NHS unsafe in Govt hands

The Government would have us believe that the NHS is safe in their hands. Having just spent six days in the GWH with Covid and pneumonia I can assure you that it is not.

The staff do their best but it is clear that they have been put in an impossible position and there are not enough of them.

The result is patients getting stressed waiting their turn to be helped. Waiting for pain relief, waiting to be helped to the toilet, to get out of bed to sit in a chair and the many other things those stuck in bed and too ill to do unaided need help with. And then there are the tests which get delayed etc because staff are overwhelmed.

Stress does nothing to aid patients rest and recovery, and the constant waiting makes patients angry. The atmosphere on wards is as a consequence unhappy. The Government needs to tackle this properly with a decent sustainable pay rise for ALL staff (instead of the grudging, mean, long delayed settlement announced) which will encourage more into the NHS professions, and those who are already working within it to stay.

Anne Bennett

Address supplied

A steady budget

The word ‘Exchequer’ derives from the chequered tablecloth on which Mediaeval Treasury clerks counted up piles of money.

It was a confrontational audit process between the powerful Barons of the upper Exchequer and the hapless accountants summoned before them. The cloth was used to visually record the sums of money that were demanded and received, and an accountant was only discharged of their debt on the provision of evidence – a writ authorising expenditure on behalf of the Crown, or a wooden tally denoting that a payment had been made into the lower Exchequer.

The Exchequer tablecloth is also symbolic of ‘balancing the books’, which Chancellor Jeremy Hunt set about doing in the Budget.

It was a steady Budget rather than an eye-catching one; and it is just what the economy needs. The Office of Budget Responsibility prediction that inflation will fall this year to 2 per cent is welcome news indeed and may have had a part to play in what looks like a fair settlement of the nurses’ pay dispute at a 5 per cent increase.

If food prices and energy prices can now return to their pre-crisis norms; and if the economy otherwise stays as strong as it is (leaving on one side the worries about the banking system), we should see a degree of comfort returning to domestic budgets.

There were other attractive aspects to the Budget. Working parents will welcome the 30 hours free childcare a week from the age of nine months, extending the energy price guarantee for three months, (by which time the price should anyhow be returning to normal) will be a relief for many, as will freezing fuel duty; and a tax freeze on draught beer will keep many people locally very happy.

Some aspects of the Budget are of course less welcome- the increase in Corporation Tax to 25 per cent has been attacked by some businesses, although generous changes to the elements which can now be offset against profits are helpful.

I am a low tax Tory and dislike the fact that the pandemic and Ukraine War have made such heavy demands on the public purse that necessitates such a heavy tax burden. So I welcome the fact that we are slowly turning the economy round, and seeing growth reappear, one result of which will I hope be a return to a proper tax-cutting agenda soon.

The best news of the Budget is simply that Jeremy Hunt is getting things under control.

We are closer to ‘balancing the books’, in a way the Mediaeval clerks and their chequered tablecloth would have understood and thoroughly approved.

James Gray

MP for North Wiltshire

Have a view on the news? Email a letter to the editor at letters@swindonadvertiser.co.uk or letters@gazetteandherald.co.uk