Drs' payrise should be funded by cutting 23.7% govt pension contribution

[eyeses]

The Telegraph today suggests that the Government could fund a significant payrise to Resident Doctors by reducing our surprisingly high payments into their pensions.

"Yet what is often forgotten is that these doctors enjoy bumper pensions worth close to 75pc of their salaries in retirement – and which are guaranteed to rise with inflation each year.
Doctors enjoy index-linked, taxpayer-funded “defined benefit” schemes, many of which pay a proportion of the recipient’s final salary from the day they retire.
Under the NHS scheme, staff contribute between 5.2pc and 12.5pc of their salaries while the state contributes a vast 23.7pc each year.
By comparison, private sector workers, who are almost all enrolled in “defined contribution” pensions where the value of the final pot depends on investment performance, receive a contribution of just 3pc from their employer.
The NHS is paying out nearly £1bn a month in staff pensions, with almost 2,000 staff receiving pensions of more than £100,000 annually – a figure that has more than doubled in a year."

AIBU - No, junior Drs deserve that we fund a big pay rise and huge pension
IANBU - We pay far too much into Dr's pensions and they want the money now

What Resident Doctors don't want you to know about their pay

There are thousands of consultants in the UK, and a great many more globally who we need to be thinking about how to attract. Neither you nor I could possibly know enough of them to mean our own suppositions about our personal circles are useful. Even if we assume your experiences of the ones here are representative, we still don't have enough of them. Supply and demand.

We do need to get more junior doctors into consultant training, that's correct. But that also requires existing consultants in order to train them!

The NHS is not the only public sector workforce. Risks of violence exist in the private sector as well so that’s a nonsense example. Local stores, petrol stations are robbed at gunpoint, for example.
Having watched my loved ones treated appallingly by so called NHS experts, I’m afraid that I can’t agree with you. The NHS is broken but that’s a whole other thread.

Once you ve had your own life or that of loved one bought back to health, your view of Doctors and other NHS workers changes.

Paradoxically, once you’ve had you own life or that of a relative blighted by poor NHS care, endless delays, lamentable inefficiency, filthy, overcrowded hospitals and gaslighting clinical staff, it can be tricky to muster any support for the latest ruse to give NHS staff even more money.

But those staff all work for the NHS as well.

That isn’t quite true. The support healthcare workers don’t and doctors tend to retire early from the NHS and focus on their private practice.

Most public sector workers ( including other NHS ataff) havent had that pay rise either! Im not sure what they are trying to achieve

They had a pay rise last year.

They didn’t get that (30%) pay rise.

This.

Most didn't get the 5% offered to the doctors this year either!

This is so drama llama and shows a lack of understanding of globalisation.

do you think any multinational is going to leave a country of 60m consumers untapped? Of course not. They operate in far more expensive countries with far higher cost of labour than the uk could be.

If you think private companies are going to start paying their staff a 24% pension you need your head examining.

No one deserves a 30% pay rise.

5% is still above inflation and they are still whinging.

If it was the law, then yes they would.

as they do in other countries where it is the law

multi nationals operate in environments with far stricter more expensive and more complex labour laws than that

@Vinvertebrate I’m with you there. The NHs is a distressing failure for the elderly in particular. Who actually wants a long ill life? Not me. I’d truly rather die.

Unemployment would go through the roof, prices/inflation would sky rocket.

We need companies employing people here. We now have 5% unemployment. Yet another drain on resources. We have high taxes on employment and companies really can find a more advantageous working environment, like Ireland. We don’t understand about growth and neither do posters! We need employment and we need growth, not more expense for employers.

Bog off. I’m taking my ‘gold plated’ pension and enjoying it. The only people whinging are the people who are jealous that they didn’t choose to work in the public sector so they can naff off.

They actually do that already, you just have to fully read the job description. It clearly states ‘total package value’ or words to that effect. This amount includes the pension.

It’s not the 24% that’s the issue, it’s the fact that you are guaranteeing future income at a set amount for the life of the employee. The uncertainty around the liability is massive. The reason why practically no private company have defined benefit pension scheme is that the risks are massive! So many companies in the UK have gone bust purely due to their defined benefit pensions liabilities. Take BA. it’s an underfunded pension scheme with a side hustle of arranging flights. There is no way a company would go back to offering one, even if forced to by the government. It’s madness.

Yes, so the companies have put all the risk onto the employee who now has to invest their pension and if there is a market crash, they individually suffer, it is a huge disadvantage compared to the public sector.

@Bearnie 100% and that’s a misunderstanding I’ve seen so often on here. They’re not “gold plated” because they’re (necessarily) massive, but because they are index-linked with zero investment risk to the employee.

Doctors in the private sector you mean? Of course they don't because they're getting paid more.

Noone goes to work for the sheer unadulterated joy of it. A decent salary isn't too much to ask. And why should they wait until the end of a stressful career for a pension.

Doctors pensions used to be good. But this has all changed now. I don’t think many docs would get final salary pension or have worked enough years in the NHS

@PommesdePlumeBecause that’s when the conventionally paid retire. At the end of a career! They don’t have the massive input from the state to go early after 30 years. They get a decent salary and a gold plated pension we pay 2/3 for. Other professionals don’t get as much with equal training, eg professional engineers.