A mixed day

What a day it has been!

This morning my work colleagues and I had a meeting with our Managers to talk about restructuring of our work. We are told that this is not to do with redundancies and this will be avoided if at all possible. Some of the work that we do will be shipped out to India. Well, it's meant to save the NHS money, i.e., lay off British workers and send to other countries where they probably pay a pittance for the work that we do. Of course, I will have the pleasure of knowing that if my job does go it will pay for another manager in the NHS, that seems the usual thing these days. How all of this is meant to help patient confidentiality and get patients seen quicker I do not know. However, on the bright side I found that we'd won £10 on Saturday's lottery and I won an extra kit-kat!!

Of course it's been Budget Day, never the most popular of events and is expected to be Gordon Brown's last as Chancellor. As a single person I have always been taken by the talk of hard working families and yes, sometimes, I do feel that a thank you to hard working single people would not go a miss. We pay our taxes as well. That aside, I cheered at the shock announcement of the 2p cut in income tax saying to my colleagues "where will that come from?" to find the 10p lower band will be axed. That worries me. That is being mild and I fear that our Labour Chancellor may be making a mistake on this and it will be low paid people suddenly finding themselves paying more tax and getting into debt because of it. I hope that Gordon is doing the right thing. I do however welcome an increase in ciggies, though one smoker feared an even higher increase, I too personally would have liked to have seen an increase of 20-30p for a packet of 20. There will be extra help for pensioners with insulation costs and the Budget is certainly aiming at the green agenda.

A mixed budget for a mixed day, still at least the NHS can now have some more managers with the extra investment. They don't send management jobs off to India for some strange reason!