EU Working Time Directive; breaking down the broken NHS

From August of this year the EU have implemented its ironically named Working Time Directive. I say implemented, I mean enforced. Even the most sceptical or politically aware of us probably wouldn’t have seen this coming 10 years ago, when it was first rubber stamped in Brussels.

Britain was more than happy to be strung along with head buried in sand that the Working Time Directive (WTD) would never come in to force. The time has finally come up for the country to have stopped being strung along and now for it to be strung up.

We all know the NHS is struggling to provide patient care. Population explosion along with the swine flu epidemic and the recession have all knocked holes in to the NHS. Will the WTD be yet another hole in an already sinking ship? Time will only tell, no pun intended.

The WTD, like a skulking predator came to us slowly, bit by bit, by stealth that the EU would be most proud of. Initially it was junior doctors that were first affected in 2004 when their maximum working hours were reduced to 58 hours, than reduced to 56 in 2007 and again to 48 this year. A 10 hour cut in just 5 years.

A pity that the then Health Minister John Hutton gave the EU such benefit of doubt or assumed logic would ensure on their part in assuming that working hours would not include time spent asleep. How wrong he was. In 2000 the meddling European Court of Justice ruled that time spent in residency on call, including time spent asleep, must count as working time. John Hutton’s naivity showing when he remarked that “it certainly was not within the intentions of the United Kingdom Government when we signed up for the Directive that time spent asleep would somehow magically count as time spent at work”.

Maybe he didn’t study history or politics, or had his head buried in the sand along with the rest of Britain in the 1970’s when we signed up to the common market that it would somehow magically, to the extent that Derren Brown himself would blush, count as the common political climate also.

So what will the Working Time Directive cost Britain? Open Europe estimates that it costs over £3.4 billion every year to be enforced. Did someone say recession?