Tax 'non-dom' rich to fund recruitment drive and save ambulance service, says councillor
A senior Lancashire councillor says that expanding the health and care workforce is key to driving down ambulance response times – and wants to see the staffing boost paid for by the scrapping of a controversial tax perk.
County Cllr Collinge said that the stats were all symptomatic of a failure to plan in the past for the staff that an under-pressure health service needs now. She also championed her national party’s policy of ditching the “non-dom” status available to some of the richest people residing in the country – but who pay tax only on a proportion of their income – in order to fund what Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer recently pledged would be “the biggest NHS training programme in its history”.
“There are also huge vacancy rates in nursing, medicine and other key healthcare roles, because the government has consistently failed to recruit and retain enough staff,” County Cllr Collinge said. “NHS England has allocated £150 million of additional funding for ambulance service pressures in 2022/23, and £20 million to upgrade the ambulance fleet, while the number of NHS ambulance staff and support staff has increased by over 40 percent since September 2010.
St John Ambulance has also been contracted to provide up to 5,000 hours of “national surge capacity” per month during periods of increased pressure on regional ambulance services. That is to allow NHS ambulance crews “to focus on responding to emergency calls”, the department added. Non-dom – or ‘non-domiciled’ – residents are individuals who live in the UK, but have a permanent home in another country, where they pay the majority of their tax. That means non-doms would not pay UK tax on overseas income unless it was received in – or brought to – this country.
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