victoria howard
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Comment on: ‘The government won’t give a damn about us'
Anonymous | 02/08/2010 12:33 pm
@ anonymous err... well I am not lying here, do you know that GPs and yes unfortunately even mediocre ones are better paid than the Consultants (other than the most senior ones)... He does not push 6 figures and that is even while taking on extra weekend work - speaking at drug manufacturer conferences, taking on private patients, doing telephone interviews and the like.... It is well known that under the last government, GPs who head up the practices were given an allowance of about £150K per year per GP, but they hire in less well paid GPs to their surgeries and pocket a substantial difference - sometimes as much as £80K.
My brother has a preclinical, post clinica degreel and PHD from Oxford and Cambridge, is a member of the Royal Society of Physicians etc etc. He choses to work in a very rare field of medicine, there are only a handful of consultants in his area in the country, so career advice is hardly required thank you. He could be a GP and be paid more, or he could take a fat salary from a drugs company, or he could emigrate, or he could move to Harley street, or he could rake it in in banking, but he choses to put his skills where he can make the most difference, and choses to put his skills paid into the NHS who trained him, and this is at a cost to his health and family life. He could of course move to a cheaper area, although where he lives isn't that great anyway, but with a 12 hr day, you don't much want a long commute either. Thank god there are still some people who are prepared to make sacrifices for the good of other people, where would this country be without that? Right coming off this site, it gets silly when you have to get into a debate like this with a stranger.. and am sure it's not very interesting for the people on this site.
Victoria Howard
I find it difficult to believe you have a brother, a doctor, who is living in a three-bedroom house. He needs some career guidance.
I have a sister, a bog-standard gp. She pulls in over £120,000 and could make more if she was so inclined, and if she wasn't so bored with stuffing a million pound house with £30,000 kitchens and stuffing pills down old ladies' throats who've come in for a chat. -
Comment on: ‘The government won’t give a damn about us'
Anonymous | 02/08/2010 12:33 pm
@ anonymous err... well I am not lying here, do you know that GPs and yes unfortunately even mediocre ones are better paid than the Consultants (other than the most senior ones)... He does not push 6 figures and that is even while taking on extra weekend work - speaking at drug manufacturer conferences, taking on private patients, doing telephone interviews and the like.... It is well known that under the last government, GPs who head up the practices were given an allowance of about £150K per year per GP, but they hire in less well paid GPs to their surgeries and pocket a substantial difference - sometimes as much as £80K.
My brother has a preclinical, post clinica degreel and PHD from Oxford and Cambridge, is a member of the Royal Society of Physicians etc etc. He choses to work in a very rare field of medicine, there are only a handful of consultants in his area in the country, so career advice is hardly required thank you. He could be a GP and be paid more, or he could take a fat salary from a drugs company, or he could emigrate, or he could move to Harley street, or he could rake it in in banking, but he choses to put his skills where he can make the most difference, and choses to put his skills paid into the NHS who trained him, and this is at a cost to his health and family life. He could of course move to a cheaper area, although where he lives isn't that great anyway, but with a 12 hr day, you don't much want a long commute either. Thank god there are still some people who are prepared to make sacrifices for the good of other people, where would this country be without that? Right coming off this site, it gets silly when you have to get into a debate like this with a stranger.. and am sure it's not very interesting for the people on this site.
Victoria Howard
I find it difficult to believe you have a brother, a doctor, who is living in a three-bedroom house. He needs some career guidance.
I have a sister, a bog-standard gp. She pulls in over £120,000 and could make more if she was so inclined, and if she wasn't so bored with stuffing a million pound house with £30,000 kitchens and stuffing pills down old ladies' throats who've come in for a chat. -
Comment on: ‘The government won’t give a damn about us'
@ Vernon, 'I wonder what got us into the thinking as a nation that the elderly deserve pokey little rooms and no spare bedroom ?' I don't think that is the debate here, most of us were simply commenting on this particular situation, of a single occupant in a 3 bed house. The fact is that one person, should have decent 1 bed flat.
Regarding the argument that 2 elderly people might need two beds, of course, if they are ill, then yes they should do, but again this lady's case is not about that. It gets tricky when people bring in lots of unrelated examples here, as we could all go on for hours about these :)
Unfortunately the hard working family who has the same property allocation as the irresponsible group who have never worked and with a 4th child on the way, is something that we cannot fight against. I think pretty much everyone would agree that the hard working family is more deserving, but we cannot chuck the others out. That needs to be tackled by other means. I do think that there should be revision of the number of rooms per children, many of us grew up sharing rooms with our siblings of either sex and there was nothing wrong with that. Yes not ideal, but the benefits system does not exist to create ideal situations, it's supposed to provide a safety net, and when many hard working families have to live with this, then why should some people be exempt? Again I cite the example of my bro who works 70 hrs a week as a doctor and has 4 kids sharing a 3 bed, one bathroom house. Not ideal for them, but they just get on with it and it was their choice to have 4 children. The assumption that if you continue to have children, you will automatically get a bigger house, cannot be afforded any longer. There was a case on here of a man with 3 children - 11 to 19, in a one bed flat, now he is more deserving that any single person occupying a 2 bed or more house.
Regarding my 'friend' living in her 3 bed flat in Chelsea, the only notification given was the death of her grandmother. Incidentally, although she was given a private education, and her mother came from a wealthy family but they had fallen out, and therefore both should have been able to stand on their own two feet, they couldn't hold a job down and frequently got sacked for being difficult let's say, but managed to go to Mayfair nightclubs and the South of France. Although she used to be a friend of mine, along time ago, I think this is appalling. Hopefully there are not too many cases like that out there.
Finally the rarefied example of grand children staying over, well if they are not living there permanently then what is the problem with sleeping on the sofa or a blow up mattress? Haven't we all done that sort of thing? Providing housing for all eventualities is a pipe dream and just cannot be afforded. -
Comment on: ‘The government won’t give a damn about us'
@ Vernon, 'I wonder what got us into the thinking as a nation that the elderly deserve pokey little rooms and no spare bedroom ?' I don't think that is the debate here, most of us were simply commenting on this particular situation, of a single occupant in a 3 bed house. The fact is that one person, should have decent 1 bed flat.
Regarding the argument that 2 elderly people might need two beds, of course, if they are ill, then yes they should do, but again this lady's case is not about that. It gets tricky when people bring in lots of unrelated examples here, as we could all go on for hours about these :)
Unfortunately the hard working family who has the same property allocation as the irresponsible group who have never worked and with a 4th child on the way, is something that we cannot fight against. I think pretty much everyone would agree that the hard working family is more deserving, but we cannot chuck the others out. That needs to be tackled by other means. I do think that there should be revision of the number of rooms per children, many of us grew up sharing rooms with our siblings of either sex and there was nothing wrong with that. Yes not ideal, but the benefits system does not exist to create ideal situations, it's supposed to provide a safety net, and when many hard working families have to live with this, then why should some people be exempt? Again I cite the example of my bro who works 70 hrs a week as a doctor and has 4 kids sharing a 3 bed, one bathroom house. Not ideal for them, but they just get on with it and it was their choice to have 4 children. The assumption that if you continue to have children, you will automatically get a bigger house, cannot be afforded any longer. There was a case on here of a man with 3 children - 11 to 19, in a one bed flat, now he is more deserving that any single person occupying a 2 bed or more house.
Regarding my 'friend' living in her 3 bed flat in Chelsea, the only notification given was the death of her grandmother. Incidentally, although she was given a private education, and her mother came from a wealthy family but they had fallen out, and therefore both should have been able to stand on their own two feet, they couldn't hold a job down and frequently got sacked for being difficult let's say, but managed to go to Mayfair nightclubs and the South of France. Although she used to be a friend of mine, along time ago, I think this is appalling. Hopefully there are not too many cases like that out there.
Finally the rarefied example of grand children staying over, well if they are not living there permanently then what is the problem with sleeping on the sofa or a blow up mattress? Haven't we all done that sort of thing? Providing housing for all eventualities is a pipe dream and just cannot be afforded. -
Comment on: ‘The government won’t give a damn about us'
The only point I was trying to make is that in a world with finite amounts of housing, it is not really fair for a single person to live in a 3 bed house and to house a family in a bedsit or a 1 bed flat because there is nothing large enough. I don't think anyone can dispute that. I have a friend who has a rather nice council flat in Chelsea, this has 3 beds and was occupied by her mum and grandmother, they both moved out and she was left with this spacious flat, again it is not right that she should live in this oversized flat, when there are people who need the space more. The system should of course cover all your costs, and that would save money in any case. Of course you should not be in debt due to that. As for your comment about being a different colour or immigrant, I don't see what colour has to do with it, simply because someone is of a different colour doesn't mean that they might not have lived here all their life and made a contribution. The immigration problem is a serious problem, no one denies that. The last government, ie not a Conservative government has completely mismanaged the system and even estimated the number of entrants from Poland to be 10,000. That has created immense pressure on local services and it is absolutely not right that then British nationals get booted down the queue. The simple point is that people should have a place to live that is right for their needs and that a 3 person house should be occupied by a family who really needs it. This is not meant to cause offence and as for my political views, these are not dictated by any one party, and if I were hard line right wing, I would not have signed the 'What's the Benefit' petition.
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