2024-07-30 20:21:15
ReutersThe chancellor and shadow chancellor were interviewed on Tuesday morning, a day after Rachel Reeves blamed the previous Conservative government for a £22bn hole in the public finances.
They criticized each other and put forward a series of claims.
We’ve already seen some of them.
“I find it inconceivable that the pressure on the public finances is not shared” – Jeremy Hunt
Shadow chancellor Jeremy Hunt has repeatedly said the chancellor should know the state of the public finances.
He said this was because she had had access to the judgement of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) since the March Budget and was given the power to question the Treasury’s most senior civil servants.
“Those public finances were audited by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 10 weeks before the election,” Mr Hunt told MPs on Monday.
But the Director of the Office of Budget Responsibility Wrote a letter on Tuesday He said he was unaware of some of the pressure until last week.
He is so concerned that he has set up a review panel to assess the information the Treasury provides to the Office for Budget Responsibility ahead of the budget.
“Rejecting the advice of an independent pay review body is almost unprecedented” Rachel Reeves
Rachel Reeves defended her decision to accept the pay review body’s recommendations for pay rises for public sector workers in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, saying it was “almost unprecedented” to reject them.
The Pay Review Body (PRB) makes recommendations on the pay of public sector workers such as teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers and the military.
They take evidence from relevant government departments, unions and expert organisations before deciding how pay should change each year.
However, the PRB must consider the limits set by the government when making its recommendations.
While it is true that the government usually accepts these recommendations (even though they are not legally binding), it is not uncommon for the government to reject some of them.
For example, when Jeremy Hunt was health secretary, Rejected a 2014 PRB proposal to raise salaries of all doctors and dentists by 1%.
There have been other recent examples – in 2018 and 2022 – where the government has rejected parts of some recommendations; According to an independent government think tank.
“She found that junior doctors were being paid 22% (10 times the rate of inflation) and other public sector workers were being paid almost three times the rate of inflation” – Jeremy Hunt
The British Medical Association offers its members a discount worth about 22%, but this is over two years.
A further 4% pay rise will be retroactively given in 2023-24, on top of the existing average 9% pay rise.
Wages will then rise further by about 8% in 2024-25, based on recommendations from the independent pay review body.
As this is over two years, it is incorrect to say it is 10 times the rate of inflation, which is 5.7% in 2023-24 and the OBR expects it to rise by a further 1.6% the following year.
As for their income, which is three times that of other public sector workers, The Ministry of Finance said The average bonus for 2023-24 is 6 per cent, with bonuses expected to be between 5 and 6 per cent this year. Junior doctors will not receive three times that.
Public sector “wages have lagged behind private sector wages for the past decade” – Rachel Reeves
The chancellor is telling why she is accepting the pay review body’s recommendation to give public sector workers pay rises above the rate of inflation.
Comparing public and private sector pay is complicated For example, whether adjustments need to be made based on seniority level and whether bonuses or pensions are included.
If you just look at the average salarybetween 2015 and 2019, private sector wages recovered after the financial crisis, but public sector pay did not keep up.
The public sector has fared better than the private sector during the pandemic because furlough schemes mean many private sector workers are receiving just 80% of their normal wages.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, private sector pay has performed significantly better than the public sector, responding more to the high rates of inflation in recent years.
But it should not be forgotten that in recent years, the situation in both countries has been extremely bad.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank noted that average public sector wages adjusted for price increases at the end of 2023 would still be 1% lower than at the beginning of 2007, while the corresponding figure in the private sector had risen by just 4%.
Additional reporting by Gerry Georgieva and Lucy Gilder
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