GPs have taken the unprecedented step of urging patients to write to their MPs about the funding crisis in the NHS (Complain to your MPs, top doctor tells patients amid worst ever A&E figures, 9 March). This situation, and the crisis in public services that has left councils at the point of bankruptcy, did not need to happen. Many of the cuts are a false economy that do not lead to savings.
A report from Policy in Practice showed that in Croydon the benefit cap, which was supposed to save the taxpayer money, led to evictions, and it calculated the cost of just one homeless application to the council to be around £8,000.
Private finance initiatives in the NHS will cost us approximately £199bn right through to the 2040s, despite the National Audit Office confirming that in London “the costs of services, like cleaning, are higher under PFI contracts”.
I’m also fed up of not seeing my wife until late at night because another of the supposedly efficient private sector trains she gets to London fails to show up.
Austerity overall has failed – it costs lives as well as taxpayer money.
Mark Murton
Wallington, Surrey
• So ministers are set to offer NHS staff a 6.5% pay rise (Report, 9 March) on condition they give up a day’s holiday in return. Pay for MPs has risen by over 15% since 2014 (without any conditions). Pay for nurses, over the same period, has risen by 3%, and public sector workers have suffered a pay freeze.
Is the government unaware of how much we owe to the dedication and hard work of NHS staff, who are working under increasingly difficult conditions, and often work extra hours with no extra pay? To require them to give up a day’s holiday is petty and mean.
Angela Crum Ewing
Reading
• Now that NHS workers have been offered a long overdue rise, will we see other employers dig deep and pay decent wages in other sectors in which there are staff shortages? Isn’t it strange that the money is found as the exploited low-paid eastern Europeans vote with their feet?
Jane Ghosh
Bristol
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