Meeting focuses on greener travel

From the Evening Advertiser 

GREEN activists from Swindon will meet unions next week to share ideas about public transport.

Swindon Climate Action Network (Scan) and Swindon Trades Union Council are joining forces on Wednesday for an open meeting.

They will discuss how unions and environmental campaigners can encourage greater investment and use of public transport.

Hugh Kirkbride, district secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, will be joining Andy Parsons, campaigns co-ordinator of Scan, to lead the discussion.

Andy said: “Transportation accounts for over a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions and personal transport is the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide.

“The UK has lagged behind in the sort of investment in public transport that is seen in Europe.

“High-speed rail in France has greatly reduced internal air travel and most cities and towns in Germany and the Netherlands have proper integrated public transport with trams, buses and trains all linked together, with simple tickets at a reasonable price.

“If they can do it, why can’t we? To get people out of cars and cut carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels, as a country we urgently need to invest in decent alternatives.”

Martin Wicks, secretary of Swindon Trades Union Council, said: “It has long been accepted that there needs to be a decrease in the number of car journeys if pollution and global warming are to be tackled.

“However, while rail and bus transport are run as commercial businesses instead of public services there is little chance of a sufficient shift from the car to rail and bus taking place.

“We have organised this meeting with Scan to discuss how we can campaign locally and nationally for a major shift from car use to public transport.”

The meeting is open to all and will take place at the Broadgreen Centre in Salisbury Street at 7.30pm.

It is a short walk from bus stops in Fleming Way and Manchester Road.

Four day postal strike is looming

From the Evening Advertiser

Postal workers picketing at Dorcan in July

POSTAL workers are threatening a four-day strike from next Friday.

The action, from October 5 to October 9, is a protest against proposed changes to hours, pay and pensions.

Royal Mail has condemned the strike and claimed the postal workers have proposed no “serious” solutions.

The crux of the dispute between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is the decision to change staff’s hours from fixed to flexible.

Chris Rye, CWU branch secretary for Swindon, said: “Depending on the amount of post, they can tell us to do more or less and they might not give it us the next week.

“People want to know what time they’re starting work and what time they finish.”

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He said the changes would cause staff problems with planning family life.

“Also if someone goes sick or on a holiday, we would usually cover it on overtime,” he said.

“But now four people would have to split it up and do it as extra work, but not get paid the overtime. That would mean a potential £5,000 to £6,000 loss for workers.”

All postal workers will also take a £1,000 to £1,500 pay cut from plans to stop the door-to-door delivery of direct mail.

The other main dispute is the scrapping of a 30-year-old scheme next April concerning allowances and redundancies.

Mr Rye said that the redundancy package for a postal worker after 23 years’ service would fall from £30,000 to £8,000.

“They are also behind in our pension payments and want to change the way our pensions are worked out, which will cost us thousands. Some of our 1,500 members could lose £20,000 to £30,000 a year,” he said.

“If they’re going to just bring these changes in, and you’re going to lose all that money, the only alternative is to strike.

“We don’t think the business is being run to the customers’ approval. People don’t like to get their morning mail late and small villages like Avebury are losing their post offices.

“We’re hoping to negotiate and reach an agreement that benefits both sides. But they don’t want to reach an agreement.”

“I think Royal Mail are pushing to be privatised and that’s why they’re putting proposals to us that they know we’re not going to agree with.”

But Royal Mail branded the union “unrealistic and unreasonable”.

“As a result of the Communication Workers’ Union decision to return to strike action, we will now begin to make the changes,” a spokesman said.

“The call for further strikes does not change the urgent need for Royal Mail to modernise and become more flexible and efficient if it is to survive.”

Royal Mail said flexible hours would simply mean staff working the hours they are paid to work, and claimed its rivals were 40 per cent more efficient after modernisation and the union’s plans would cost £2.4bn over four years.

The union refused Royal Mail’s offer of a 2.5 per cent pay rise to be topped up to three per cent over several years.

Royal Mail also claimed the union had misled its members by stating the company had decided pension changes without consulting staff. It said all changes would be made in line with existing agreements with the union and staff would get the proper notice period. Further one-day strikes in logistics, deliveries and processing are planned from October 15.

“Postal pay is heated issue”

This is a response from Roger Seaborn, CWU Divisional Rep, to a letter in the Swindon Advertiser.

You would think from Terry Reynolds’ letter that he knew nothing about the current postal dispute.

In fact Terry is a postman and has been since 1986. He already knows the answer to all of the questions that he has posed.

Well he would know the answer if he chose to read both sides of the argument and not just management’s. But that is his choice, as is his choice not to be a member of the Union.

Terry quotes a pay demand of 22 per cent. He must know this is not true. All that has been asked for is parity with the average in the country over the next five years. Terry asks how many firms are paying out rises of 22 per cent.Well Terry, how much did you get earlier this year?

You see Terry is an HGV driver in Royal Mail. Earlier this year HGV drivers in Royal Mail received a rise of about 18 per cent.He has a go at the Union through his letter, and yet it was the Union who negotiated that rise for all of the HGV drivers, not just the Union members. I don’t recall him saying he did not want it.

The penultimate paragraph in Terry’s letter is the most telling part.He asks, if we get a pay rise, will we take action to get even more money for the HGV drivers so that they get their parity back? It is ok for Terry to have large pay rises and want to keep the differential, but the rest of the postal workers can carry on struggling on low wages.The rest of his fellow workers at his depot came out in support of their fellow workers.

R.Seaborn, CWU Divisional Representative. 

Money, Money Money

Martin Wicks reports on recent developments in the NHS.

The commercialisation of the Health Service which we have previously highlighted, has been underlined by a couple of developments recently reported in the press. The Financial Times reported that NHS Foundation Trusts are setting up various forms of charity, joint venture or other arrangements with the private sector to bring in extra cash. The deals are designed to get round legislation that bars trusts from earning a higher proportion of their income from private patients than they did in March 2003, when the law creating the self-governing bodies was introduced.

Research from the Public Finance magazine has shown that:

• the North Bristol NHS Trust is looking to set up a charity to run a new infertility unit where most patients would be private.

• Chelsea and Westminster is examining the use of a private charitable company to expand its private maternity services.

• Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children is doing the same to cover income from its international private patients.

• Basildon and Thurrock is planning a “special purpose vehicle” that would take its private patients.

• University College Hospital (UCLH) has launched a joint venture with Hospital Corporation of America on an international cancer centre. This has seen HCA take over the hospital’s private patient wing, leasing space and paying for services, and sharing profits from private patients with the hospital.

• UCLH is looking to expand the same model into neuro-sciences, cardiac services and obstetrics.

The Foundation Trust Network, which represents the 73 foundation trusts, has repeatedly pressed the Department of Health to lift the private patient income cap.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times reported that Family doctors are being paid for access to their National Health Service patients by a private health company which is charging the patients £145 to screen them for serious illnesses. More than 50,000 patients have been charged for screening at 250 surgeries for stroke, diabetes and heart disease.

Vanessa Bourne, of the Patients Association, asked:

“Are these tests necessary or are they not ? If they are necessary for the patients then why is the GP not offering them on the NHS ? The GP is abrogating responsibility.”

GPs have received two separate payments from the Health Screen Clinic, the private company: an “administration fee” to write to their NHS patients inviting them to undergo the screening tests and a rental fee to hold the screening sessions in their surgeries at the weekend.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has warned that GPs may be breaking the law by using their NHS patient lists to advertise the private screening tests. A letter sent to regional health bodies states:

“The practices are in breach of the Data Protection Act. They hold patient data as part of their NHS contract. It was never intended, and patients are not aware nor indeed have consented to their personal data being utilised for the purpose of advertising private services.”

Dr Ron Singer, a north London GP and spokesman for the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, said:

“The GPs are using an NHS resource to offer a private service. The NHS data-base, which is owned by the NHS, not by GP practices, is being used in order to have a contract with a private company.”

A senior member of the Commons health select committee has attacked NHS foundation trusts seeking to circumvent caps imposed by Parliament on their private patient income. Public Finance has discovered that at least four foundations are exploring options to establish third-party bodies to run private patient services.

As the bodies will be separate entities, the income will not be consolidated in the trust accounts. Labour MP Howard Stoate said such actions were not what Parliament intended when it imposed the cap in the 2003 Health Act. He called on the foundation regulator Monitor to review the situation.

“It’s deplorable that this is happening, but my worry is that this is what foundation trusts were almost bound to do,” he said. “Their raison d’être is to generate as much income as they possibly can. It’s hardly surprising they have found ways around it as they are almost duty-bound to be as creative as they possibly can with what they see as a market system to raise cash. It’s regrettable - it harks back to the pre-NHS days when each hospital was an independent business providing services to whoever they could sell health care to.”

Unfortunately Howard, that is the logic of the market which your government has introduced. The government has given Trusts the right to set up “special purpose vehicles”. It wants them to be “entrepreneurial”. They are following the logic of the government’s market system. The only way to stop them doing that is put an end to the market system and to Foundation Trusts.