To think this budget will finish us off

[BurnoutGP]

I am a GP Partner of over 20 years. I am now senior partner for the last few years. We have seen year on year below inflation funding increase. With an explosion in demand and massive shift of work from secondary care. We have issues wirh recruitment.
Our partner income is shrinking year on year. We are now always overdrawn and this gets worse every month.
We just cannot soak up the MLW and NI without adequate resource uplift.
I think we will be done. I'm so very tired of the constant battle and the demand and anger while working "part time" 60hr weeks.
We will have to hand back our contract. And we wont be the only one. That will leave one surviving practice in my area.
I'm done.

If your points were accurate then GP services would be pretty consistently poor or good varying only by demographic area. The opposite is true.

My practice isn't perfect but they have become probably the best practice in my local area since recruiting a proper business manager with customer service experience some years ago. For phone appointments they manage to give a reasonably good estimate of time (and they don't use a receptionist as NMW triage - a doctor or nurse does the triaging). Its not spot on - typically it will be something like "between 10-11, probably nearer to half past". Its something that patients can work with. They also moved into the 21st century technology wise many years ago.

Contrast with the neighbouring practice which expects patients to give their medical history to the receptionists and if they are lucky enough to get an appointment it will be "some point tomorrow" and woe betide you if you miss the call because you are in the loo or similar. That practice shut up shop to any face to face appointments during covid (but expected non GP staff to be in) and has had issues flagged up repeatedly during reviews.

There are at least two other practices in the area which fall in the middle - one closer to the poor practice one slightly better.

They are all similar in terms of patients per GP, all contracting to the same authority, all dealing with the same demographic.

It is ludicrous to suggest that all GPs are heroically delivering the best possible care because we all know that there are good but there are plenty of bad and lower middles and as patients we have no real way of flagging that up. If (as you imply) you are a GP you must know this because the doctors (including currently practicing GPs) and other HCPs in my family certainly do.

Businesses cannot pass the costs on, if consumers won't pay them.

So businesses will mitigate the costs by employing fewer staff.

I imagine you understand that.

Details and understanding details are important.

Does not work with what I just posted from the Resolution Foundation. It will impact on working people, that's the point. And it is on Labour for not thinking through policy more than a superficial headline.

Even if you are feeling grateful it still needs to work long term which the IFS talks about in a critical way.

'The chancellor's new debt rule allows more room for manoeuvre but most of that money has already been used up, which means that even a small economic downturn could force the government to increase taxes further in the future, the think tank said.'

That said, I am happy you are feeling better off, I have no issue with that, but I do question as the IFS and RF do what it'll mean for others and long term.

Enjoy the short term boost. I expect your teaching job will get automated over the next decade as you're prohibitively expensive compared to automation.

The highly automated multinationals that this NI/living wage increase benefits will come for you after they're done taking down labour dependent sme's. It's beneficial to the Government to automate the public sector.

I'm sure teachers like the PP don't realise that AI is coming for them... They're just gleeful that current employers are facing higher costs. I'm going to sit back and LOL over the next five years as schools figure out how to cut their costs...

I wouldn't be so sure. We saw in the pandemic the effects of children being taught virtually. The role and responsibilities of teachers might change, maybe they finally get to work normal hours and get their evenings back but I do not see their job going 100%.

You can use AI in a school.

Less need for specialist/qualified teachers.

It's currently immature technology.

Once it becomes more efficient to use technology to educate children that's the end of it. There's no economic argument for teachers.

Totally. And much fairer, when you think about it. Classes are not reliant on the skill (or not) of an individual teacher. Children can still gather, but less specialisation is needed to teach them. And teaching will be consistent across the whole country's year group.

Exactly, no reason to spend lots of money on educating teachers. If we need humans to assist they don't have to be skilled. It's much cheaper for everyone.

I'm not sure why you would be so gleeful about educational standards for children getting even worse and school budgets getting even smaller. What are you lolling about exactly?
Yes, AI use will increase but not that much in a short space of time. They will still need actual people teaching and TAs taking care of children with SEN. It's not something like accountancy, advertising, tech jobs, basic law where AI can take over completely. Cost is a major factor, for sure, but let's wait and see just how expensive AI is overall. It uses a great deal of electricity and water and I suspect it will be far more expensive and absolutely not be the panacea that some think it will be.

Wow. This is depressing. You see no benefit in educated and experienced teachers? See post above.

No, definitely not. The jobs that will go over the next years and decades (not just because of AI but economic forces) will be jobs in discretionary sectors eg travel, property investment, entertainment, finance, 'tech', marketing, beauty plus lots of those connected to these business such as accountants and lawyers.

I do. But the Government sees no value in human labour anymore. It's made it abundantly clear from yesterdays budget that highly automated companies do not have to shoulder any burden for these tax increases, and have paved the way for them to accelerate their progress.

I see. I'm relieved that this isn't your own opinion!
I agree that all these daft politicians seem to get over excited about 'tech's' ability to solve anything. Of course, they are all in the pockets of these huge corporations so they get away with murder (literally) while many working people suffer.

I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing. We had a nurse who was somehow promoted way beyond her competence. Student to band 8 in a matter of years. She was out of her depth and could not cope. There is something about experience and mastery of a role, which should not be underestimated.

We saw in the pandemic the effects of children being taught virtually.

No we didn’t. We saw the impact of children being abandoned at home with a few worksheets or links to websites uploaded for the motivated or those with parental support. What happened for most children was nothing like proper online teaching.

@GillBeck My school taught live from March 2020 Day 1. We were ready to go and had the tech to do it. I rarely had full classes. We had systems in place to report missing students to admin who would ring parents - no response. It’s not as easy to as you think to motivate teenagers (and I teach in a grammar).

If we are talking about details, the first post alluded to 'a tax on working people.'
Labour didn't tax working people yesterday.
You're now saying that it will affect people- yes of course it will- but that's very different. Why? Because in their manifesto Labour said they wouldn't raise taxes on working people.
And yesterday, they didn't- they kept their promise.

No government in history has ever stated in their manifesto 'our policies will not affect you financially in any way.'

What were the realistic political alternatives to sorting out the current mess? Both our public sector and public services are in a really dire situation, all thanks to the last government. No wonder they called the election early.

Blaming Labour for having to made hard choices in the budget is like blaming a cleaner who's been called to clean up the mess, for the mess.
In fact, that's not even an analogy- it's what's happened!

I also believe this, same then council, the waste is enormous, the contractors and suppliers they choose, often not great value for money, more people on higher levels driving red tape rather than a tual people doing well....what the NHS is supposed to do which is focusing on patients health...

I'm genuinely curious about what this will look like.

The reason I chimed in is because the 'I'm alright jack' attitude riled me up a bit. There's a good reason that businesses are 'bleating' now and it's because the tax burden has fallen on those with the narrowest shoulders. There's a lot of people making an argument, of, well if you can't afford to pay it then you shouldn't be in business. Well if that's the case we're only going to be left with a handful of large technology companies because human labour is comparatively expensive.

Now if they had raised the personal tax threshold and introduced a higher corporation tax bracket, that would have been a fair deal. I think people are too caught up in the fact that something needed to be done, but don't realise that it's not necessarily going to help working people over the long term.

You can ask AI things. It's not just a PDF on a screen. No longer will specialist teachers be needed. No longer will children be reliant on the skill, or otherwise, of a teacher.

Classes can be facilitated by an assistant, while they interact with AI that is consistent across the whole country's year group.

Do we have specialist mathematicians to read logarithms these days? No, we have computers.