The NHS…………..again. (P155 boiling content)

they are not automatic they’re performance based although this hasn’t always been followed.

Out of interest, have you ever known anyone not get the annual pay point increase?
Ours is automatic, it doesn’t matter what you have or have not done you will always get it. As a result we have people you wouldn’t trust as first aiders on the top of their pay bands!

Out of interest, have you ever known anyone not get the annual pay point increase?
Ours is automatic, it doesn’t matter what you have or have not done you will always get it. As a result we have people you wouldn’t trust as first aiders on the top of their pay bands!

Nope. However this is being tightened up from next year and should be for all trusts.

As a result we have people you wouldn’t trust as first aiders on the top of their pay bands!

If they that bad why hasn’t anyone raised this?

As a result we have people you wouldn’t trust as first aiders on the top of their pay bands!

My missus is on the top of one of the highest pay bands – I wouldn’t trust her as a first aider. She is a bloody good physio though.

Checklist for “under attack” workers:

– 60% of the employees do not get an annual length of service increment of 3.5% BEFORE the pay rise
– 20% london weighting
– 33 days annual leave when you have 10 years service
– 5 days additional annual parental leave
– an automatic pay differential of £21K a year just for being 4 years older
– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down
– Annual length of service increments that for nearly every person on Agenda for Change are in practice automatic
– “clinical merit awards” or to use naughty private sector language “bonuses”, for some clinical staff that can exceed £70K and are not performance based and ARE taken into account for pension calculations
– a completely unsustainable defined benefit pension that everyone else pays for…
– your annual length of service increment less year is only 100% more than the average worker in the whole population will get
– you have complete job security

It’s completely right that healthcare workers are paid well and compensated for jobs that are very often hard emotionally (and in some cases physically). But 3.5% compared to the 2% that everyone else will probably get in a year when the country is still broke reflects this more than adequately and is not a value judgement on the staff – or an attack on the service.

I like to keep stuff simple as dinner is nearly ready.
I like the NHS, they saved my life and I didn’t have to sell my house to pay for the pleasure of being alive still.

Nope. However this is being tightened up from next year and should be for all trusts.

It needs to be but it would involve managers having to manage which in out trust doesn’t really happen at all.

If they that bad why hasn’t anyone raised this?

Managers who are best buddies with the people in question and lack in backbone to do anything that may rock the boat.

It’s a pretty poor situation across the board and I don’t see it improving any time soon. As it goes I quite like my job so I’ll just continue to do it as best I can and avoid the politics that’s involved.

robdixon – Member

the country is still broke

😀

For most of the last 300 years Britain has been more in debt than it is now.

If we’re “broke” now, then we’ve been “broke” for more than 300 years, so I wouldn’t start worrying about
it ! 🙂

BTW you’ll note that after second world war Britain was a lot more “broke” than it is now, and yet that was a period of huge investment and growth, including the creation of the NHS and the construction of unprecedented amounts of affordable housing.

Britain is broke is a Tory sham to justify ideologically motivated cuts. And give them their due, it works very well.

Synopsis?

Other than with health being a devolved matter there was never any threat to the 1% payrise for NHS Scotland staff…

Out of interest, have you ever known anyone not get the annual pay point increase?

Ahem.

toxicsoks – Member

The incremental pay increases my lot get are based on their annual appraisals where competencies and well defined knowledge and skills frameworks are used. If the individual isn’t progressing and displaying the required competencies and ksf’s – no increment. Simples.

……………………………and I should know because I do the appraisals. Generally speaking it gives most people the incentive to get their ar5e in gear and be sorted for their six monthly review.

Ernie, please tell me you are joking. How far is your tongue in your cheek when you posted that? Or is it just a test/joke to see if you can get away with it?

Yeah of course I’m joking, Britain’s never been in so much debt before 🙄

Well leaving aside the fact that the graph is grossly misleading (calculation of debt, total UK debt including households and corporates, the UK as a debtor nation not a creditor one as in the past, and global levels of gov debt – you can’t look at the UK in isolation etc), the idea that those trajectories are a solution is nonsense.

The UK has one of the worst histories of long-term debt management in the world. How did those downslopes occur? A combination of historic defaults, debt restructurings, then financial repression (all different forms of theft), inflation and bail outs. LatAm has a bad press, but we are almost as bad if not worse.

The formula I showed earlier is clear. No government will run a surplus sufficient to stabilise debt. Growth will not, indeed cannot, save us. So what is he future? 10 – 20 years of government theft dressed up as financial repression. Without the introduction of stringent capital controls, this has to lead to a depreciating currency and higher inflation in time. Relatively poor for low income households.

So to bring this back to the OP and NHS – there can only be one conclusion. The outlook for wages and pensions for anyone employed by the government is negative. And it’s not rosy in the private sector either.

teamhurtmore – Member

No government will run a surplus sufficient to stabilise debt. Growth will not, indeed cannot, save us. So what is he future?

Do what the public sector would do- declare bankrupt, set up a new UK with different directors retaining all the profitable bits.

Or- since the situation we’re in is not really significantly different to much of the world, we just carry on. In the end, it’ll become clear that the whole paradigm is ****, madeup numbers make us simultaneously the richest and poorest countries in the world… And we look at debts that will never be repaid and say “Well if it’ll never be repaid then **** it, it’s all mad”. With the resources, knowledge and technology that we have today it’s absurd that the human state will be poorer tomorrow. Compound interest isn’t the most powerful force in the universe, it’s an idea made up by monkeys.

There’ll come a point where nobody can argue that unborn kids should pick up the crushing bills of their fathers without having a brick thrown at their head.

Northwind, economist, has spake.

I was just listening to a conversation between two speech and language therapists yesterday ( one of whom was my wife ). Seems that one of them had made the mistake of revealing that chronic understaffing was the reason a “client’s” child couldn’t be seen for three months. Sounded like sheer, head-banging-on-brick-wall frustration on the part of the therapist.

Said client was less than happy. Not life or death but the child in question is unable to engage at school due to his severe communication issues, has fallen well behind and has developed behavioural issues which have seen him excluded from school. How would you feel if it were your child, whose stammer couldn’t be treated, and whose future was being seriously affected by an easy to treat issue? Purely because an nhs trust couldn’t afford to hire staff?

Good point NW – in effect that is what the UK did in the past.

Excellent. I’ll bring the bricks.

So to bring this back to the OP and NHS – there can only be one conclusion.

Yep, that it’s bugger all to do with the state of the economy and everything to do with ideologically motivated cuts.

Whilst in opposition the Tories were perfectly happy with the Labour government’s spending plans despite the fact that the deficit was increasing.

In fact the Tories were so supportive of Labour’s spending plans that in Sept 2007 George Osborne pledged to match them :

Tories vow to match Labour spending

The Conservatives sought last night to destroy Labour claims that they would cut public services by issuing a formal pledge to match Gordon Brown’s spending plans.

George Osborne vowed last night to stick to Gordon Brown’s plan of increasing public spending by 2 per cent in real terms over the next three years.

“Today, I can confirm for the first time that a Conservative government will adopt these spending totals,” the Shadow Chancellor said.

“Total government spending will rise by 2 per cent a year in real terms, from £616 billion next year to £674 billion in the year 2010/11.

And you can see from this graph, which you will of course dismiss as “misleading”, what was happening to the deficit in Sept 2007 :

So what happened, why did the Tories change their minds ? Well the global credit crunch caused by greedy risk-taking bankers resulted in a crises in the UK economy.

This was far good an opportunity for the Tories to miss and they suddenly announced that the recession was all the fault of the Labour government for spending too much and that in government they would have to make “difficult decisions” and slash public services, permanently.

So there you have it……the Tory Party’s mates the bankers, screw the British economy, the Tories then use that as an excuse to screw the British people, and it’s all the fault of the last Labour government !

Of course the fact that they had to make a complete about-turn from saying that they supported Labour’s spending plans 100%, to saying that Labour’s spending was the cause of the worse global economic crises since the 1930s, proves beyond any doubt that the Tories had absolutely no idea whatsoever that there would be a global credit crunch/recession/crises.

They would much rather have never pledged to match 100% Labour’s spending plans, if only they had known that there would be a global credit crunch/recession/crises. But then at the end of the day, like you, they’re not the economic geniuses which they would like people to believe they are 🙂

Robdixon on that list there is so many false statements.

For now I’ll just say the pension one. Really that everyone else pays for are people still claiming that, I’ve paid in for 24 years so has my employer and on top of that I pay taxes like everyone else so I’m sorry what part am I not paying for my pension?

Right back in and for once not had a bad shift so time address these before I grab some sleep.

– 60% of the employees do not get an annual length of service increment of 3.5% BEFORE the pay rise

Is that including or not including NHS?

– 20% london weighting

Very common ‘bonus’ that

– 33 days annual leave when you have 10 years service

Loyalty rewards brought in to try and keep NHS staff with experience.

– 5 days additional annual parental leave

News to me I’m owed about 50 days there then

– an automatic pay differential of £21K a year just for being 4 years older

News to me too.

– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down

4 Episodes of sickness in 12 months and your gone with our Trust, that can be as few as 4 days in total. So where’s that bollocks come from?

– Annual length of service increments that for nearly every person on Agenda for Change are in practice automatic

Shouldn’t be but it’s not followed strict and as I’ve mentioned it’s a contractual agreement, similar as the holidays it’s to reward staff for length of service to keep them working in the NHS.

– “clinical merit awards” or to use naughty private sector language “bonuses”, for some clinical staff that can exceed £70K and are not performance based and ARE taken into account for pension calculations

Are you a Daiy Wail reader?

– a completely unsustainable defined benefit pension that everyone else pays for…

Covered that up there.

– your annual length of service increment less year is only 100% more than the average worker in the whole population will get

Want to type that out again as it makes no sense.

– you have complete job security

No we don’t. We’re as secure as is possible with employment but not complete., my wife also works for the NHS. Her role is at risk at the moment there has been staff doing a similar role to hers finished in the last 12 months I’ve they decided they’re not needed anymore. The choice was to go or take a huge pay cut into the new restructed roles, basically the same job renamed.

drac – you need to do maths (*as does EVERYBODY with a pension), however in a DC (defined contribution scheme aka money purchase) you will CERTAINLY get out only what you pay in plus any investment returns. In ANY DB (definied benefit, aka final salary scheme) you MAY get out more than you pay in – it depends when you die…and they stop paying your pension. (*also take into account spouse/dependency type benefits)

However, try some maths.
Add up all your contributions/employer contributions[taking into account how your employer rate compares with other employer rates] paid over the years – then divide it by the number of retired years. Work along these lines
Retirement time – well if you go at 58 say 25 (*wiki gives male average at 82),so you will be pensioned for 25 years which you have paid in for 35 years. So you/your employer will pay in £X in contributions (note that contributions are presumably a salary % and take into account your initial salary is presumably a fair bit less than your current/final salary), you will get a pension of £Y per annum for 25 years. My personal guess is that at 82 Y will be a LOT bigger than X. That shortfall in the case of any public sector pension is underwritten by all the govmt/all taxpayers. (Private sector schemes just go bust when they can’t pay – see Equitable life)

Or here is another maths:
A DC person will need to have accumulated a pot of £100,000 to get a RPI linked pension of about £2780. (http://www.ft.com/personal-finance/annuity-table),so add up all your/your employer contributions and then convert to a DC rate and see which is better.

Robdixon,
job security? Yet another incredibly costly restructuring means that even existing nhs trust have made redundancies across all sectors including nursing, that’s before your get into the realm of areas that are being privatised put out to tender and then restructured further still.

– “clinical merit awards” or to use naughty private sector language “bonuses”, for some clinical staff that can exceed £70K and are not performance based and ARE taken into account for pension calculations

cousultants only of course. The average wage in the nhs is not even near the £70k you quoted. Exactly what proportion of these nhs workers do you think these performance related bonuses apply to?

– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down

-and which roles would they be? -and which dinosaur of a trust does not actively manage sickness these days? When I worked in acute respiratory care you would be sent home for the sorts of coughs and splutters we all get because the risk you presented to the patients we had there outweighed the benefit of you staying and working. The same is certainly true for those in intensive care/hdu too ie your stay home sick threshhold is a lot lower than elsewhere. And we nearly all caught (inhaled) an airborne Norwalk-Like-Virus that nothing short of bunking off work would have protected us from and cost us all a few days off sick each. There are many places where through poor resources and poor support of staff, or just sheer bad luck, the job makes you ill whether it is managed by an NHS trust or a private company. If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t had a day off sick or parental leave for three years, my couple of illnesses have had the good grace to occur during my 33 days annual leave. As for my colleages, my manager would be ‘managed’ about this and I would nevertheless be subject to a formal interview with HR if I was off sick (even for a day at a time) more than twice this year.

drac – you need to do maths (*as does EVERYBODY with a pension)

I understand how it works thanks very much I should do after 24 years of paying in but it’s the stupid comments that people make “everyone else pays for…” is gubbins. I pay tax too so we I pay just as much plus my contributions so I pay more than “everyone else”.

And yes you’re right technically we all pay for each others pension.

Managers who are best buddies with the people in question and lack in backbone to do anything that may rock the boat.

It’s a pretty poor situation across the board and I don’t see it improving any time soon. As it goes I quite like my job so I’ll just continue to do it as best I can and avoid the politics that’s involved.

Ah yes I remember our little conversation at Exposure now.

Wow, quite a post last night Ernie. Straw men, ad homs, graphs, smoke and mirrors….a STW classic!

ernie_lynch – Member
Yep, that it’s bugger all to do with the state of the economy and everything to do with ideologically motivated cuts.

???? Feel free to ignore what is in front of us!!!!!

Whilst in opposition the Tories were perfectly happy with the Labour government’s spending plans despite the fact that the deficit was increasing. In fact the Tories were so supportive of Labour’s spending plans that in Sept 2007 George Osborne pledged to match them :

True and that was an error. Politicians, eh!

Look back at budget deficits and surpluses – this has “bugger all” to do with ideology and politics, that’s lazy analysis. Politicians love to bring forward consumption and delay paying for it ie they love debt. How often do we run budget surpluses and under which parties? Strip out gov debt and how much has the Uk economy actually grown over the past 40 years (the answer is not good)?

The Tories are as bad a Labour, thats why its important not to be tied to political allegiances. The reason why Labour deserve relatively more (current) flak IMO is (1) they had made progress in bringing finances back under control, (2) their economic training and background tells them that this is a good thing (ie move to surplus in good times – ie be counter-cyclical) but (3) they then embarked on the ultimate folly (believing that they had “miracled” an end to boom and bust) and started to expand the budget deficit aggressively just at the time they should have been doing the opposite. And we know where Gordon spent most of that money…

So there you have it……

We enter an inevitable downturn exacerbated massively by the financial crisis (as the BoE was warning) with very high levels of deficit rather than surplus…..

…and it’s all the fault of the last Labour government !

100% they abandoned their ideology (read Ed Balls’ admissions), their training and their responsibility. The only mitigating fact is that they were not alone in this. Probably the biggest villain was (the RW hero) Alan Greenspan in all of this.

They would much rather have never pledged to match 100% Labour’s spending plans, if only they had known that there would be a global credit crunch/recession/crises. But then at the end of the day, like you, they’re not the economic geniuses which they would like people to believe they are

Ignoring the unnecessary ad hom, very true. The history of governments “managing the economy” is not a good one. Politicians want power and implementing anti-cyclical policies doesn’t win votes. Far better to fill voters with sugar and clean up the inevitable mess afterwards (Liam Byrne?!?)

So the Tories now use deceit – misleading talk about progress on dealing with the deficit. Why? because stabilising debt via running surpluses will lose them power, so they will resort to the tried and tested policy of theft using the more harmless name of financial repression just as we did 1940s-60s (althought to be fair it’s probably the best of all the bad options). We have already had the deceit of QE. Sounds grand until you realise what it is.

The bottom line is the same – a future of tight fiscal policies with inevitable hit to public sector wages combined with theft from savers. But if people want to hide their heads in the sand, so be it. Its their wages and pensions after all.

What it all boils down to is you can’t afford to run an aggressive war machine and a caring health service at the same time.

I wonder which the govt is giving priority to?

Let’s look at this increment thing a little differently.

Firstly, it’s not an indefinite annual increase as some seem to think – you don’t keep going up and up. Each role will be in a pay band (or it might straddle a couple). Let’s say your job is an Agenda for Change Band 4 role. The scale for that has seven points ranging from £18,838 to £22,016. After seven years service, assuming you’ve hit your performance targets etc, you’ll be at top of scale and unless you move jobs you ain’t getting any more increments.

Now, the government, pushing an agenda, likes to look at this from the bottom and talk about increases like it’s a freebie, a bonus, throwing money away. How about we look at it the other way round: The full salary for the job has been assessed as £22,016. BUT, if you start new in the role, you only get £18,838 and it will take you six years work, professional development etc. before you will receive that full salary.

Looked at like this, if the government wants to get rid of increments because they are a bad idea, then if they’re not talking about cutting the salaries for roles, then logically they need to pay everyone at the ‘full’ (i.e. top of scale) rate for the job from day one. Not a great money saver.

Alternatively, if they are going to the bottom of scale, they’re giving everyone a pay cut, aren’t they? They’ll either have to cut pay for existing workers who are higher than the bottom of the scale or have different pay points for the same job: bottom of scale for anyone starting after it comes in, and a range of higher salaries for those already somewhere further on. As usual, not thought through.

Best barmy thinking I’ve heard on the radio about this was someone (didn’t catch who) talking about the savings being available to “spend on front line services”. I’m not sure what they think the majority of the money for “front line services” is if it ain’t the salaries of the people delivering them…

Well explained Edlong.

robdixon – Member

– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down

Just stop and think about that for a second. Who’s more likely to be sick than a health worker? Who comes into contact with the most ill people? Who can least afford to be at work while ill? Do you want to be treated by an ill doctor, or nurse? And of course, many of these roles include physical work (moving patients etc), long hours and high stress, even higher than average risk of assault.

It’s absolutely inevitable that health workers will have a higher rate of sickness than the average. If you ever see the NHS claim otherwise, things have gone very badly wrong.

Drac – Moderator
Well explained Edlong.

+1 x 1000.

A few bits of evidence for my earlier post which received a few follow up questions / request for evidence: the Agenda for Change data are readily available here (see the PDF for the detail):

http://www.nhsemployers.org/payandcontracts/agendaforchange/pages/afc-ataglancerp.aspx

The £500m / year of Clinical Merit Awards is referenced here…

http://www.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/2013/09/16/hospital-doctors-collect-as-much-as-163-160-000-in-overtime.aspx

And the size of annual clinical excellence awards (bonuses) for medics exceeding £73K a year are covered in this review:

http://tinyurl.com/clinexc

…and finally the strange patterns of sickness absence in which some staff groups take an average of 16 days a year off whilst other directly patient facing roles take as few as 2 days a year off are covered at the link below. It’s a given that some roles are more stressful than others so that needs to be taken into account but even so when back office / admin staff are averaging 9 days off there’s a pretty big chance sickness absence isn’t as well managed as it could be.

Northwind makes an interesting point above and suggests that staff dealing with sick patients are more likely to be sick as a result but the data doesn’t support this – Hospital Doctors typically work the longest hours yet statistically take significantly less sickness absence than colleagues.

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/staffsicknesspr

Putting the sickness absence into more context The NHS in England averages 9.5 sick days per FTE a year – that’s over 13 million sick days a year at a cost of over £3B a year when extrapolated across the whole NHS workforce including Scotland and Wales (where sickness absence is actually higher) and on any given day means that more than 60,000 staff are off sick – that’s enough to run 12-15 large hospitals.

Just managing sickness absence in the worst performing Trusts to the mean that some of the best performing Trusts already achieve year on year would save the NHS £1.5B a year (possibly more depending how sickness absence is covered) or enough to pay the majority of the capital cost of of HS2 by the time it’s predicted to open in 2026.

From your first link

At two defined “gateway points” on each pay band, pay progression is based on them demonstrating the applied knowledge and skills for that job.

Putting the sickness absence into more context The NHS in England averages 9.5 sick days per FTE a year

Not 16 then.

“I understand how it works thanks very much I should do after 24 years of paying in but it’s the stupid comments that people make “everyone else pays for…” is gubbins. I pay tax too so we I pay just as much plus my contributions so I pay more than “everyone else”.”

“everyone else pays for…” is gubbins

“He added: ‘Once taxpayer-funded employer contributions, over £16bn last year, are added to the burgeoning cashflow shortfall, along with additional costs care of the Treasury’s 25 year “no change” pledge [following the reforms], the annual cost of providing public service pensions will be over £1,500 per household, by 2016, and rising rapidly,’ he added.

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2013/03/public-sector-pensions-funding-gap-set-to-double/

As one of those households I pay too.

and so do all the households who aren’t getting a subsidized public sector final salary pension……………….

If it’s any consolation most private sector workers aren’t actually multimillionaire bankers (*deliberate mispelling) and will have to pay a bleeding fortune in DC pension contributions to get a decent pension.

robdixon, again, what proportion of the ‘attacked’ nhs staff you spoke of in your earlier post get these £70k clinical merit awards? Since you seem so well informed in such matters you mihgt like to help the less informed casual reader out by expressing this as a percentage of the workforce in total, and for a bit of proper non-daily-mail-outrage, you could add the minimum and average annual salaries of nhs employees too. Oh and tell us what proportion/percentage of the total NHS wage bill is paid out as clinical merit awards (my hunch is that it will start with at least two zeroes and a decimal point 😉 )

PS even nurses in private sector care often can and often do get real money bonuses, either just for christmas, as a share of their manager’s performance bonus, or skilfully/correctly dealing with ‘mystery shoppers’ (typically a telephone enquiry or referral, or someone posing as a snooping journalist ) I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing but the nhs is most certainly not about to introduce this practice already widespread in private healthcare.

and so do all the households who aren’t getting a subsidized public sector final salary pension……………….

Likewise you pay for our pay with NI and tax part of that pays for our pensions too. You won’t get a discount of they abolish our pensions. They needed reviewed I’ve never denied that, they have been twice in the last few years. It means despite the time I’ve paid in I pay more in, get less out and facing an extra 10 years at work.

There’s no NHS millionaires that made their money in the NHS.

Northwind makes an interesting point above and suggests that staff dealing with sick patients are more likely to be sick as a result but the data doesn’t support this – Hospital Doctors typically work the longest hours yet statistically take significantly less sickness absence than colleagues.

The point about hospital doctors being less sick than other staff is an interesting one well known to hospital staff and sometimes debated at the nursing station in the small hours between turning patients and cleaning up poop. I use this analogy as most nurses will tell you this is why doctors are less sick less often than nurses: they are involved in far less manual handling (so fewer injuries despite also in my experience taking the biggest risks with their backs compared to nurses, porters, physios, OT’s, ambulance crew and ODA’s), and total per-week duration of close proximity to and physical contact with breath, vomit, wee and poo is hugely less.

The NHSBSA do not alas break down assaults on staff by professional group, only by acute/pct/mental health trusts which all of course have a range of professional groups within them (although most incident reporting systems do record professional groups in their many drop down menus; it would be interesting to see if nurses are right in claiming that they get physically assaulted and harassed/abused more per head than doctors or receptionists).

Just managing sickness absence in the worst performing Trusts to the mean that some of the best performing Trusts already achieve year on year would save the NHS £1.5B a year (possibly more depending how sickness absence is covered)

Oh and finally, there is little point in looking at figures and making public/private comparisons now or in the next few years as there will be tupe arrangments for tendered-out ex-nhs services that cover sick pay for ex-nhs staff, but you will have a devil of a job in 5 years time getting private healthcare to publish reliable figures (actually any figures at all!!) on how much taxpayers money is still being spent on sickness and absence now that they are having their slice providing a better VFM service. 😆

Edlong I’m saving that for next week when I go on strike it could be easily adapted!

Hi Drac

“They needed reviewed I’ve never denied that, they have been twice in the last few years. It means despite the time I’ve paid in I pay more in, get less out and facing an extra 10 years at work.”

Private sector pensons were ‘reviewed’ ages ago – so have suffered a worse impact I’d suggest as private sector employees will have had less/0 time in a final salary scheme/longer time at having to pay more, also note state pension changes and S2P changes which impact ‘everybody’ (*meaning both private and public sector workers).

I appreciate you’re feeling hard done by but imho the harsh reality is that the private sector were harder done by some time ago. Another imho, is that this harsh reality has been delivered too late by the ‘public sector’ (* admittedly a smallish % of them) who were busy staying in power as opposed to managing the country properly)

*awaits prelection vote buying offers from both sets of rsoles

and so do all the households who aren’t getting a subsidized public sector final salary pension

IIRC the current NHS pension scheme was negotiated to be self-funding, ie. the costs are met from contributions of members and not by the taxpayer; if the costs go up, so can the contribution rate (as is already happening).

Obviously, as we all know, the contribs go straight back to the Treasury and there isn’t actually an ‘NHS Pension Fund’…