The UK budget (Hell Edition)
Hooray we are going to get a bloody 2p cut in National Insurance. Bring out the flags, listen to the cheering in the streets. Nobody wants the extra teeny tiny amount of money that will give us. Put it where it can be used best like infrastructure or the NHS.
Let’s hope he has better in his red bag.
Let’s hope he has better in his red bag.
Comments
You've met the tories, right?
Because it may get lost in the general Tory mess. This is an election budget. I think it deserves its own.
We are turning/we have turned/we are about to turn The Corner, everything is Going to Plan, the Rich will be OK, and the Little People can FOAD.
On the other hand, Sir Kier seems to have discovered some comedy talent not previously evident....
"[The chancellor's complacency could be summarised ] 'crisis, what crisis?" or as the former Prime Minister might say: 'Iceberg, what iceberg?'"
As well as, in response to Hunt stealing Labour ideas, warning the Members Opposite that they may soon be having to defend VAT on private school fees....
Genius.
AFZ
Nice one, Sir Keir...
(BTW, I thought Jezza was often called by the vulgar name of a different part of the human anatomy)
Tories cut taxes in an election year. This is standard operating practice, and happens regardless of the state of the economy, or of anything else. The headline is "taxes cut", but the fact that income tax thresholds didn't get moved means that the net effect is a tax increase for the poor and a tax cut for middle-income possible Tory voters. He targeted the same group of middle-income possible Tory voters by increasing the income cap for child benefit.
The signposted intention to base child benefit eligibility on household income rather than individual income seems to make superficial sense, but I can't help but think that it would be all together simpler to go back to child benefit being a universal entitlement, and just tax rich people a bit more.
Not just this. Child benefit is usually paid direct to the mother, this to ensure that a greedy partner cannot swallow it up.
If you're on about £35K, you'll be about £450 a year better off.
BBC link to "what does the budget mean for you"
I confess to being somewhat underwhelmed by it all...
I do not believe that nobody wants the extra money.
The reduction of National insurance payments is of no use if you don't pay it. I don't pay it by the way.
I would not give it the NHS as they could just use it to make more diversity like jobs.
I would have prefered to give the money to councils and not just those which are inefficient
They're still not getting my vote though.
What do you mean by *more diversity like jobs*?
That's only about £5 a week, which you'll probably need for higher food bills...
Standard, right wing, ignorant talking point.
AFZ
I should have guessed...though I'm still a bit unsure as to what @Telford really means...
It's these Diversity Officers who are paid over £100K a year to do a non job
Yeah, this is what happens when you get your information from gbnews without much reference to the real world, here you go, the scale for equalities officers:
https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/equalities-officer
It's largely a compliance and outreach role, coupled with making sure that your organisation doesn't fall foul of legislation. That doesn't translate into being a 'non-job'.
Well, that's your opinion.
Is this the non-job you mean?
The main duties of the job - this includes the NHS / EDI agenda and NHS specific related guidance. Support in the development of plans for how the Trust meets its legal duties and responds to equality, diversity, and inclusion legislation as well as delivering updates on evolving best practice and guidance.
If so, your information regarding salary is incorrect:
The average equality diversity officer salary in the United Kingdom is £34,328 per year or £17.60 per hour. Entry level positions start at £29,488 per year while most experienced workers make up to £41,842 per year.
What @alienfromzog said.
(BTW, those quotes are from the NHS website)
My place of employment has a person with a "head of diversity" type job title. I know her quite well. She's a long-time employee, and before she had this job title, she had a fairly standard "human resources" type job title.
Very little of her job has actually changed. The HR people have always been responsible for ensuring that we're following relevant employment legislation - that we're providing reasonable accommodations for people who have requested it, and that those accommodations are documented correctly. That complaints against employees are handled correctly and lawfully. That we're not accidentally creating a discriminatory workplace with some "we've always done it this way" assumption. That if we need to fire someone (for gross misconduct, or bad performance, or whatever), then everything is documented correctly, and handled correctly, so my employer is not at risk in a potential lawsuit.
And HR has always had a role in retention, and culture, and trying to ensure that when we've hired someone and spent a bunch of money training them, they want to stay working for us.
And she's always had a small part of her role as outreach - looking for places to advertise for potential new employees, to ensure that we have a wide pool of competent candidates to choose from. Now as "diversity head", she does a little more of that, but it's a relatively small change.
I'm not sure exactly what you think "diversity officers" do, but I suspect you would discover, were you to spend some time with one, that very little of their day-to-day work would be what you would call a "non-job".
It will be the person in charge of them that gets the big bucks
It sounds like the duties of these diversity officers were already being done.
BTW, if you @Telford were referring to *them that gets the big bucks*, you should have made that clear. Do you have a link to indicate who *them that gets the big bucks* are?
Sorry. I don't
Frankly, the most interesting debate in the next few weeks will take place in the House of Lords where John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has a bill getting its first reading which would establish a Ministry of Poverty Prevention: this would stop the current divided and sticking plaster approach and might actually do something for the nation's poorest families. It remains to be seen whether either party will listen, let alone act, on this suggestion, and I won't hold my breath in expectation that our news media will give it any airtime.
Then why say it?
Stick to what you know about.
The jokes.
Stuff about policing.
No names, no pack drill but I've actually been a councillor, at town and borough levels.
The only 'big bucks' are those paid to the senior top brass. There aren't corridors full of people doing 'non-jobs'. Most council officers in my experience do as good a job as they can with limited resources.
Sure, there are inefficiencies in local government. Some local authorities have made daft decisions or ill-considered investments.
But it's not just the non-Conservative councillors who have been lobbying central government - pleading even - for a bigger slice of the cake. And largely falling on deaf ears.
Local authorities are faced with stark choices. Do they fill the potholes or prioritise social care for the most vulnerable in our society.
The amount of funding local authorities receive from central government has been cut and cut and cut again. Boris was the worst offender and the trend has continued.
Incidentally - you may not have seen it but I sent you a PM praising the boys in blue for something my brother brought to my attention.
I like to give praise where it's due.
I'd like to think I was even-handed during my involvement in local politics. People from all political parties and none said so.
But I am also prepared to lay charges at the feet of those responsible for the current generic funding crisis in local services.
The blame lies squarely with the present government. With the Tories.
I rest my case.
You need a bit of slack in the system in case of storms.
I'm curious about this. In which direction is the gap, and how is it measured? I can understand how you measure productivity in terms of widgets produced or money generated per hour of work, but when the "product" is a hip replacement for an 85 year old the value of that work is not economic, it's personal and social. Was the surgeon unproductive?
We must consider carefully what 'productivity' means in the public sector. The problem is that the public and private sectors are different animals. If your bank decides its branch in Stoke Poges doesn't make enough money for the shareholders it can close it. Public services can rarely operate like that. To the extent that they do, it makes the punters very unhappy. Ultimately, the prime objective of the private sector is to maximise profit. This is not true of the public sector and nor ought it to be.
I suppose if you could find a way to make everyone's tax bills be processed more cheaply (for example) with no loss of quality in the service, no one would mind. But many public services are not like that. They are labour-intensive by their very nature.
Where things get more complicated still are things which were once in the public sector, such as buses, trains and utilities. This has muddied the waters as, again, folk reckon that these services should be provided, with little or no thought to the economics. Here in Cardiff most buses are run by a Council-owned company. It can't make a loss (but shouldn't be seen as a profit centre for the Council). Folk still struggle to understand the concept and say, "The Council run the buses, they should put on a better service" without realising that the Council-nominated directors are a minority on the Board.
This is one of those moments where you can tell which newspapers/magazines people think are credible.
Generally if a columnist starts banging on about a 'public sector productivity gap' they can be safely ignored. Why? Because the statistics are simply not comparable by design.
For much of the public sector output value is assumed to be equal to input costs, see the ONS guidance here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity/publicservicesproductivity/methodologies/sourcesandmethodsforpublicserviceproductivityestimates (section on Quantity Output)
Taking into account the exclusions public sector productivity cannot increase at a comparable rate to the private sector's because for 40% of public sector output, the ONS methodology holds the productivity constant.
Okay, so now we've gone from a generalised complaint about the "wide productivity gap between the public and private sectors" to the comment about hospitals and one working practice in particular which could be down to all sorts of localised factors (including a shortage of staff at any stage in the pipeline that processes patients and preps the operating theatre).
On which topic maybe you'd like to google 'NHS unfilled vacancies'.
There are also some concerns about the practice, and some clear limitations on the situations for which High Intensity Theatre lists are practical. BMJ Article.
It’s clearly a strategy worth thinking about and exploring, but some (many?) trusts may lack the resources, human, financial, or plant, to implement it.
It isn't. I've also thought for a long time that the wedding and funeral industries take advantage of people at times when they're emotionally vulnerable.
Btw I've just joined our DEI group at work and am finding it very interesting and worthwhile. Anything that brings people together, especially disadvantaged people or minorities, and makes them feel more at home in a group and more able to contribute can only be a good thing. We are planning events, activities and talks, and I get to write pieces for our intranet. And I'm not getting paid any extra for this.
I agree with @Puzzler and with @Ariel.
One of the reasons I took early retirement from the Ambulance Service was the imminent privatisation of some of our work. Colleagues who stayed on, and now work for a private firm, tell me how important making a profit for the shareholders appears to be...and how many corners are cut in order to save money, with no due regard for the safety of staff or patients.
(What's DEI, please?)
The difference is that competition between food providers keeps food prices down and service levels high, while health services are a near monopoly - one can't try different health services providers to see which one one likes - and so the private sector can be inefficient with little comeback.
(In fact, when it comes to food provision the problem for food providers is that the big supermarkets form a near monopsony and so are able to keep profits for farmers to a bare minimum while making a profit themselves.)
Yes. Sorry, I assumed it would be familiar to most.
Thanks, both!
Part of the problem is, of course, that many of the worst homes are reliant on inadequate funding from local authorities, who in turn have been short changed by central government. Given the number of such that have gone bust, I don't think profiteering is necessarily the issue here. Where there's profit to be had it's in private provision for paying residents.
Actually the going bust is a symptom of the profiteering:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/02/profiteering-off-children-care-firms-in-england-accused-of-squeezing-cash-from-councils
https://www.ft.com/content/330fde3c-e187-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c (https://archive.is/5Pvf5 )
They normally deploy corporate structures that shield the ultimate owners from liability, and then do the normal trick of loading them up with debt, extracting dividends and cutting costs until the care homes go under (extra bonus ball if the care home originally owned the property on which it was situated).
Good point, well made. Fuck rent-seeking capitalism.