Health and care staff deserve much better

The Labour Group at the Full Council Budget setting meeting of Bath and North East Somerset Council last week were puzzling over how the cabinet member responsible for Adult Social Care could promise cuts.

We older residents are getting older, there are more of us as the ‘post war baby boomers’ pass 70, and all ages survive with ever more complex health needs.

We could only presume that the threshold for accessing support was going to be raised.

Now a member of the council administration could justifiably say, the issue was not knowing what would be in the government’s Budget, and the staggering fact is that the Chancellor made no mention of the subject at all.

Quite a number of my residents (Westfield ward) are professional trained carers and I know they desperately badly need a pay rise. Ignoring them, and the very real problems of those who run our residential homes is a slap in the face comparable to that dealt out to NHS hospital staff.

I remember my sister (40 years plus, a nurse/lecturer in nursing studies) saying in a previous dispute that no-one went into nursing for the money, but they resented having their high ideals of service exploited by governments underpaying them.

A pay rise would be quite affordable if the government had not wasted so much money on defective PPE and inefficient private ‘test and trace services,’ not to mention the way local hospital trusts haemorrhage money paying for agency staff to cover the staff shortages, something which has been going on for a decade.

There’s a Yorkshire saying, ‘good intentions don’t butter no parsnips.’ Clapping for the NHS is all very well, but praise in parliamentary speeches does not pay the heating bills or put food on the table. Mr Rees-mogg, please take note and get your government to do (yet another ) U Turn

Eleanor Jackson (Cllr)

In a personal capacity, Radstock