It is rumoured that his models will be paid in the region of pounds 13,000 to appear in his show, so the supermodels are in town, and London is managing to generate the kind of buzz usually reserved for the Paris pret a porter shows. The American designer Tommy Hilfiger will be launching his women’s sports- wear collection on Saturday as part of London Fashion Week, which begins today. He said: “It’s going to lead to those nurses left in the system working longer and harder, because they won’t put patient care in jeopardy.”There will have to be an about turn on government policy on pay and conditions. The Government will need to recognise that one of the main reasons why people are not being attracted into nursing and are leaving is because they do not feel valued.”Yesterday, the joint negotiating council for nurses, midwives and health visitors called on their Pay Review Body to recommend a “substantial” national pay rise next year.Christine Hancock, page 15. There had also been a decline in the proportion of nurses receiving payment or time off for excess hours worked.An RCN spokesman said the survey revealed that staff shortages were affecting every part of the NHS. One in five had worked more than 48 hours in the week before the survey, and the average number of overtime hours worked had risen from 3.8 last year to 5.9 hours.

Recorded turnover – the rate at which nurses change jobs – was shown to have increased for the third successive year to 22 per cent.At the same time, there was evidence that nurses were working harder and putting in longer hours. One in five of the 6,000 nurses questioned said they expected to leave the NHS within two years.On the supply side, intakes to pre-registration nurse education had dropped by 39 per cent since 1988. Although there were signs of this trend reversing, the effects would not be felt until the turn of the century. In the meantime, retirements were expected to increase as the workforce continued to age.The size of the NHS registered workforce had shrunk slightly during the Nineties while a growing number of nursing posts remained unfilled. As many as a quarter of nurses could qualify for early and normal retirement by the millennium.In addition, the rate at which nurses were quitting the NHS rose from 5 per cent to 6 per cent last year, with many citing poor job satisfaction as the main reason. A quarter of NHS nurses could retire by the turn of the century, with those left struggling to cope with the increasing demands of patient care, it was claimed yesterday. Only a complete U-turn on government policy will avert a crisis caused by the demand for nurses far outstripping supply, according to the Royal College of Nursing.
A major survey carried out for the RCN by the Institute for Employment Studies showed that the number of nurses retiring was set to increase massively in the next five or 10 years.The average age of nurses was now 39, and 20 per cent were 50 or over.

Among them is Hambros Bank, whose chairman, Lord Hambro, is the party’s honorary treasurer. Hambros has pumped pounds 300,000 into Conservative coffers since 1992, according to Labour.Shadow Defence Secretary Dr David Clark said: “It is scandalous and disgraceful that our service families’ homes should be sold off in order to line the pockets of Tory backers.. Just pounds 100m of the proceeds will be retained by the Ministry of Defence to upgrade all married quarters over the next five to seven years.Mr Holtham was worried about the fate of the service personnel under their new landlords, even though they will be given a discount for mortgages on ex-MoD houses.The first year of the deal will cost the MoD an estimated pounds 111m in rents.Labour is furious that the consortium includes major contributors to Conservative Party funds. For them to do this is extremely insensitive.”On hearing of the involvement of the Nomura International Bank of Japan in the consortium, Mr Holtham said: “The issue of human rights in this country has now been superseded by commercial interest.”The deal will bring in urgently needed cash to the Exchequer shortly before the Budget, giving Chancellor Kenneth Clarke greater leeway to make election-boosting tax cuts. Angry war veterans and Opposition politicians hit out yesterday at the controversial pounds 1.66bn sale of military married quarters to a Japanese- led consortium. Contracts for the 57,400 homes, 2,400 of which are empty, were exchanged between the Annington Homes consortium and the Government yesterday.

They will be handed over on completion in six weeks’ time.
The chairman and founder of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors Association, Bill Holtham, said his members, who are taking legal action against the Japanese over their treatment during the Second World War, were furious about the deal.Mr Holtham said: “We are extremely annoyed with the Government. Which suggests that, taken together, the partisan papers have no impact on their readers, either in a pro-Tory or a pro- Labour direction.. Labour has been most likely to make converts among those who read the Daily Mirror and to lose friends among those who stop reading that paper.”He concludes that, overall, “the influence of the press is at most only a marginal one”.The effects that there are seem small, and the net effect of the partisan press appeared to be zero.There was no difference between the swing to Labour since 1992 among readers of partisan papers, Labour and Tory, taken as a whole, and the swing among non-readers and readers of the “non-partisan press”, including the The Independent. Mr Blair’s best friend continues to be the Daily Mirror, not the Sun.

The changed tone of the Tory press since 1992 may have been entertaining for journalists to read and a source of some self-satisfaction for Labour’s spin doctors But … Last year Mr Blair travelled to Australia as the guest of Rupert Murdoch to speak to executives of his NewsCorp global media empire.But Dr Curtice writes: “There is little evidence to suggest that either politicians or journalists should be as preoccupied with the partisan tone of the press as they often appear to be. In 1992, 82 per cent ofDaily Telegraph readers thought it backed the Tories, compared to 80 per cent in 1995.Daily Mirror and Guardian readers, by contrast, showed no change in their conviction that their papers supported Labour.But the study found that Labour picked up more new supporters from readers of the Daily Mirror than of the Sun.One of the reasons was that Daily Mirror readers were more likely to take a pessimistic view of the state of the economy.But generally newspapers seem to have no discernible impact on readers’ images of the parties or their leaders.The study found no difference in how the Prime Minister was rated by readers of the “rebel Tory press” (the Sun, Daily Mail, The Times, and Star) and the “loyal press” (the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express), despite the rebels’ call for Mr Major to be ousted in last year’s Tory leadership battle.Similarly, there was no evidence of any link between newspaper readership and opinions about the Labour leader, “despite the relatively favourable coverage which Tony Blair has received in the traditionally Tory press”, Dr Curtice writes.The findings do not necessarily confound the strategy of Alastair Campbell, the Labour leader’s press secretary, of wooing the Tory press.”It may have stopped the Tory press playing its usual role of acting as a source of reinforcement for the Conservatives,” comments Dr Curtice. Casting doubt on the Sun’s claim that “It’s the Sun wot won it” at the last election, research suggests that the calls last year by normally Conservative papers for John Major to go, and the move by the Sun to a less hostile posture towards Labour have had no impact on readers’ political views.
John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, looked at the newspaper- reading habits and political views of 1,317 voters, interviewed every year between 1992 and 1995 for the British Election Panel Survey.Readers of the Sun certainly noticed that their paper had changed its allegiance, with a drop from 83 to 51 per cent in the proportion who believed it backed the Tories.Other pro-Tory papers show smaller falls, with only readers of the Daily Telegraph believing it has remained loyal to the Tories.