Employers NI raise confirmed by BBC?

LHW99

Albermarle said:

Altior said:

Albermarle said:

Grumpy_chap said:

hallmark said:

I wonder if part of the agenda here is to curb wage inflation.  A 2% increase on employers NI will likely mean a percentage or so off of wage increases.  That would be very welcome to the Govt

Given the public sector wage settlements agreed by the current Government, curbing wage inflation would not appear to be a current priority.

Presume the priority is more about stopping  strikes / filling all the vacancies / staff retention problems in critical public sector occupations.
50,000 nurse vacancies for example.
Even the apparently highly paid train driving jobs are not exactly overwhelmed with applications and having to drop the minimum age to 18.
In the end the law of supply and demand is in charge.

Genuine question, where is the 50K nurse vacancy number sourced? 

In an organisation with the headcount of the NHS, there will always be vacancies. Thousands of leavers and joiners every month I should imagine. It would also be useful to know if the level of vacancies has recently increased, decreased or remained pretty consistent. 

For what it's worth, I searched the NHS vacancy website using the job title 'nurse', and it threw up '7,781 jobs found for nurse'. 

This website gives a figure of 43,300 at the end of 2022, with an extra concern over the rate of people leaving the profession
Retaining NHS nurses: what do trends in staff turnover tell us? - The Health Foundation
Other sites indicate some small improvement in the meantime.
The site says the NHS has a target vacancy rate for nurses of 5%.
This site says currently it is nearly 12 %
Stats And Facts On The UK's Nursing Workforce 2024
So a gap of 7% on total number of nurses around 400,000. So a 'real' gap of about 30,000.
It is a leaking bucket though due to the high leaving rate.

And of course you don't just pull someone of the street and make them a trained nurse (or doctor, radiologist etc (or train driver)).

It takes time (up to 10 years plus for doctors / surgeons), and for NHS jobs usually at least one or two degrees, and that is increasingly costly for the trainee, never mind the Universities themseves.