How our Welsh teachers are getting screwed

SITTING pretty with salaries of £125,000 a year, the Senedd’s new Plaid Cymru ministers are hardly the people to rule that schoolteachers can manage on a mere quarter of that.

Unjustifiably, the government is tossing aside an independent call for a 4.25 per cent pay increase and trying instead to impose 3.5pc.

The National Association of Head Teachers Cymru gets it exactly right when it says that decision “raises fundamental questions about the value of an independent review body if its evidence-based recommendations can be ignored when they do not align with ministerial preferences.”

A 3.5pc rise would give teachers a basic of about £34,700, below even the £35,796 Wales full-time median salary, and less than half the salary of ground-floor Members of the Senedd.

Education minister Anna Brychan’s move to undermine the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body’s recommendation is basically unprincipled. But it also points to a disturbing double standard over public sector awards.

If you are a Senedd minister, or an MS (£79,817 a year), handsome pay comes without a squabble. The Independent Remuneration Board of the Senedd sets your salary, as well as staffing, accommodation, travel and other costs. The board includes people from other political sectors and is not known for its stinginess. Pay recommendations are consistently at levels which preclude restiveness among the recipients.

That’s hardly surprising when, for example, MSs were awarded an extra £3,000 following this year’s election. If Anna Brychan gets her way, basic teacher pay will rise by a piddling £990 or so.

In local government, the routine is very similar, with pay recommendations for councillors notable for their lack of restraint.

This year, county councillors in Wales got an above-inflation pay rise of 6.4pc, hoisting the basic salary to £21,044 - that for as many or as few hours a week as they care to put in.

The increase was suggested by the Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru (DBCC) - an “independent” body appointed by…Senedd ministers.

Meanwhile, teachers, who frequently put in extraordinarily long hours for no extra pay, have to go cap-in-hand for a measly 3.5pc. This is truly an undisguised insult.

Brychan says 4.25 per cent can’t be afforded. Bearing in mind how the public purse-strings are so obligingly loosened for politicians at all levels, and the comparatively far greater importance of teachers, her argument will be seen as grubby special pleading.

WITH AN air of injured innocence, Powys council says that only once this year has it sprayed the notorious and probably carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate on a housing estate in Machynlleth. So that’s all right, then, it seems to be saying.

Well, no, it isn’t.

Can the council conceivably be ignorant of the fact that a few years ago the German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer reached a $10.9bn settlement for 95,000 American cancer patients who claimed their illnesses were caused by Bayer’s glyphosate-containing RoundUp?

Is it so out of touch as to not know that, seven years ago, a slew of councils announced they would phase out the use of all chemical weedkillers on playgrounds, parks and pavements after a US court ordered RoundUp manufacturer Monsanto, which is owned by Bayer, to pay just one user $80m (£61m) in damages after he developed cancer?

Then there’s the chilling indictment of glyphosate in Entropy, the international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open access journal of entropy and information studies. Interference with human gut enzymes, it finds, gives rise to gastrointestinal disorders, obesity and diabetes. Another paper reveals that glyphosate can increase our antibiotic resistance which, as everyone should know by now, is increasingly a global health problem.

And what is the terrifying menace Powys council is so desperate to eradicate? Turns out the answer is “weeds”, which actually are merely plants of huge help to wildlife as we flounder through a biodiversity crisis (which the council should also be acutely aware of).

MABON ap Gwynfor will have been shocked by Andy Burnham’s first words as prime minister.

Not so much by the content (his declared first job to end rough sleeping, closely followed by fixing social care), as by what ap Gwynfor will see as Burnham’s cockiness.

The new PM obviously doesn’t understand governmental chains of command. He’s telling civil servants what to do, and that’s out of order. Impossibly uppity. Mabon is clear: it’s supposed to be the other way around. Officials rule the roost; they make the decisions, not elected politicians.

All right, before the election he did sound authoritative, saying that “immediately” he became health minister he would see to it that mid and west Wales kept its fully-fledged stroke unit at Bronglais Hospital. No ifs, no buts. A clear promise. Moreover, the hospital would be elevated into a regional centre of excellence.

All this of course being at odds with the fanatically south-facing Hywel Dda health board, who are intent on wrecking the well-established Aberystwyth stroke centre.

Mabon was apparently on the side of the angels. And it wasn’t only the cooing groupies of the Plaid camp who took his promises at face value. Few foresaw that, after the election, his assurances would be run through a shredder.

Post-election, he declares that health board officials, not him, will determine whether the stroke unit survives as a fully functioning entity. Mr ap Gwynfor presents himself as helpless and powerless in the matter. He would love it if the hoary old voters clinging to the moth-eaten ‘rule by the people’ principles of ancient Athens stopped rattling his cage.

He surrenders to health officials the decision over whether stroke victims in rural mid-west Wales live or die. And no-one doubts the board thinks a threadbare mid-west NHS is all the region needs, or deserves.

It all fits with what a senior Plaid politician once told me: “Of course, Plaid’s nightmare is that one morning they’ll wake up and find themselves in power.”

And so to Andy Burnham’s temerity; thinking he, not his staff, will decide on policy and priorities.

The sheer nerve of it. Mabon will have to pen Andy a little note. Put him right. An act of kindness from someone who knows his place in the governmental scheme of things.