Afternoon:
10°c
If we want to know how public spending mounts up, we can get some insight from the pay of police and doctors. Some GPs earn in excess of £300,000 a year, if overtime and bonuses are included, according to figures supplied to the Daily Mail from a Freedom of Information request. Six years ago, GPs were paid £70,000.
For the increase in doctors' pay, one man is chiefly to blame: John Reid, the Health Secretary who presided over the new doctors' contract in 2004. As a result of the incompetent way the contract was drawn up, doctors were allowed to opt out of weekend and evening work, which they were previously obliged to do, and had to be induced to undertake out-of-hours jobs with payments of up to £200 an hour. Some of the larger payments to GPs include staff pay but not all. Dr Reid has long since moved on but the taxpayer is still paying for his ineptitude.
Meeting government targets is another way to maximise earnings under the 2004 contract: doctors can earn more by testing and diagnosing diabetes, checking blood pressure and monitoring patients with heart disease and asthma. In a sane system, this would constitute basic medical care, not grounds for bonuses. It also raises the problem that other conditions which do not earn bonus points may attract less attention.
The police, too, are well remunerated, even without taking sick leave and early retirement conditions into account. Our report today on how a Met police constable earned more than £100,000 a year by working overtime, as did four sergeants, may not be typical of the majority of Met staff but shows how police overtime can mount up.
The level of pay revealed by these figures, though it does not reflect the low pay of some public sector workers, shows that the state is a poor manager of its resources. It is profligate with taxpayers' money. And outgoings on salaries at a time when there are serious constraints on public spending are both difficult to justify and hard to cut back.
Ministers should at least make a determined attempt to renegotiate doctors' contracts. The work that doctors and police do may be invaluable but we do in fact have to set a value on it, and we are paying too much.
Lessons of Northern Rock
There are two Britains revealed by the latest bank figures: that of recession-beating business shown by Barclays' £3 billion half-year profits and the other, of Northern Rock, which today reported losses of £724.2 million for the same period.
Much of Barclays' profit came from investment banking. Northern Rock's business is chiefly mortgages and savings and the grim reality is that nearly four in every hundred customers are more than three months in arrears.
Northern Rock owes the taxpayer nearly £11 billion; it was nationalised in 2008. It is now a well-run bank but the lessons from its collapse are valid throughout the sector. The problem was not merely its short-term borrowing from money-markets to fund its loans but that it offered those loans to people who should never have been given them, on absurd multiples of their earnings and sometimes in excess of the value of their houses.
Right now, the Government is, for good reasons, urging banks to be more generous in offering loans to businesses and homebuyers, particularly those banks which are partly or wholly state-owned. But that should not translate into a return to the old imprudence, whereby would-be housebuyers were not refused loans when they should have been, in their own interests as well as the bank's. Those days must not return.
Quixotic Corporation
The BBC has forced a senior newsreader, George Alagiah, to step down as patron of the Fairtrade Foundation in the interests of impartiality.
Meanwhile, it allows Jay Hunt, BBC1 controller to continue in her job while working for a media training company that makes some of its money from the BBC. Funny old world.
Sats snapshot
Many teachers dislike Sats tests but they do give a snapshot of the standards reached by pupils leaving primary schools. This year's results show that one in five 11-year-olds leaves unable to read and write properly, an increase on last year.
These underperformers will struggle in secondary school. Ministers like to claim that exam results show ever-improving schools but their record has today been found wanting by its own measure of success.
