Oh, and gay marriage. The biggest social change for at least a generation, and achieved by a Tory government, at the vanguard of what is hopefully an international change. Hopefully that alone will be enough to put clear water between them and the bigots.
Which benefits are easier to access? What specific changes to ESA “help people get better”?
All of them, due to the continued streamlining of the system. Universal Credit has also begun to be rolled out, which will make claiming tax credits far simpler, as people won’t need to figure out what they need to apply for, one application will cover everything.
The expansion of the work-focused group, increased help to get voluntary work, work experience, and part-time work through the Job Centre to focus on what people can do, not what they can’t. Getting back to work is inherently better than being out of work.
Of course, they’re not focussed on giving people money for nothing, which is the focus of most of the complaints against it. I, personally, don’t want to stay on benefits for any longer than I have to, and am trying to take advantage of all that assistance.
I’m not necessarily claiming that a Labour government would undo all of this, but it’s not a risk I consider necessary.
The performance is exceptional. What is in complete crisis - and that is no exaggeration - is staff morale, well what’s left. I know a dozen or so NHS staff and they are all exhausted. One eye doctor I know took three months unpaid last summer because it was that or leave all together. Other staff cannot afford a sabbatical. They are in pieces.
They only think preventing the system collapsing is the possibility of a Labour victory.
To repeat, I don’t exaggerate, the Tories have no sense nor regard for the unsustainable human cost of what they ask people to do.
Tories achiveved gay marriage: It’s not quite parsing.
With the publication of the manifestos I am struck by how little score we can put in them. Even in normal times they are advertising and wishes rather than a programme of government, but this time even the major parties have no real hope of implementing their plans without major revisions in Parliament.
Because of the pig-headedness of the politicians we do not get any idea of what are real core policies and which are negotiable in the likely event of a minority vote for both parties.
Perhaps it is time to concentrate on the broad brush approach alone- which general direction a party is likely to take, rather than assuming that any one party will have a mandate to implement its own policies.
This is particularly apposite for Labour who show every likelihood of approaching coalition or minority government in the same manner that they did last time.
That is Tory propaganda. NHS wages were never greatly increased for non-medical staff and were increased for doctors to match the effective international going rate with which we are in active competition- younger doctors are quite willing to work abroad and are free to leave. The recent pay freeze for nurses (not in Scotland where the one percent has been maintained) is leading to nurse shortages almost everywhere and a medium term training crisis as so few start or complete training.
Over my time in the health service I suspect that I was paid some 20% less a year than I would have been had I held a similar management post in industry. There was a trade off when I started between low pay and poor conditions against secure enjoyable employment, training and support; that is now dead and nursing is just another bit of industry paid at factory rates with factory quality. Nurses at lower than sister grade could not even think about being house owners until the wage crisis of the eighties occurred when the largest single home to nurses’ pay was forced on the Thatcher government to avoid that nursing crisis. We are in the same position now.
A newly qualified nurse receives £21, 600 a year. We cannot recruit enough nurses with these conditions and pay, and those we do train tend to not enter practice, leave within the first couple of years, or emigrate.
Apart from that we are massively overpaid and cossetted.
Well, the NHS is basically stealing 1 in 4 of its new nursing staff from developing countries atm, where they have been trained and then leave for here.
It’s really very, very uncomfortable.
Agreed. We have always done so but never to this extent. It is a symbiotic relationship though as many nurses remit much of their salaries to their home country to support their families.
Many of our nurses simply emigrate to Aus, NZ or the USA where wages and conditions are better- I almost did so in my forties, but stayed the course. So long as pay is severely limited in the UK we will continue to have a massive shortfall of trained nurses.
Just caught up with Gove being interviewed on Newsnight by Emily Maitlis: he didn’t seem to have much idea either. Didn’t dispute £18bn of spending promises; affirmed £30bn of cuts. Couldn’t begin to say where it would come from. Except it definitely won’t come from pensions.
He did say that you could tell what a Conservative government would be like by looking at what they’ve done before. I’m not sure that’s the clincher he thinks it is.
Osborne point blank refused to answer the question on where the extra promised funds for the NHS will come from on Andrew Marr last weekend, too. Incidentally, he seems to construct all of his sentences out of hashtags.
You do realise that that is a considerable starting salary, don’t you? And nurses overall earn only slightly less than the average national wage.
The question of their wage relative to average wages isn’t relevant. The only relevant question is: would I do their job and put up with the amount of shit they put up with for that wage? And the answer is no. And, from emigration and drop-out rates, it seems many nurses agree. Pay should be set to retain staff, not to reflect the average wage.
Increasing pay is fine as long as it’s tied to performance, not seniority. Give people the chance to earn a high wage if they can show they deserve it.
There’s a good piece here on spending and productivity in the NHS.
I can’t reproduce the graphs here, but some highlights:
The NHS made productivity gains in the first two years of the coalition, but these are now being reversed (-c.95% productivity in last two years).
A commenter goes in to greater detail on this:
[QUOTE=Steophan]
Increasing pay is fine as long as it’s tied to performance, not seniority. Give people the chance to earn a high wage if they can show they deserve it.
[/quote]
Today’s target: 150 bedpans per nurse ! You can do it !
These productivity problems are the same almost everywhere. The first few cuts are relatively easy, further savings are harder to come by. Though I do have doubts as to productivity figures in the NHS; they are notoriously difficult to measure.
The hiring of foreign nurses is a long and [ig]noble tradition of the NHS. Over a deade ago the NHS was accused of “stealing” African human resources by targetting cheap African nurses to work in the NHS. THis was a time when money was being poured into the NHS. I doubt the situation regarding foreign nurses has become too much worse in the time being. It’s basically the same recycled headline from the early 2000’s.
edit: From 2005:
This is something I’d love to see Osborne, Cameron et al challenged on. The best metaphor I’ve read is that it’s like giving blood: the first pint is easy and a healthy adult will hardly notice. But if you extrapolate from that first pint that it’s just as easy and innocuous to give a second, and third, and a fourth, then you’ll quickly find yourself undergoing major organ failure. There’s a point where you can’t cut and still do the basic job.
But the Tories - and to a lesser extent Labour - continually act is if the “quick win efficiencies” of austerity Mk1 can be re-enacted indefinitely without any change in consequences.
(In actual fact I think that a lot of cuts go beyond quick win efficiencies - e.g. legal aid, but even on its own terms the argument is dodgy)
The NHS is down to 9.1% of GDP - that’s during a period of the economy contracting.
In some ways that’s the absolute beauty of the NHS, funding is hugely flexible - sometimes you invest, other times waiting times lengthen and huge pressures build.
But 9.1 while serving 100% of the population is remarkable by literally any world standard.
Keep looking for efficiencies by all means but to suggest the 'NHS ‘inefficient’ is plain ignorant.
The NHS is a huge organisation. Like any such, there are bound to be bad bits. What I hear of is not inefficiency but bad management.