IT is difficult to conceive of a more perverse policy than to penalise the UK’s most experienced doctors for doing overtime or continuing to work at all at a time when medical vacancies are running at a record high and demand from an ageing population is growing.

And yet, here we are.

A pensions tax policy designed to hammer the rich is at risk of harming those who least deserve it: the sick.

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Inevitably there will be those who feel little sympathy that doctors earning over £110,000 should pay more tax. But when the extra taxes actually outweigh the extra earnings, where is the logic?

Even the most jealous of critics must appreciate that when the effect is to drive our most experienced doctors to quit, retire early or cut back on hours designed to reduce waiting times for everything from hip replacements to cancer surgeries then we all suffer.

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It could only possibly make sense if the amount recouped by the taxman in additional revenue from doctors was enough to create a huge amount of extra investment in the NHS - enough to balance out not only the damage done to services by an exodus of senior medics, but to bring the UK into line with the health spending of our best performing European neighbours. Of course, it does not.

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The UK Government’s proposed remedy - the ‘50:50’ plan allowing clinicians to halve the amount they save into their pension in exchange for halving the rate at which their pension grows - has been rubbished as”a cheap sticking plaster for a major haemorrhage”.

If you thought a no-deal Brexit was bad, this is worse.