Not LHS yet but working towards it
Take home for a Captain is about £4200 and for an SFO is about £3100 (old scale non TRSS before pension contribution).
From joining I believe you need a year in the RHS to be considered then it'll take anything up to a year to get on a course. Promotion has been rather slow for the last year so many people are in the pool having achieved the 3,000 factored hours. UK commands are slowing down to but there are rumoured to be a lot of people leaving for BA and VS (can't blame them).
5/2/5/4 works out great. Very often you'll have a couple of standby's thrown into the pattern and lately not been called for any of them so in the 16 day block you can get 8 on and 8 off! However I'm in the regions and every base is different so that may not be the full picture, just as I see it.
Not the best company in the UK but neither is it the worst!