EXCLUSIVE:Rishi Sunak has accepted recommendations of *all* public sector pay review bodiesMillions of public sector workers including teachers, doctors and police officers will get pay rises of 6% or moreBUT it will be funded from existing budgetshttps://t.co/PRKE944vkM
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Or is that turd.
Probably effective politics from Sunak as it will make it tricky for the TUs - accepting review body recommendations in full is correct, but funding part of it from "efficiency gains" is cowardly, imo. We need taxes somewhat increasing and rebalancing.
Anything else is pissing in the wind.
That interest is going some where, right?
Funding recurrent expenditure through one off reallocations of underspend is terrible, terrible financial management. And that’s not just for schools. The NHS deal is apparently funded in part through increases in visa fees and health surcharges. This is silly – the equivalent of digging around the sofa for some spare coins to pay a gas bill...
So a good day for everyone today. But a lot of harder decisions punted to the other side of the election – again.
https://jonathansimons1982.medium.com/bonus-thursday-thoughts-who-wins-and-who-loses-from-todays-teacher-pay-settlement-454c3e58ef8e
Tellingly, no such commitment was given in respect of the NHS, which is going to squeeze resources (though they're finding a few bits and pieces from behind the sofa to go towards it).
By all means do that, if it makes you feel better. But you then need o find the other 99% of the money.
Bit like cancelling Trident to pay for everything.
Voters who want big pay rises for public sector workers will vote Labour anyway
Which is a novel definition.
The Department for Education is to raid its existing budgets for £1.4bn to help fund the 6.5% pay rise offered to teachers in England, as part of the deal announced between the government and the teaching and school leader unions.
How pay rises would be funded was a major sticking point, with the unions insisting that pay increases come with extra resources from the government rather than being met from school budgets, as has happened in the past.
Today’s joint announcement from No 10, the DfE and the unions stated: “Importantly, the government’s offer is properly funded for schools. The government has committed that all schools will receive additional funding above what was proposed in March - building on the additional £2bn given to schools in the autumn statement.”
The government had argued that its previous offer – amounting to an average rise of 4.3% - could be afforded out of the £2bn increase last year, a position supported by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
But the “additional funding” being promised to pay for the higher invcrease announced today will come from the DfE, with an extra £500m in the 2023-24 financial year and £900m in 2024-25. The DfE said it will “reprioritise” its existing budgets “while protecting core budgets”.
The DfE said it will also provide a hardship fund of up to £40m “to support those schools facing the greatest financial challenges”.
...It is also worth noting that the offer still constitutes real-terms pay cuts for millions of workers, coming on top of what unions say have been many years of the same.
They are also nowhere near, in percentage-point terms, the 12.4% nominal increases junior doctors have been offered in Scotland. ..
That.
Financing from the underspend is a short-term fudge, of course, so the problem isn't going to go away. We need more economic growth, better productivity, and better-managed public services, especially better management in the NHS. But none of that can be done quickly, and meanwhile we have the long-term deadweight of Brexit red tape dragging us down and stifling investment. The medium-term future is pretty bleak, to be honest. Labour are going to inherit a very, very difficult situation.
At least this is one banana skin the government have avoided.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66189243
Methods wise, they've cocked up a bit here, particularly with the about right bit. People will pick a point for about right and then put higher/lower as too high/too low. You can see that here with the peaks for about right at 5% and 10% - people like round(er) numbers.
Better approach is to do a referendum style question - should employers be offering at least this amount? (with amount chosen at random for each respondent) and then logistic model or similar from the yes/no answers.
I'm available for hire/consultancy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/health-66179742
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYYMf0FDP1E
So following on from TSE's narrative instead of giving a 6% pay rise (which had 46% saying too small and 44% saying about right or too large) if they were following this polling they should actually have given only a 5% pay rise (which had 44% saying too small vs 46% saying about right or too large)
This is not a comment on the validity of the payrises, more on the validity of using the polling in this way.
(Apologies for the mixed metaphor, although I rather like the idea of a punting fig-leaf).
https://twitter.com/ukhomeoffice/status/1679433311926534147
Rishi Sunak said “it’s not about cuts” but about departments reprioritising resources.
Experimented with this once, for a pilot surveys for a different question (part of trying to set the range of random amounts asked to do it properly) and if you present multiple figures, over different ranges, the one with the higher maximum will give you a higher mean/median answer.
61% of 2019 Labour voters think a 6% payrise too small
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/oh0n5likti/Internal_Payrise_221202_new.pdf
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/people/academic-staff/prof-willem-smelik
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jul/13/school-in-cat-pupil-controversy-given-ofsted-all-clear-after-snap-inspection
This seems exactly what the government is trying. Although most of us need a good state education not one janked together.
Junior doctors vow to keep striking as 'derisory pay offer means just 84p extra an hour'
The NHS has almost 10% of posts unfilled: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/01/nhs-vacancies-in-england-at-staggering-new-high-as-almost-10-of-posts-empty
These are roles for which the funding exists, but no-one can be recruited. Salaries that have failed to keep up with inflation for fifteen years are a major reason.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re Labour or Conservative, if you want public services to be run efficiently then you need to pay enough to keep & retain staff or else you end up paying a fortune to fill the roles with temporary contract staff, if you can find them at all.
We long since passed the point of keeping pay down to the point where it balanced recruitment; it’s been pushed so far down that public services are failing.
I know Labour bangs the “save the NHS” drum every election, but this time around teaching is suffering similar problems, yet it doesn’t have the ageing population pressures that the NHS does. The Conservatives have cut salaries relative to other jobs in the UK economy to the point that these services are breaking down.
Which is what I originally said.
In contrast to the truple lock which is strictly neutral in principle.
And no, that's not worker blaming. Productivity is difficult and often expensive to increase. Just Work Harder has almost never worked, in human history.
We used to have good debates with a very left wing teacher at school, but she welcomed the engagement (and believed in her ability to win the argument, so was never defensive) and would certainly never have threatened anyone for simply disagreeing.
Cutting inheritance tax was one of the most popular Tory policies this century, so why should we care less what leftwingers like you think about it?
I bought two packs and am celebrating my find with the first can
https://www.bmj.com/careers/article/the-complete-guide-to-nhs-pay-for-doctors this is the official pay and overtime scale.
Very noble of you to be happy to work for less.
Of course, it’s always easier to cut (or not recruit) middle management in the interests of protecting those all important front line staffing numbers; who cares if it takes 30 minutes for their PC to boot in the morning?
Interesting that this key passage had 'likes' from three of the most vociferous Brexiteers who post here. It's almost as though we're dealing with alter egos.
I'm a Tory voter, and I find it quite hard to imagine how Boris managed to do absolutely nothing with the huge mandate he had.
The problem is that Brexit so fixated everyone that it's still in the mirrors.