With nurses, ambulance staff and train drivers fighting for wage deals that cover the rising cost of living the Government thinks it hasn’t got the money, but they just aren’t looking hard enough.
Nurses on strike for the first time in the history of the Royal College of Nursing should be an indicator that this is a unprecedented situation. The wage rise is just to keep step with the current level of inflation. It does nothing to address the decline in the relative value of salaries over the past decade. The inability to recruit and retain staff is the bleak consequence of the declining real terms salary.
The cost to fix this? £1.8 billion.
Similarly, the rail workers are looking to prevent the relative value of their salaries slip any further. Some incompetent Tory politicians have been banging on about how much train drivers earn. Not sure why. This has nothing to do with drivers. It’s all the other staff who have a median salary of £31k, below the rail sector average.
The cost to fix this? It has been very difficult to find a figure for the cost to settle this dispute. For the sake of this we will use a figure of £3 billion.
Seems like a lot of money so far, but I think we can up the number.
Let’s throw in some ambulance workers. Being a bit pissed off after 10 years of falling relative salary, they are not happy about an imposed 4% rise which sees their salary value fall again. Many fall in to debt while training, and with the value of the salary falling year on year it’s not surprising that recruitment and retention are suffering.
The cost to fix this? Again’ it has been very difficult to find a figure for the cost to settle this dispute. For the sake of this we will use a figure of £2 billion.
To settle these could cost around £6.8 billion. That sounds a lot to most people, but for the government they’ve spaffed more than that up the wall.
The government has written off about £10 billion in unused, unsuitable or undeliverable PPE. Claw that money back and that’s those disputes settled. Of course there willl be a few more disputes so chasing £16bn lost due to fraud and error in Covid loans schemes should help.
Money is no object if you really want to spend it, or just piss it down the drain.