. If the pension wasn’t so ridiculously generous then there would be more for salary. It’s about being realistic and putting the money where it needs to be (ie more cash now, not in retirement)

I say this as someone with a public sector pension pot

Oh sorry @Iamthewombat - tax for millionaires/billionaires per year was my understanding

Yep I would pay more tax, I think higher rate tax payers should pay more tax.

This government has systemically underfunded vast swathes of the public sector for years and years and the strikes are the output of it

The government could close tax loopholes and start taxing corporations fairly. They could also stop wasting billions on pointless expensive drugs. There are usually cheaper just as effective (unpatented) drugs out there for most things. They could also take drug production in house so drug costs come down. Big pharmaceutical companies are sucking the life blood pit of the NHS.

This is not correct. Charities often pick up small gaps but can never compensate for a failing state.

The costs of our failing services are immense. The whole country is very weak compared to many comparable economies, you can see that in our health outcomes, our quality of life and our unsolved crime rates etc.

You can't correct structural weakness with charity.

The railways put up the fare by the rate of inflation every year, but not the staffs wages. Though they take out the profits of £2 billion

we are paying for the railways profit regardless of how the profits are shared, I’d rather the profits were shared fairly, not all at the top and little for the bottom

Each 1% rise is £800m apparently