Nurses' pay, Scottish seats, Penalty shootouts
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is happening to nurses pay?
Amid reports of nurses using food banks, Jeremy Hunt said he doesn’t recognise claims their wages are worth less now than in 2010. He says nurses are actually paid £31,000 - more than the average person. If he’s right, why do so many nurses say they’re earning much less than that?
The Great Scottish Election Conspiracy
The reporting of the Scottish council elections has caused a bit of a stir. Did the SNP lose seven seats or gain six. The media including the BBC reported that they had lost seats, the many SNP supporters are sure that this isn’t a fair representation of their performance. This all hinges on how you look at the results last time around and how you account for the major boundary review that took place between elections. Tim tries to get to the bottom of what has happened with Professor David Denver from Lancaster University.
Penalty shootout maths
What do coffee, stew and nerve-biting football finales have in common? Maths whizz and football aficionado Rob Eastaway explains all. UEFA, European football’s governing body, is currently trialling a new system for penalty shootouts. But what is the maths behind the new system – and could a century-old Scandinavian mathematical sequence offer a better approach?
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Charlotte McDonald
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Tim Harford here, thank you for downloading the Radio 4 edition of More or Less, first broadcast on Friday the 12th of May. |
| 0:45.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less, your weekly guide to the numbers all around us, |
| 0:49.4 | in the news, in life, and in the election campaign. This week strange reporting of the Scottish local election result. |
| 0:57.8 | But first, an awful lot of nurses have got in touch with us this week. They were surprised to hear the health |
| 1:03.5 | secretary, Jeremy Hunt, telling the BBC's Andrew Mar that nurses get paid |
| 1:08.2 | more than the average person. You've got a real problem of pay in NHS, nurses who have had seven years of pay freeze. |
| 1:16.6 | I put it to the Prime Minister, the Royal College of Nursing says that nurses are having to go to |
| 1:21.3 | food banks at the moment. |
| 1:22.6 | And she said there were complex reasons why people go to food banks. |
| 1:25.8 | Are the complex reasons why nurses have to go to food banks? |
| 1:28.6 | Well, let's look at the facts. |
| 1:29.8 | The minimum a nurse can be paid in this country is $22,000, |
| 1:34.0 | £27,000 in inner London. |
| 1:37.0 | That assumes they do no night shifts or antisocial hours which in practice most of them will the average pay for nurses is 31,000 |
| 1:46.2 | which is and more by 11% in real terms well we don't agree with those numbers but |
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