These include an inflation-busting pay hike for junior doctors which amounts to 22pc over two years, and were proudly described as the “right decision for the people who work in, and most importantly the people who use, our public services”.
It’s highly debatable whether spending £9bn on pay rises is really the best use of taxpayer cash. And when quoting these headline increases, people tend to ignore both employer National Insurance contributions and the lavish public sector employer pension contributions, which are roughly three times those enjoyed in the private sector.
None of the proposed deals appear to involve any commitment to reform or productivity improvements.
Sigh.
£9bn?
This will presumably be paid every year, until retirement, and will be factored into their tax payer funded pensions.
Plus I assume that all future doctors will get the same salary.
It’s a lot more than £9bn.
Not that it matters – the country will devolve into total murderous chaos long before any of this lot retires.
I feel a sudden urge to bang a couple of pans together in celebration of our NHS heroes, who keep us all safe by going on strike.
Cvnts
Why are we boosting the pay of junior doctors by 22% when medical schools are demanding A*AA and are oversubscribed? That’s the only way into being a doctor. You can’t do a Udemy course. A*AA and oversubscribed tells us that the rewards are really good.
Not just the financial rewards but all the other stuff. The “personally rewarding” stuff. People rarely leave medicine for their “dream job” elsewhere. And like law, it’s become stuffed full of women, 50% of graduates. So, the pay should fall, in the same way that law has. It shouldn’t be as financially profitable as it was 40 years ago because the supply of candidates has massively increased.
When G Brown threw a lot of money at the NHS, it too went straight into (was invested in) the staff’s wallets. I don’t recall the NHS improving. But it gave the junior doctors a level of pay that they remain rather keen on regaining.
Western Bloke:
That’s such a good post and I would dearly love to see how Streeting and Reeves would deal with it.
Increased pay for the same work is by definition a reduction in productivity.
It’s even more egregious when you see that they are following Murphy’s strategy of seizing private sector pensions to fund public sector. On the grounds that the money is ‘already saved’ and can be accessed. The fact the U.K. has deficit of hundreds of billions of public sector pensions are included passes them by.
Further to WB’s excellent point, note that the training route continues after med school through the junior doctor stages, which are essentially extra years of education while working and are necessary to become a specialist. Due to expansion of the NHS without proportional expansion of med school places, around half these training roles are taken by doctors from overseas. The fact med schools are oversubscribed with very strict grades for entry suggests we could do with a lot more med school places… and hopefully some of that extra supply will reduce the pressure for future inflation busting pay rises in future. I have been told by specialists that this is harder to do than it sounds because med school placements are tricky to sort out in sufficient volume – and you don’t just need a snazzy new university building and to hire some lecturers, you need a local healthcare service that has capacity to take all your spotty undergraduates and do something meaningful with them while they’re on placement. But the oversubscription is a clear sign we need to go further with this.