Part time policing?

[Morroccomole]

The average salary for an A&E nurse is around £23000, although I stand to be corrected. This is well above being half the salary of a Police Officer as mentioned.

Point taken, but.. you'd have to be a really incompetent numpty not to make it above Constable level in thirty years.

I suspect your now at the wind - up with that last assumption

[Josef]

Point taken, but.. you'd have to be a really incompetent numpty not to make it above Constable level in thirty years.

I suspect your now at the wind - up with that last assumption

Perhaps a bit.

Although I will point out that of all of the friends 'n' family that have ended up in the service, the one and only person that I know of that remained a Constable all his days was a Highland bampot with a penchant for sticking the nut on neds that he happened to disagree with.

Excellent piper, mind.

[Morroccomole]

Josef,

following your train of thought then, any A&E nurse not promoted during their career must be an incompetent numpty.

[Josef]

They seldom last that long. Most of them probably sod off to the Police for an easy life.

[Morroccomole]

They seldom last that long. Most of them probably sod off to the Police for an easy life.

And a better pension!

[RDR]

I don't know where Josef is getting his figures from but they don't appear correct.
Looking at the AfC payscales lets assume the A&E nurse is full time (many are not) and doesn't progress beyond band 5 (probably unlikley in a 40 year career), and I'm not taking into account shift premiums.
The nurse would come out with a pension of circa £13,800.
Nurses can retire at 55 at the moment (again recogntion of the type of work) but will suffer an acturial reduction if they don't have 40 years service at age 55, and many of this generation don't, having had to take unpaid career breaks for children in a way which wouldn't happen now.
Hardly a kings ransom.
They contibute 6.5% of their salary for this.

[Josef]

I don't know where Josef is getting his figures from but they don't appear correct.
Looking at the AfC payscales lets assume the A&E nurse is full time (many are not) and doesn't progress beyond band 5 (probably unlikley in a 40 year career), and I'm not taking into account shift premiums.
The nurse would come out with a pension of circa £13,800.
Nurses can retire at 55 at the moment (again recogntion of the type of work) but will suffer an acturial reduction if they don't have 40 years service at age 55, and many of this generation don't, having had to take unpaid career breaks for children in a way which wouldn't happen now.
Hardly a kings ransom.
They contibute 6.5% of their salary for this.

Which bit are you taking issue with?

I've generalised, but I think the figures I've quoted are largely accurate, albeit it's a few years since I was forcibly privatised out of the NHS.

Looking at the AfC payscales lets assume the A&E nurse is full time (many are not) and doesn't progress beyond band 5 (probably unlikley in a 40 year career), and I'm not taking into account shift premiums.

It's final-salary based, no? So premiums are nice whilst you're working but irrelevant in pension terms.

Nurses can retire at 55 at the moment (again recogntion of the type of work) but will suffer an acturial reduction if they don't have 40 years service at age 55

Really? I thought 60 was the retirement age for NHS staff full stop, although you could always retire earlier than that with, as you say, an actuarial adjustment for age. Years of service were irrelevant.

The NHS pension operates on a 1/80th (1.25% PA) basis. The Police service is slightly over 2.2%. As has been pointed out, the Police officer will, as of next year, pay twice the pension contribution, which broadly tallies.

However, the NHS pension, based on the average UK male lifespan, is collected for up to 18 years, the Police one for up to 40.

So with 30 years service, an NHS employee will in retirement be paid 6.75 times their final salary; a police officer will be paid 26.4 times theirs.

[RDR]

The bits I had issue with was the suggestion a nurse would be on half of what a PC earns and couldn't retire until 60.
As its based on a final salary scheme, it is relevant what allowances are paid within the normal 37.5 hours working week (not overtime), because the calculation looks at the last three years of service.

[Josef]

The bits I had issue with was the suggestion a nurse would be on half of what a PC earns and couldn't retire until 60.
As its based on a final salary scheme, it is relevant what allowances are paid within the normal 37.5 hours working week (not overtime), because the calculation looks at the last three years of service.

If allowances over and above the basic salary are included in the final-salary then I apologise, I got that wrong. I believed that the pension related to base salary rather then pay-packet.

Retiring from the NHS before 60 - that's semantics, basically. Whilst you can retire before that age, your pension will be reduced to account for the fact that you're not 60 yet, so to all financial intents and purposes you can't.

I'm prepared to be proved wrong on the relative salaries of Policemen (note : not PCs - that's a different thing) and NHS staff, but my guess is that the median wage of Policemen is broadly twice that of NHS staff.

[RDR]

On salaries that's a difficult comparison.
I'm not sure on the police wage scales but you would need to decide on what a like for like comparison consisted of given the complexities of the NHS pay structures. I would have agreed with your hypothisis about 15 years ago, but since then the salary of a basic level nurse versus a policeman has caught up, though I would agree there is a differnce still, just not as stark as you are suggesting.

Any allowance within the normal working week is counted for NHS pension purposes.

The employer cannot block any nurse who wants to go at 55, though I understand your issues with the financial side of it. Some nurses, in mental health, would not be finanacially compromised by going at 55, as there service is counted as doubled for pension purposes for as long as they have worked in that field (Boxer 6 should be able to confirm that).

Moving aside from pensions, privatisation of the police service also impacts on nursing staff, as some police forces employ them in custody suites.

[The Egg Man]

.... unless you didn't want to. Many don't.

There's also the issue that the promoted post profile of police forces has changed a lot in recent years. It was something of a pyramid. It's now more of a pin and this process will only get more pronounced post single force restructuring.

first point accepted.

I genuinely don't know what your second point means. 'pin''?

Sorry, that started out as drawing pin by which I meant a wide base (head) with a long, thin point sticking up.

Where previously there might have been (rough numbers) 100 constables overseen by 15 sergeants with 6-7 Inspectors above them and 3 Chief Inspectors above them and so on up to 1 Chief Constable, it now looks as if there'll be 4-5 sergeants for that 100 constables, maybe 2 Inspectors above the sergeants (assuming the rank of Inspector survives) and a matching reduction all the way to the point where there's 1 'Chief Constable' for the whole of Scotland.

That's going to make promoted posts harder to find and increase the likelihood that eg an ambitious constable with experience of the streets of Govan or Partick might have to move to Skye or Selkrk to find a sergeant post.

[Boxer6]

On salaries that's a difficult comparison.
I'm not sure on the police wage scales but you would need to decide on what a like for like comparison consisted of given the complexities of the NHS pay structures. I would have agreed with your hypothisis about 15 years ago, but since then the salary of a basic level nurse versus a policeman has caught up, though I would agree there is a differnce still, just not as stark as you are suggesting.

Any allowance within the normal working week is counted for NHS pension purposes.

The employer cannot block any nurse who wants to go at 55, though I understand your issues with the financial side of it. Some nurses, in mental health, would not be finanacially compromised by going at 55, as there service is counted as doubled for pension purposes for as long as they have worked in that field (Boxer 6 should be able to confirm that).

Moving aside from pensions, privatisation of the police service also impacts on nursing staff, as some police forces employ them in custody suites.

I replied to this point, and it disappeared!

Anyway ….. MH nurses used to have Mental Health Officer status, which meant the first 20 years counted as 1:1 for your pension, then 2:1 thereafter. Normally that would add up to 40 years and full pension, but you couldn't get it until age 55. Hence, when my OH retired at age 55, she had 33 years actual service, with the last 3 years making no added contribution to her final pension, though it did increase her lump sum by a couple of hundred pounds.

However since approximately 1992 (I think, could be later), qualified Mental Health nurses no longer qualify as Mental Health Officers, and hence are now required to work til full retirement age - 65 for most, at present, though no doubt older than that in due course, in line with any other nurse in the NHS.

I'm not as au fait with the actual figures as I could be, as along with many others, my ex-wife and I (she was a psychie nurse too!) opted out of the NHS pension scheme at an early stage, on advice from the then COHSE union reps, and so am in a private pension scheme.

[Josef]

along with many others, my ex-wife and I (she was a psychie nurse too!) opted out of the NHS pension scheme at an early stage, on advice from the then COHSE union reps, and so am in a private pension scheme.

Seriously? How's the projected pension coming along?

My frozen residual NHS pension looks like it's going to be the only thing between me and raking the bins outside Greggs, frankly.

Between me and the current employer I now pay 16% of salary into a Money Purchase pension, and the projected pension has actually decreased almost every year for the last three or four. It's currently projected to pay out a can of Irn Bru and a deep-fried pizza supper per month.

I exaggerate only slightly.

[Dexter St. Clair]

That pension's gone the way of COHSE.

[Morroccomole]

The bits I had issue with was the suggestion a nurse would be on half of what a PC earns and couldn't retire until 60.
As its based on a final salary scheme, it is relevant what allowances are paid within the normal 37.5 hours working week (not overtime), because the calculation looks at the last three years of service.

If allowances over and above the basic salary are included in the final-salary then I apologise, I got that wrong. I believed that the pension related to base salary rather then pay-packet.

Retiring from the NHS before 60 - that's semantics, basically. Whilst you can retire before that age, your pension will be reduced to account for the fact that you're not 60 yet, so to all financial intents and purposes you can't.

I'm prepared to be proved wrong on the relative salaries of Policemen (note : not PCs - that's a different thing) and NHS staff, but my guess is that the median wage of Policemen is broadly twice that of NHS staff.

A very difficult comparison to make however the average Police Sergeant salary in Scotland is £38778. The nearest equivalent in the NHS, say a junior sister band 6, is £28858. Not exactly half as Josef suggested!!