Today’s Autumn statement reminds me of this ASI blog post (h/t Mounsey). The post itself quotes a report finding the setting of national pay scales causes a drop in the quality of nursing care. The measure used was “AMI rates” i.e. the death rate from heart attacks:

It isn’t that wages are too high in low wage areas, but that they are too low for nurses in high wage areas. This leads to both a shortage of people willing to do the job itself and hospitals relying upon agency staff who are not constrained by the national pay scale: but agency staff are, by the very nature of their shift by shift employment, unlikely to know the systems and hospitals as well as permanent. The end effect is:

A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 4 percent to 8 percent increase in AMI death rates.

That is, where hospitals cannot pay the going rate for trained staff because of the national pay setting, people die.

So, congratulations to George Osborne for setting out to save a really staggering number of lives with this measure, as described Eamonn Butler:

the government will explore tearing up national public-sector wage agreements and move to local bargaining. Then, wages will fit local conditions.

I suspect he has the luck of a stopped watch, but credit where it is due for George Osborne. Let us hope he has the moral clarity to take on the unions and see it through to the end.