Well, here we go again.
Another week of political argy-bargy. Labour are conferencing in Liverpool.
They don’t have much luck there.
In 1925, King George V asked Ramsey MacDonald to form the first Labour government. It didn’t last long. MacDonald and several other prominent Labour Party members resigned … during the Liverpool conference!
They didn’t return until 2011, when leader Ed Miliband’s speech was blacked out by an IT failure!
Will we see history being made this week?
Starmer has his Ming-Vase approach to policy making. Don’t touch, say or move anything in case you break something, upset somebody, and risk losing support.
The papers are full of speculation. The big idea seems to be; get knackered NHS people to work overtime, to get the waiting lists down.
In 2021, roughly 43% of NHS staff worked up to five hours of unpaid overtime in an average week… 10% worked ten unpaid hours.
I’m sure they’d be delighted to work more.
Thinking this through, overtime hours are taxed at the same rate as ordinary pay.
The Treasury wins.
There are different tax bands so overtime may push you into the next band.
The Treasury wins.
How about making the overtime hours tax free, and count towards pensions?
That’s called policy making, a bridge too far for Labour?
The next cunning plan is more diagnostics. Two million more a year…
… I make that just under 5,500 a day. Between 215 Trusts… that’s 26 more a day. A ‘bold vision’… really?
…24/7 working? Really?
About 60% of waiters need a diagnostic, of them about 20% will need inpatient care… numbers that are not lost on the NHS…. hence the ‘faster diagnosis framework’…
… however…
… the NHS delivered over 25 million in the last year, two million more than the same period before the pandemic.
Do more? Sure but…
… a 285-slice-scanner costs about a £million, isn’t exactly an-off-the-shelf-purchase and might deliver 7,000 images a year. With overtime, sweat the asset, say 10,000?
How many will Labour buy… have they even done the sums? NHSE intends to establish up to 160 new diagnostic centres by 2025, with financial backing of £2.3bn.
The Richards’ Report tells us staffing levels will need to rise by 18% in diagnostics and 16% in therapeutic radiology by 2026.
The Diagnostic radiography workforce (a degree course) needs to grow by double the current funded projections, each year until 2026… 28% growth in total.
This is called research, policy development and thinking. Silly Boy doesn’t seem to do that…. headlines will do.
To pay for all this, Labour will change the tax arrangements for non-doms to; fund overtime, buy scanners, sprinkle glitter and put a cherry on the top of the cake.
A look at the numbers will tell you, very few people benefit from the current non-dom tax regime.
Rachel de Souza, from the tax consultants RSM says;
‘… Labour [referenced] a report… by Warwick University … September 2022… [concluding]… abolishing the regime would raise an additional £3.2bn for the government in income tax and capital gains tax.’
So far so good. But…
‘… to [deliver] this… policy, any changes would need to bring £7.1bn of overseas revenue into the UK… and be taxed at the highest UK income tax rate, or more £ if taxed at lower rates…’
HMRC, July;
• There were only 55,200 claiming to be non-dom.
• there’s a long-term downward trend, since 2017.
• Of the 2,100 non-doms actually paying the non-dom charge to avoid UK taxes; 1,600 paid £30,000 and only 500 paid £60,000.
• the vast majority of non-doms do not generate enough income to use the charge arrangements.
De Souza, again;
‘Labour would be relying on a very small number of non-doms to pay significantly more in tax to make up the £3.2bn that it expects to raise from changing the rules…
… the 500 wealthiest non-doms, would have to pay on average additional taxes of £6.4m, each, in order to generate the additional £3.2bn in taxes that Labour need….’
… and let’s face it, it ain’t gonna happen… it’s not a policy it’s a hope… with no hope.
So, if you are at the conference… now you know the numbers and none of them add up, or they are already in play.
Health Warning; be very suspicious about all and everything else they tell you.
And, remember the ‘Meiyintang Chenghua Chicken Cup’, a small, delicate porcelain cup dating back to the Ming Dynasty.
It was sold at Sotheby’s in April 2014 for over $36 million.
It turned out to be a fake…
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
