Week 41 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Helping Hand

       

   It is a sad comment on today’s world (or perhaps on my state of mind!) that my heart sank when, responding to a ring on my front door bell, I found two personable young women smiling at me.  Were they hoping to sell me something, seek my financial support for some worthy cause; or try to persuade me to become a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness?   It was none of those things.  They were calling on me and my neighbours  to publicise the help that is available from our local Citizens’ Advice Bureau.  They gave me a flyer, reproduced here, giving contact details and the range of their service and – no doubt noticing I was leaning heavily on a stick! – assured me that if, when I needed help or advice, I couldn’t get to their office they would gladly send an adviser to my home.

            They also handed me a very useful little leaflet entitled Quick Guide to Welfare Reform which sets out the effects of the Government’s recent changes to Social and Welfare Services, how they may affect us and what we can do to help ourselves if we are affected. The leaflet tackles the replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments, as well as Social Fund Reform, Universal Credit (replacing a number of currently means-tested benefits) the Benefit Cap, the Bedroom Tax and Council Tax Benefit. In each case brief advice is given on ‘what can I do?’ to those affected.

            Supposing, for instance, you are currently receiving Disability Living Allowance and you get a letter (as, if you haven’t already had one, you undoubtedly will!) from the Department of Work and Pensions informing you that that allowance is coming to an end and asking if you want to claim Personal Independence Payments.  If you fail to claim PIP your payments will simply stop.  Your local Citizens Advice Bureau will help with your application for PIP, with appealing the decision if you are not awarded PIP, with finding out what other benefits may be affected and advising you on coping financially if you have a drop in income.

           

A Nation of Debters!

Nowadays practically everyone is burdened with debt to an extent that was unheard of in my pre-World War II childhood and youth.  In those days if you wanted something badly you ‘saved up for it’ perhaps for months or even years.  My parents had a horror of debt that, to some extent, they have passed on to me.  I remember them discussing far into the night whether or not to buy a radio (in those days it was a wireless set of course!) by hire purchase or, as my dad disparagingly described it, ‘on the never, never’.  They did decide to do so in the end!

            How very different things are today!  ‘Saving up’, was struck a mortal blow with the advent of the credit card.  Do you remember the posters advertising the very first ones?   ‘Barclaycard takes the waiting out of wanting!’  Daytime commercial television owes much of its finance to adverts for those easily obtainable (but less easily cleared!) payday loans – ‘Two or three hundred pounds till next payday – just to get you through a one-off crisis’.   But, of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pay back the whole of that loan plus interest, on your next payday – and the interest will begin to accumulate!

            Then there are debts resulting from government policies.  Student loans, to pay tuition fees and living costs, can amount to £20,000 or more – a debt that can hang over former students’ heads for the whole of their working lives.   House purchase by means of a mortgage loan is strongly encouraged by the government that has the ideological aim of creating \a nation of home owners.  That may be the result in twenty or thirty years’ time.  In the meantime though it creates only a nation of home buyers – a nation of debtors, any one of whom could lose his or her job at any time, default on the mortgage payments and become homeless.

            It is no surprise therefore, to discover that debts are among the most common problems about which Citizens Advice Bureaux are consulted.  They can’t make debts disappear but they can help you to sort out your household budget and perhaps negotiate with your creditors to work out an acceptable way for you to deal with that debt burden.

            Debt is like a cancer.  The sooner it is caught, the more likely it is that there will be a happy ending.  The borrower should consult the local CAB before being ensnared by a loan shark or a payday loan provider.  If you live in the Tendring District phone the number on the flyer at the beginning of this blog.  I think I am right in saying that wherever you live in the United Kingdom there will be a CAB within a few miles.  I know that Tendring Topics….on line has readers in the USA, in Russia, in mainland China and elsewhere in Europe and the world. Debt is a universal scourge that ignores national borders.  I can only hope that there are similar services in their countries for those who need them..

A Housing Bubble?

            I have never pretended to understand economics.  I hope though that I have my fair share of common sense.  It is obvious to me that when the demand for an object or a service increases more rapidly than that service can expand or the objects can be supplied, the price of that service or those objects will rise.

            This is what happened with the housing market in the 1990s.   The demand for houses (spurred on by the political ambition of home ownership for all) outran the supply.   Thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation (that the New Labour Government had lacked the courage to repeal) there was no large stock of publicly owned homes to help keep rents down, so private landlords raised their rents as high as ‘the market’ permitted. The ethical principle of the 'free market'  is, of course, to get as much as you can grab for as little as you can get away with. 

            The demand for home ownership increased.  To encourage purchasers, banks and building societies were prepared to lend 95 percent of cost of house purchase – in some cases even 100 percent, with perhaps an additional loan for the purchase of furniture.  On day-time commercial tv, money-lenders touted for custom; ‘Never mind if you’re unemployed, disabled and have a low credit rating.  We may still be able to help you with a loan’.  ‘Then thrived the usurers’, as Shakespeare might well have put it had he lived at the end of the 20^th century instead of the 16^th!

            Inevitably the bubble burst.  Thousands were left with huge debts and homes that had lost their value overnight. Thousands were made homeless, having lost their homes (that they had thought they owned!) and their savings.  Banks and building societies had to seek government help and the government used our money to rescue them.  That – as the former governor of the Bank of England repeatedly told us – is the cause of the country’s financial problems.  It wasn’t the poor, the unemployed and the disabled who produced the financial crisis from which the government is now trying to extricate us, but the banks and the money lenders aided and abetted by a business friendly government.

Once bitten, twice shy.  The money-lenders, having been rescued with our money, were determined not to be caught out again.  There was still a demand for homes – still no great reserve of social housing to keep rents at a reasonable level.   Interest rates have been kept artificially low but lenders could sieve out risky borrowers by demanding a much larger deposit than in the past before agreeing to a mortgage.  Often twenty-five percent or even more of the purchase price was demanded.

Is history about to repeat itself?  When the government first announced their help-with-the-deposit scheme that guaranteed all but five percent of the deposit on a mortgage, I commented in this blog that the demand for homes ‘at affordable prices’ would now outstrip the supply. Those ‘free market forces’ that are so popular in government circles would ensure that  house prices would rise – perhaps as another bubble expanding to bursting point?   Since then the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the national Chambers of Commerce are among those who have warned of the same danger. 

Has the government heeded?  Not a bit of it.  They have expanded the scheme to include the purchase of existing houses as well as new-builds and at the recent Conservative Party Conference it was announced that the scheme would begin immediately instead of in a year’s time as had been earlier announced.  It does of course need the co-operation of the Banks and Building Societies. Only Lloyds and RBS (over both of which the government can exercise direct control) have so far agreed to take part. In the meantime, house prices are rising.  I suppose that, as a home owner with my mortgage long since paid off, I should be pleased. I’m not!

           

Week 6 2013

Tendring Topics.......on line

April Fools!

 1^st April is traditionally the day on which we get surprises – many of them unpleasant ones.  Most will disappear though, as with a triumphant cry of ‘April Fool!’ the surprise is revealed to be a hoax.

            Sadly, there will be nothing good humoured or ephemeral about the unpleasant surprise that, for many of us, will be manifest from the first day of April this year*.  This is the day on which the government’s economic measures, designed – so they say – to reducing and ultimately eliminating that deficit about which we hear so much, begin to take effect.  The immediate effect will be to make the poorest and most vulnerable of our fellow countrymen and women even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are at present.

            From that day, there will be no Disability Living Allowance.  This will be replaced by a new allowance payable only to those who can demonstrate being capable of no work whatsoever.   Others will lose the £208 disability living allowance currently paid to them and go instead onto the £112 job seekers allowance payable only for as long as they are actively seeking any work of which they may be capable.

            Then there’s the ‘bedroom tax’ that will mean that families in social housing with a spare bedroom will have the choice of paying extra rent or of moving into smaller accommodation.  The poor are not permitted to have an unused bedroom for the occasional use of adult sons or daughters or other friends or relatives. They’re not really being offered much of a choice because there won’t be smaller accommodation available for them.

            And don’t let us forget that the government is withdrawing from local authorities the funding that made it possible for them to reduce or waive altogether Council Tax on properties occupied by the unemployed or the disabled.  I have just watched on tv an unemployed (but seeking employment) middle-aged woman in Cornwall in tears because she says that she is already living frugally to the very limit of her meagre income.  ‘How am I going to find the money for Council Tax;  by giving up heating….or eating?’

            But, of course, we don’t have to go to Cornwall to find examples of extreme hardship.   In Tendring, because benefits for the elderly have been ring-fenced and our district has a very high proportion of old people, the withdrawal of this funding will mean a loss to the Council of two million pounds!  The Clacton Gazette carries a report of a sixty-year old who has worked all his life but is now full-time carer to his stroke-stricken and disabled wife.  They have been exempt for Council Tax but have been told that they will now be expected to pay the full amount.  How are they to find it?   They are just one couple among thousands suffering similarly nationwide.

            In this instance the Government has been particularly clever/cunning (delete as preferred).  Local authorities don’t have to withdraw this subsidy on unemployed and disabled liability for Council Tax.  They needn’t do so if they can raise the money involved in other ways – by such means as cutting libraries or sports centre services, reducing the frequency of collection of refuse and recyclables, or postponing the repair of highways and footpaths.  This will cause antagonism between the working population and the unemployed and disabled, both of which groups will resent the exemption of us oldies from these austerity measures. And it will be local government, not national government that has to make the final decision.  Thus it will be ‘That lot in the Town Hall’ not ‘them in Westminster’ who will get the blame.

            Just to add insult to injury, 1^st April will also be the date on which the seriously wealthy – those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year - will have their higher rate of income tax reduced!  We’re all in this together?  Now that is an April Fool hoax!

*I have just learned that our water and sewerage charges (from the privatised water companies) are to go up by an average of £13 per annum from April. This will mean nothing to the lucky minority who will be having their income tax reduced at the same time.  It won't mean very much to me.  But there are those for whom it will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back 

‘Making sick people sicker’

            A few weeks ago there was condemnation from both sides of the House of Commons of the way in which thousands of sick and disabled people had had their benefit axed after the private company Atos, that the government has employed to ‘weed out slackers and scroungers’, had wrongly found fit to work.   There had been a number of deaths, including suicides, by people who had been assessed as fit for work following what was described as ‘a demeaning process that was making sick people sicker’.

            Private Eye, a publication that probes deeply where others walk hastily by, has learned that, despite these revelations, the government has tabled amendments to the employment and support allowance legislation which academics and campaigners say will lead to even greater suffering by the genuinely ill. 

 Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

            MP Tom Greatrex is reported as saying, ‘The fact that people can be assessed as fit for work on the basis of an imaginary guide dog, without taking account of the availability of guide dogs and the time taken to train both dogs and users, highlights just how far the Department of Work and Pensions seems to be prepared to go to find people fit for work without the support they need to make work a reality’.

            All of the above reminds me that my blue ‘disabled parking’ badge (that I use infrequently and only when my sons or a friend give me a lift) expires in July.  I shall have to apply for it to be renewed. Previously they were prepared to take the word of my doctor that, to use today’s new-speak, my mobility was strictly limited. I understand that there are new, more stringent, eligibility criteria nowadays. I may have to appear before government employed assessors. I certainly don’t look forward to parading my disability before those who are employed to try to catch me out   I really can’t walk safely, even the shortest distance, without a stick – and I’m much happier when I have a companion to take my other arm, or there is some furniture or perhaps a railing, with which I can steady myself.  I hope that will satisfy the assessors.  If I have to be even worse than that to qualify for a blue badge there would really be no point in my having one – because there would be no way I could walk from the parked car to the shop, cinema or church that would have been my destination.

A Dubious Triumph

          Both my sons were pupils at Clacton County High School in the 1960s and early ‘70s.   One went on to Cambridge and graduated with a good degree.  The other decided not to seek university admission but to leave school at 16, take a job and study for a professional qualification in his spare time.  He did so very effectively, taking the two parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination for professional Housing Managers and passing both at his first attempt.  Both my sons have had satisfying and socially valuable working careers.

            Consequently I have always held Clacton County High School in warm regard and was delighted when, referring to the CCHS, the Clacton Gazette carried the headline Valuable triumph – School among the country’s top performers.

            Reading on however, I discovered that the CCHS wasn’t in the top flight of schools for its GCSE or ‘A’ level results but had achieved one of the highest ‘value added’ scores in the country.  Very creditable, of course, but it may say almost as much about the abysmal ignorance of some of the pupils when they came to the CCHS aged eleven as it does about the standard of education that they later achieved.

            The Gazette published ‘league tables’ showing the actual exam results of ten north-east Essex educational establishments.  No-one would expect Clacton’s Comprehensive Schools’ results to equal those of selective schools like Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls – but it was disappointing to see them at the very bottom of the list!   Right at the bottom was Clacton Coastal Academy, formed by the amalgamation of Bishop’s Gate College and Colbayns High School.   Only 36 percent of their students taking GCSE’s achieved 5 A* to C Grades at GCSE or their equivalent, including English and Maths.  Next above them was the Clacton County High School with just 51 percent.

            Needless to say the Head-teachers of both schools cite the controversial changes in the marking of GCSE English exam papers during the year in explanation – but these changes surely affected Colne Community School, Brightlingsea (72 percent) and Tendring Technology College, Frinton (69 percent) as much as they did the Clacton Schools.

            It is certainly an achievement to have raised the standard of children of low achievement at primary school – but if this result was achieved by neglecting the encouragement and support of high flyers, and there must surely be some of these (as there were in 1970 when Clacton County High School sent no less than four of its sixth formers to Cambridge) it was a somewhat hollow triumph.

Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Securicor’ to G4S

            In the distant days of the late 1940s, World War II was an all-too-recent memory. My wife and I had married in 1946 and  had not yet started our family. Tony Blair was unborn and New Labour undreamt of.  In politics Left was Left and Right was Right, and Kingsley Martin was Editor of The New Statesman, the leading journal of the ‘intellectual left’.  I was one of its avid readers, on one occasion winning first prize (I think it was all of £5!) in the weekly literary competition.  It was a proud moment.

            The content of one article that I read in the NS at that time has stuck in my memory.  It warned of the danger of private armies growing, competing with, and possibly supplanting, the country’s armed forces and police forces,  ‘Securicor’ was mentioned, a firm of which, at that time, I had never heard.

            I wonder what the author of that article would have said had anyone told him that some sixty years later, Securicor (then providing uniformed protection for cash transfers from banks and similar security operations) would have evolved into G4S an enormous international organisation with its base in Britain but its tentacles world-wide.

              Most people in Britain today probably know of G4S only as the private security firm that signally failed to fulfil a £300 million contact with the government (that actually means with us, the tax payers!) to provide security cover for the London Olympics. They admitted their inability to honour their promises when it was too late to set things right except by dragging soldiers, on leave and war-weary from Afghanistan, and police officers from off their beats, to take their place.   They then had the nerve to demand a £57 million  management fee!

            That is what everybody knows.  What I have learned quite recently, largely from an article by Clare Sambrook in the Friend, a Quaker weekly journal (though I have since confirmed the accuracy of its content on the internet), is that G4S is an international organisation based in the UK now employing 657,000 people in 125 countries!

 ‘Company employees protect oil, gas and mining companies all over the world.   They have served the Israeli prisons service and businesses in the Occupied Territories. For G4S the Arab Spring’s popular uprisings seemed more about business opportunity than democracy.  Last year their executives told shareholders that civil unrest had sparked a rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain G4S gained visibility among government heads of security and built the brand.  In Saudi Arabia the company’s support for the regime during popular protests earned local staff, by royal decree, a two-month bonus’.

Clare Sambrook writes that here in the UK, where G4S is based, the company is a leading beneficiary of outsourcing – the transfer of government functions and service provision to the private sector.  Its success is helped by an ability to nurture cosy relationships with ministers and civil servants.  In this year alone G4S will receive more than £1 billion in long-term contracts with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions and local Police Authorities!

In Britain G4S activities include building and managing prisons, running children’s homes, monitoring tagged offenders, training magistrates and reclassifying benefits claimants.  Lincolnshire is the scene of one of G4S’ most comprehensive outsourcing triumphs.  In that county, they are managing custody suites for the police, dealing with both routine and emergency phone calls and are in charge of firearms licensing and court protection.  They have been commissioned to build and run Britain’s first for-profit police station and they stamp their corporate logo on police staff uniforms!

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation says of ‘out-sourcing’ what I have said over and over again in this blog:  The bottom line is that the priority for private companies will always be shareholders and profit margins.   That is why we have voiced real concerns about the future negative impact of public safety if the government’s drive to privatise mass swathes of policing comes into fruition………..it is very clear that these private contracts are built upon an expectation that the public sector will step in to pick up the pieces if private industry fails to deliver.

When that prophetic New Statesman journalist in the late 1940s warned about Securicor and similar organisations ultimately rivalling and coming into conflict with the police he could hardly have imagined that nearly seventy years later Securicor’s successor would be slowly taking over not only the police but large amounts of Britain’s other vital public services.  Nor that they would be doing so with the connivance of a government blinded by its obsession that private enterprise is always better than public service – a proposition that has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue.

The Olympic Legacy

          The United Kingdom’s summer of almost unbelievable sporting success is over.  It began with the winning by a British cyclist (for the first time ever) of the Tour de France!   Hot on its heels came the Olympics, which began with an opening ceremony that was acclaimed world-wide, and continued with day after day of successful and extremely watchable, athletic and sporting events from which Great Britain harvested an unprecedented crop of medals.  Although we came third in the ‘medals table’, if we take populations of the leading countries into consideration, we were ahead of both the USA and China!

A vey special Paralympian.  Unable to use his legs from birth, David Weir MBE, has won a total of six gold medals at the Paralympics of 2008 and 2012 and has also won the London Marathon on six occasions! This was surely a triumph of courage and determination over adversity that is an example to us all. David Weir won for Great Britain the very last gold medal for the very last event of the 2012 Olympics

           

The Paralympics that followed were, in their own way, even more successful.  They too had a universally acclaimed opening ceremony.   They were, I believe, watched much more widely than ever before and the spectators’ seats in the Olympics Park and at the other venues were full day after day.  It was perhaps unfortunate that they were available for viewers only on Channel 4 television, where viewers had to endure regular ‘commercial breaks’ for adverts!   Those on the spot cheered with enthusiasm athletes who ran, jumped, swam, rode or manoeuvred their wheelchairs, with disabilities that would have anchored most of the rest of us to our armchairs, if not our beds.

            And then, when it was all over, there was that wonderful ‘Victory Parade’ through the streets of central London before a million cheering spectators.  Among that multitude were my elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene who found a vantage point in Trafalgar Square from which they managed to get ‘close-ups’ of some of the athletes we had been cheering on during the games.

            Even that wasn’t quite the end.   As a postprandial treat after a very satisfying meal, we had Andy Murray, who had already achieved a gold medal in the games, win the American Open Tennis Championship – the first Brit to have done so since I was a schoolboy (and that was a long time ago!)   What a wonderful few weeks – even the weather cheered up and smiled on the athletes!  

And after the Games were over?   The example of the athletes and of all those who had striven to make them a success (in particular perhaps the thousands of volunteers who, without hope of either financial reward or Olympic glory, had welcomed visitors, directed, helped and supported them) was supposed to instil us with patriotism, an enthusiasm for personal participation in sports and games, and a new respect for and appreciation of our disabled fellow-citizens.

I think that it has inspired a sense of national pride that revelled in the prowess of our own athletes, but honoured and applauded too the successes of those from other lands.  It was wonderful to see those thousands of red, white and blue flags displayed by Brits of all skin colours and ethnic origin.  They demonstrated that our national flag is not, as it has sometimes seemed in the past, the exclusive property of the White Anglo-Saxon far right!  Perhaps an enthusiasm to follow those Olympians’ example will emerge in due course, but I have seen little evidence of increased respect and understanding of the disabled.  I was shocked to read a headline on one national newspaper announcing that there had actually been an increase in the number of ‘hate crime’ attacks on disabled people.

The government isn’t setting a very good example. They want to encourage public participation in outdoor sports and games – yet all over the country government cuts are doing the reverse.  Cash-strapped local authorities are closing public swimming pools and fitness centres and removing tennis courts from municipal parks and recreation grounds. In Colchester OTT (Opportunities through Technology) is a thoroughly worth-while charity that through the use of technology, helps disabled people to lead independent lives and to find work.   The Gazette records that, ‘as well as finding equipment suitable for each individual’s disability such as specially designed keyboards or computer programmes that read text for blind people, the charity’s technical team have also developed new kit to meet users’ varying physical needs’. All this threatens to end before Christmas unless OTT can find funding to replace the grant of £25,000 a year that has been withdrawn as a result of government cuts.

Then, of course, the government is ending the Disability Living Allowance that enables many disabled people to survive.  Existing recipients of this allowance will be re-assessed (by a foreign corporation to whom the task has been ‘outsourced’!) and may or may not become entitled to a new PIP (Personal Independence Payment).  Small wonder that when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the temerity to visit the Paralympics he was greeted with boos and derision!   

As my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene followed the Olympics from start to finish and supplied the photographic illustrations to this blog, perhaps Pete should have the last word:

                It occurred to me that we have witnessed talented MPs /ex MPs from both sides of the Commons working together to put on a really excellent show for the whole world, and now we come back to earth and have to witness incompetent amateurs fighting it out for the right to wreck the Economy. I would put Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell in charge of the economy rather than have them bother with the “Legacy”!