Sir, According to your last issue (Herald, May 20), Oxford hospitals are facing a recruitment crisis in nursing and are looking overseas to fill vacancies.

When I was a lad, the idea was that if something was in short supply, you had to pay more for it. That should be tried here – Oxford is the UK’s least affordable city and things are probably similar for most of south-east England.

One option would be to extend London weighting for public service staff to the Thames Valley. This would cost money, but as your article makes clear, the present methods of dealing with the staff shortages, such as using agency and bank staff and paying for flights and relocation packages, are costing money anyway. It is not clear that they will make enough of a difference. The NHS will have to pay the market rate for staff as a priority if it is to deliver services.

What worries me is that keeping pay down will result in more demands on the taxpayer in the form of housing subsidies in this very expensive county. Twenty years ago, while working at a hospital in Oxford, I heard the general manager tell someone that one of the nurses was planning to leave because she couldn’t afford her rent in the nurses’ home. He had to reduce the rent as he was short of nursing staff.

The extra money for this presumably came from the taxpayer via the NHS budget. Nowadays it might be social housing subsidised by the local authority, again at extra cost to the taxpayer; in this case, part of the true cost of providing NHS services would be buried under a different budget heading, but would be just as real.

Peter Smith
Bostock Road, Abingdon