NHS Consultants can't do maths just like Junior Doctors

 NHS consultants have voted to go on strike over pay. If it's not Junior Doctors striking it's someone else in the NHS.  It seems the poor little darlings are struggling on a base salary of £152,000 per year + 23.7% employer pension contribution of £36,024 per year.  They can also get extra money for additional clinical sessions, on-call and Clinical Excellence Awards.  That also ignores the private work they can also do.  So it's quite a tidy little package.

So by any stretch of the imagination the 63k consultants in England, 5k in Scotland, 2.5k in Wales and 1.5k in Northern Ireland are hardly poorly paid.  They are in the top 1% of highest paid people in the UK. Or to put it another pay - NHS Consultants make up 20% of all of the top 1% highest paid people in the UK. Of course the NHS is paid for out of taxes so these are public sector workers and therefore have to paid for out of taxation.

NHS Consultants recently had an inflation busting 28% pay rise spread over 4 years so why strike?

So why are they striking.  Well the root problem is their take-home pay (ie after tax) has fallen relative to 17 years ago. However their gross pay has considerably increased.

Therefore the root problem is Kier Starmer - "those with the broadest shoulders need to pay more tax" he said.  Rachel has also made sure we all suffer higher taxation from fiscal drag by not increasing tax band allowances in line with inflation.   

In other-words the Consultant Doctors don't want to pay the extra tax like everybody else despite having some of the broadest shoulders in society.





 

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