Week 18 2012

Tendring Topics........on Line

 ‘The Proof of the Pudding…………’

            It was about three years ago that I decided to have a solar water heating system installed.  My bungalow has a south-sloping roof and Clacton-on-Sea has, statistically, a good deal more than an average number of hours of bright sunshine.   I was then in my late eighties and knew perfectly well that I would be unlikely to recover the capital cost of installation.  However, thanks to the present government’s fiscal policies, it seemed probable that the money saved would be greater than the interest the cost of installation was earning in a bank savings account.  In any case, again thanks to government policy, my banked savings were inexorably decreasing in value as each month passed.

            The solar water system installed was a complicated one – a development of the very primitive solar systems that I had envisaged when writing my books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage twenty years earlier!    An additional small hot water storage cylinder was provided in the roof space. A temperature controlled pump circulated an antifreeze solution in a closed circuit between the solar panel on the roof and the new cylinder to warm the water stored in it.  A second electronically controlled pump exchanged this solar heated water with cooler water in the main storage cylinder. The flow and return pipes between the boiler and the main cylinder remained unchanged.

            The system worked very well when it was working properly.   My monthly direct debit payments for gas and electricity dropped from over £100 to something over £70. There was a lot that could go wrong though – and did!  Faults were always promptly put right by the installers. I called them teething problems though it must be said that some of them carried on well into the system’s adolescence!!  Last year at this time, we had had a hard winter in which I had let the gas boiler run night and day for several days.  Several faults had occurred and had been rectified. My monthly payments rose to £98.  I began to ask myself if it had all been worthwhile!

           

            Providentially (though it didn’t seem like that at the time!) last summer my main hot water storage cylinder failed.   It had been in constant operation for nearly a quarter of a century.   Its heat exchanger was covered with hard water scale. The gas boiler was taking an unreasonably long time to heat the water in the cylinder. 

            One of the operatives of Solar Power Ltd. my installers, suggested that I should replace the old cylinder with one of their recently developed ‘dual action’ solar cylinders and thus greatly simplify my system.  It would, I was assured, give me trouble-free service.   It was quite simple really.  The small cylinder in the roof space and the second circulating pump were dispensed with.  The new hot water storage cylinder is rather larger than the old one and is very heavily insulated.   It has two separate heat exchangers inside; one, in the top one-third of the cylinder is connected to the flow and return pipes from the boiler.   The other, near the base of the cylinder, has flow and return pipes connected to the solar panel on the roof.  There is just one electronically controlled pump which circulates an antifreeze solution through this latter heat exchanger when the liquid circulating through the solar panel becomes hotter than the water in the storage cylinder.  

During the summer, it would be possible on sunny days to switch the boiler off and rely entirely on the solar panel and that lower heat exchanger for all domestic hot water.   Even in the winter just an hour or two of sunshine would be sufficient to preheat the water in the cylinder before it passed through the boiler. Less gas would therefore be needed to bring it to the required temperature.

            The new ‘dual action’ cylinder was installed in mid-July.  At about the same time I took advantage of a Government grant and had my roof space heavily insulated by a specialist firm.  As we moved through autumn into winter the prices of electricity and gas rose dramatically and the government cut services and benefits.  Some old – and not so old – people were faced with a stark choice; Eat or Heat!

            My new solar hot water system was working perfectly.  It had no ‘teething problems’.   I could hear its pump switch on to warm the water in the storage cylinder, as the solar panel on the roof began to heat up.  I felt that that extra insulation above my ceilings was helping to retain warmth in my bungalow.  I awaited the annual review of my E-on account with both anxiety and hope.  Had the new system plus the insulation cancelled the effect of the price increases?  Would my monthly direct debit payments stay unchanged?  Was it just possible that they would be reduced?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating!

            That proof arrived last week – a large official communication from E-on.  I opened it with some trepidation, but I need not have worried.  My hopes had been more than justified.  My account was comfortably in credit.  £74.64 would be repaid to me within the next few days and, with effect from 1^st June, my monthly direct debit payments would be reduced from £98.00 to £62.00.   Solar power plus insulation had saved money!

            My improvements had been made towards the end of July.  They had therefore been effective for only nine months (the least sunny nine months) of the year.  Next April there should, with any luck, be a further reduction.  However, as I shall be celebrating my 91st birthday in three weeks time, it would (if I were a gambling man) be unwise of me to bet too heavily on my ever seeing that reduction!

            I hope, by the way, that I am not so pleased with the success of my own efforts to reduce my energy bills as to forget that there are many old people, and many poor families, who are not able to take similar action. They really do sometimes have to choose between Eating and Heating!   I wish I could solve their problems as effectively as I have solved my own.

An Evil Empire?

          When the Leveson Enquiry first began its work, I wrote in this blog that I had little doubt that the nefarious press practices of phone and email hacking, and the even more corrupt and illegal practice of bribing and/or threatening the Police and other public officials, would be thoroughly investigated and exposed.   I thought it likely though that there would be far less investigation and exposure of an exercise of press power that affects every single one of us but is probably not even illegal.  It is the way in which those who own and control the news media influence the policies and decisions of senior politicians, thus promoting national policies to the advantage of those owners and controllers rather than that of the rest of us – the nation as a whole.

            On 25^th April Mr Rupert Murdoch, whose News International owns forty percent of Britain’s national press and has similar holdings in North America and in Australia and New Zealand., assured the Leveson Enquiry that he had never asked a favour of Mrs Thatcher or of any other British Prime Minister.  It was a claim that was dismissed by the Daily Mirror (not a Murdoch publication!) as codswallop.  I have little doubt though that the Mirror was wrong and that Rupert Murdoch’s claim was literally true.

            Mr Murdoch wouldn’t condescend to ask a favour of any politician. Why on earth should he?  He doesn’t seek their favour.  They seek his.  Tony Blair created New Labour, reversing everything for which the pioneers of the Labour Movement had fought, to gain the approval of Mr Murdoch and the electoral support of the Sun.  David Cameron, while still in opposition, interrupted a family holiday in Turkey to fly to Rupert Murdoch on his private yacht on the Mediterranean.  In office he consulted with him and his lieutenants again and again, inviting him to the back door of 10 Downing Street to escape the notice of the non-Murdoch press.   Cameron appointed Andy Coulson, former News of the World Editor, to be his personal spin doctor and pursued a neighbourly relationship with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s ‘right hand woman’.  Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need politicians’ favours.   They need his!

            Murdoch has never concealed the fact that he owns and controls newspapers to promote political causes - unfettered free enterprise and extreme Euroscepticism!  Politicians who support those causes can expect the support of the Murdoch press empire – those who don’t can expect derision!   When, after a Tory electoral victory, the Sun claimed ‘It was us what done it!’ it was no idle boast.

            If we really want a free and independent press (independent of ‘big business’ as well as of the state) we will make certain that it is impossible for a substantial section of it to come under the control of one individual, particularly not someone who is a foreign national, has his home and principal interests outside the United Kingdom, and owes and acknowledges no loyalty to our country, its culture, and its traditions.

 ‘I don’t believe it!’

            My nature is, I think, to be somewhat credulous and unsuspicious; the uncharitable might say ‘gullible’.  I tend to believe what I have been told until I have good reason to do otherwise.  On balance, I prefer, very occasionally, to be deceived, rather than to suspect wrongly that someone is deceiving me.  There are limits to my credulity though. I find that these days those limits are constantly being overstepped by politicians and others in the media spotlight.

            Take, for instance, the case of Mr Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister.   Mr Hunt took over from Lib.Dem. Vince Cable the decision about the ownership of the residual BSkyB shares when Mr Cable was trapped into remarking that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire was eager to acquire BSkyB in its entirety.  Mr Hunt was on record as an admirer of News International, so David Cameron obviously felt that he could be depended upon to make an absolutely impartial judgement and arrive at the decision everybody (well, everybody whose opinion mattered) wanted!

            Adam Smith, Mr Hunt’s principal adviser, seems to have imagined that our Government was the political wing of News International (it was a mistake anyone might have made!) and carried on a considerable email correspondence with News International on that assumption.  What I find difficult to believe is that, considering the nature of the ‘advice’ that Mr Hunt must have been receiving from his adviser, he still had no doubt that he would  be able to make an impartial judgement on the disposal of those BSkyB shares.  I am reminded of the story of the judge in America’s ‘wild west’ who told a captured bandit, ‘We’ll give you a fair trial – and then we’ll hang you!’  

              There is little doubt in my mind that the acquisition of the whole of BSkyB by News International would have gone ahead ‘on the nod’ had not the extent of News International’s phone hacking activities come to light at a crucial moment – and Rupert Murdoch had decided that it would be politic to withdraw his bid for those shares rather than to risk its being refused on the grounds that News International was an unsuitable organisation.

That brings me to the other news story that has stretched my credulity beyond its limits.  I just cannot believe that Rupert Murdoch, the astute news media superman, who prided himself on keeping a tight rein on all his enterprises, on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Antipodes, could possibly have allowed himself to become a victim of a conspiracy of his underlings to prevent his learning about the wide-spread phone and email hacking that had become the practice in at least part of his British media domains.  He was, so he claimed, a victim of that conspiracy and not its source.

            As Victor Meldrew, anti-hero of One Foot in the Grave, used to proclaim on our tv screens, ‘I  don’t believe it!’

‘The Cruellest Month!’

          T.S. Eliot begins his poem ‘The waste land’ with the remark that ‘April is the cruellest month’.   April 2012 certainly was that for our Prime Minister and the coalition government.  A unpopular Budget benefitting millionaires was followed by a scathing comment from one of his own Conservative MPs that he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer were ‘two arrogant rich boys who don’t know the price of milk’

Then there were those emails to which I have referred above – and Lord Leveson’s disinclination to stray into the Prime Minister’s domain and decide whether or not Jeremy Hunt had breached ‘the Ministerial Code’.   Almost at the end of the month came the pronouncement of Scotland’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop that the government’s policies were benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.  On the same day came the official revelation that the richest of rich Britons had become even richer!   The rest of us don’t need official confirmation to know that we have become poorer!

This week are the local government elections.  The Prime Minister must surely be praying that the electorate will concentrate on local issues!

           

           

           

           

Week 35 2010 6.9.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter…….’ Do we Heat or Eat?

I had thought that I might have been exaggerating just a little when I suggested a few weeks ago that during the coming winter many poorer families could well be facing a stark choice of ‘heat or eat’. I now believe that this gloomy prediction may prove to have been all too accurate. Since I wrote those words there has been an enormous surge in the price of gas and electricity and the cost of food has continued to increase. Inflation, particularly of the items that all of us need to purchase regularly, is now at more than double the government’s declared target, and increases in pensions and benefits are calculated by a method that no longer reflects accurately the increase in human need.

Our weather is notoriously fickle. During the past two weeks there have been days of wall-to-wall sunshine and others on which I have seriously thought of switching on my central heating! One thing is certain. Winter is coming. Like the last two winters, it could well be a long and hard one.


Dudley Road, Clacton, January 2011. It could have been much worse!

  There is not a great deal that we can do about government policy and even less that can be done about the weather! Most of us though can do something to counter the worst effects of both. When my family and I first moved into our bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road in 1956, space heating was by open fires in the kitchen and sitting room. Water was heated from a back boiler to the kitchen fire with flow and return pipes directly connected to an unlagged hot water storage cylinder in the airing cupboard. The bungalow was cold and draughty. During cold weather in the winter it had definite ‘no go’ areas.

Over the years (we had a car-loan from the council and a mortgage to repay, and two small sons to bring up!) my wife and I made improvements, all without any grants or subsidies whatsoever. A porch for the front door and, years later, an extension at the rear of the bungalow, helped with the draughts. After the back boiler, and, a few years later its successor, corroded and leaked, I had the ‘direct’ hot water system replaced by an ‘indirect’ one, but it was not until after my retirement from the Council in 1980 that we had a thermostatically-controlled gas-fired central heating system installed, with a gas fire and back boiler replacing the open fire.

We were early converts to the idea of cavity wall infilling and had ours infilled by Rentokil with their Rockwool system in the early 1970s. We had double-glazing provided throughout, and I clambered up into the roof space (I certainly couldn’t do that nowadays!) and laid a fibreglass mat between the rafters to reduce loss of heat through the ceilings. It had taken us a long time, but by the early1980s - and for the last twenty-five years of my wife’s life – there were no ‘no go’ areas in the winter and our bungalow was pretty comfortable all the year round!

Heather and I with our two sons outside our bungalow in 1947. The windows are not double-glazed and the porch not filled in


Sadly, my wife (and everything that had seemed to give my life a purpose) died in July 2006. With steadily diminishing strength and energy, but with the never-failing support of family, friends and neighbours, I have since kept myself fully occupied.





Nearly three years ago I decided to have a solar panel installed in my south-facing roof, harnessing solar power to augment my gas-fired boiler for water heating. It worked well, markedly reducing my fuel bills.

My solar panel.  My mobility scooter (iron horse) is in the driveway.

Just a month or so ago (in July 2011) my hot water storage cylinder (which had scaled up in over thirty years of continuous use) failed. I seized the opportunity to update my solar water heating system. It is now simpler and, I think, even more effective. I look forward to lower fuel bills despite the price increases. I would probably have to live to well over a hundred to recover, in money saved, the capital cost of the solar installation. However I have no doubt whatsoever that what I am saving is much more than the meagre interest I would have received on that sum had it remained in a Halifax Saving Account. I have added to the value of my home, made a minute contribution towards ‘saving the planet’ and, what’s more, I don’t have to pay income tax on the money I have saved , as I certainly would have had to on the bank interest!

All of the above – the porch and the rear extension, the cavity wall infilling, the double glazing, the roof space insulation, the solar water heating system – were done without any support from the government or the council.

The Government is currently paying the full cost of home insulation for the over-seventies including, for instance, increasing the thickness of loft insulation to a level considerably greater than I had installed. I decided to take advantage of this free service. The roof space was surveyed, the installers came by appointment a few weeks later. They did the job in about three hours without causing me any inconvenience, and departed without leaving any mess whatsoever behind them. If you think you may be entitled to free, or reduced price insulation, do enquire about it (the Council, or Age Concern should be able to suggest an approved firm). It really is worthwhile.

No-one can see what the future holds, but I now have up-to-date space and water heating systems, infilled cavity walls, double glazing and a heavily insulated roof space. My mobility scooter (my iron horse) has an all-weather canopy. It is therefore confined to ‘its stable’ (leaving me housebound) only by falling and laying snow.

I am able to face the winter of my ninety-first year with quiet confidence.

 Is your County Council really necessary?

 I was directly involved in the local government service for something like forty years. It was only fairly recently though that I fully appreciated that three quarters of my council tax payments were going straight to an authority based in Chelmsford in which I had no confidence whatsoever. I came to the conclusion that county councils were a layer of local government that we could well do without, and that among the first to disappear should be our own Essex County Council. While loudly blowing its own trumpet (‘Essex works!’) and embarking on such extramural activities as funding influential councillors’ world-wide jet travel ‘on‘County Council business’, taking over failing post offices, launching its own bank, and establishing a branch office in mainland China (some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Essex?) it was selling off its old people’s homes and failing in its statutory duty of child care.

 I didn’t, and don’t, believe that there is a single function of the Essex County Council that couldn’t be better performed by the county’s borough and district councils.

 I was heartened to see that a former Lib.Dem. Tendring Councillor Mrs Sue Shearing, has come to the same conclusion. She believes that Tendring Council should become a unitary authority, responsible for all local government services in our area. She is reported as saying that this would be, ‘a fantastic idea. It would benefit the whole district. Wouldn’t that truly be localism, as the government is pushing nationally ……….. local councillors know their areas and are passionate about them’.

 Mrs Shearing’s damascene moment came when she realized that the County Council had paid its Chief Executive Ms. Joanna Killian more than £5,500 per week last year, despite her generous acceptance of a ‘pay cut’ that had miraculously left her better off! Those who like to have a yardstick to compare incomes may care to know that that it would be possible to hire two Prime Ministers for that amount! She also realized that the County Council receives 74 percent of the money that she pays to Tendring District Council in Council Tax. Tendring retains 10 percent of it and the remaining 16 percent goes to the fire and police services.

 ‘Surely’, she says, ‘The time has come to rid ourselves of this burden and allow councils, like Tendring, to keep the money they collect and run the district in a much less grandiose way.

 Mr Neil Stock, Tendring Council leader, is dismissive of the suggestion. Mrs Shearing, he said, was five years too late with the idea. He is reported as saying, ‘It was tried with others and one or two unitary authorities were created, but it was not very popular’.

 Well, it certainly wasn’t very popular with the County Council, or with Whitehall bureaucrats, who much prefer having to deal with one large authority rather than half a dozen smaller ones. I don’t think though, that Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock would describe their unitary status, and consequent independence of County Council control, as ‘not very popular’!

 I wish Mrs Shearing every success with her campaign but fear that it is doomed to failure. She should not, I think, pin too much hope on the government’s support of ‘localism’. Despite their verbal enthusiasm for giving power to local people I can’t think of a single example of a government or a county council service being handed down to a truly local authority. I can think of a number of instances of elected local authorities being divested of powers and responsibilities that they once had. These were either retained by central government or handed over to unelected groups or individuals directly funded by government.

 The recipients of this largesse would be wise to remember that, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune!’

 The Voice of the Voter

 Whenever I pick up a local paper, be it the Clacton Gazette, the Daily Gazette or the East Anglian Daily Times, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to Readers’ Letters. These, whether they are simply restating the obvious, are controversial, or are just plain stupid, express the strongly-felt opinions of real people, not those who – as I did in the past – write for a living. What is more, it is usually the case that for every reader who feels strongly enough to write to the newspaper, and who write sufficiently coherently for the editor to publish the letter, there are likely to be dozens, perhaps scores, of others who feel just as strongly but who would describe themselves as ‘not much of a letter writer’, or feel that they have better things to do with their time.

 For that reason I was delighted to find that in the latest Clacton Gazette (1st Sept. 2011) there were no less than three readers’ letters echoing my comments in last week’s blog about Tendring Council’s Tourism boss Stephen Mayzes’ extraordinary outburst against the Coastal Academy for letting the school’s playing field for a fortnight during the school holidays to the highly respectable Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain for a rally of the club’s members.

 One of the letters is from Michael Weighell, a Governor of the Academy, one from Ms. Janet Hayes of the Grove, Clacton and the other from B. Nicholson of Douglas Road, Clacton who remarks that ‘Also, the site was left clean and tidy and not in need of cleaning up at the rate-payers’ expense’ thus confirming the accuracy of the prediction I had made in my blog the previous week.

 I think that Mr Mayzes owes an abject apology to the Coastal Academy, The half-million members of the Camping and Caravanning Club, and to the officials of the Council’s Planning Department, whose time he has wasted!

Week 43 10 26th October 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘We’re all in it together?’

I have to confess that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer finally announced his spending review on 20th October, my first feelings were of relief. The cuts didn’t, at first glance, seem quite as bad as had been expected. Government Departments, for instance, had been asked to cut only 19 percent of their spending when, just a fortnight earlier, the prime minister himself had suggested that those cuts would be 25 percent. Pensioners winter fuel allowances were untouched, as were our free prescriptions, tv licences and bus passes!

Looking back over the years though, I remembered that whenever unpopular finance measures had been introduced, they had never been quite as awful as had been predicted. The former Public Relations Officer in me entertained the cynical thought that some of that gloomy prior speculation may have been deliberately promoted, so that our feelings of dismay when the facts were revealed would be tempered by those of relief. We had been encouraged to expect even worse.

One cut that was deeper than had been anticipated has been in central government support for local authorities. This is to be cut, not by the anticipated 25 but by 26 percent; only one percent – but one percent of a very large sum is quite a lot. The effects of this cut won’t be noticed for months, perhaps not for a year or two. And then, when refuse collections are halved, broken paving stones are not replaced, the needs of the very young and the very old are neglected, libraries and leisure centres are closed down or survive only by introducing crippling charges to users, it won’t be central government that will be blamed but ‘that lot at the Town Hall’.

Among the local authorities whose governmental support will be cut is our own Essex County Council. We now learn that they were millions of pounds ‘in the red’ even before this financial crisis hit us. Surprised? I’m not. Jetting influential councillors and top officials half-way round the world to stay in luxury hotels, establishing an office in mainland China to encourage Essex exports (has it, in fact, found us any markets?), setting up a bank, taking over failing Post Offices, and putting self congratulatory adverts on tv cost money. What a pity that, unlike the Government, they can’t blame the debt on the profligacy of the previous Labour administration! The County Council is, of course, responsible for the care and support of the elderly and disabled. I’ll just have to try my very hardest keep out of a care home and maintain my present degree of independence for whatever remains of my life. I’d be unwise to count on much Social Service support!

There are plenty of people who will suffer – really suffer – as a result of this spending review. They are the people, and the families, who survive on the benefits that are to be reduced or eliminated. Some of them no doubt are scroungers who have chosen a life of squalid idleness, funded by benefit fraud and minor crime. I shall be very surprised if these are any more than a small minority. Most, I think, lack saleable skills, are mentally, physically or emotionally inadequate, or have been just plain unlucky. Some would undoubtedly take any job that was offered. But none is offered. And if there is one thing that can be predicted with certainty, it is that the coming months will bring fewer jobs and more unemployed.

Those of us who were brought up in loving homes with parents, however poor, who valued education and wanted their offspring ‘to get on in the world’ often don’t realize how very, very lucky we have been. It is those who didn’t have those advantages, those who drew a losing ticket in the lottery of life, who will have to suffer most to free us from the economic prison into which we have been led by avaricious financiers, and myopic politicians incapable of looking beyond the next election.

Saving the Planet! (and saving on gas bills)

From time to time there are features in the popular press ‘exposing the renewable energy racket’. According to the authors, all this business about the need for alternative sources of energy and the savings, or even profit, that can be made by solar power or wind turbine installation is illusory. There’s rarely enough sun or wind in Britain to make either source of power profitable. Better by far to install double-glazing and draught proofing, and rely on tried-and-tested gas or oil (‘there are still plenty of reserves of both in the world!) for space and water heating. What rubbish!

I know nothing about privately owned wind-turbines in the back garden, or roofs with their sunward slopes covered with solar panels; heating homes and hot water and selling surplus electricity back to the national suppliers. My experience is limited to a single small solar water heating system that I had installed in my bungalow just before Easter in 2009. I knew that I was unlikely to live long enough to see it recover the capital cost of its installation, but I thought that it would add value to my home and that its saving would probably exceed the meagre interest that I was receiving from the ‘rainy-day-fund’ in my Building Society account. It has fulfilled all my expectations.

On the southern slope of my bungalow roof I have a solar panel and two photoelectric cells, one on each side of it. An antifreeze solution is pumped in a closed circuit through the solar panel to heat the water in a heavily insulated storage cylinder in the roof space. This cylinder is connected to my main storage cylinder so that when domestic hot water is drawn off for baths, showers, washing and so on, preheated water flows into the main storage cylinder. During sunny summer days, sufficient water is heated to meet all domestic hot water needs. Even in the winter the domestic water supply is preheated, so that less fuel is needed to bring the water in the main storage cylinder up to the required temperature.

There are, in fact, two electric pumps, both activated by the photoelectric cells on the roof. One circulates the antifreeze solution between the solar panel and the new storage cylinder in the roof-space, the other exchanges the water between the new storage cylinder and the main storage cylinder, when the temperature of the water in the upper cylinder is ten degrees Celsius higher than that in the main cylinder. This means that there is little wastage of cold water when the hot taps are turned on, and that, on warm and sunny days, I have two cylinders – between 50 and 60 gallons in all – of stored solar heated hot water. Temperature sensors, connected to a control panel in my airing cupboard, switch the two pumps on and off.

The completed system is complex but the principle on which it operates is straightforward enough. I described a very basic solar water heating system in my ‘David and Charles Manual of Home Plumbing’ and my ‘Teach Yourself – Plumbing’, published way back in the 1980s. Then though, I knew nothing about photoelectric cells or electronic control. Nor, I think, had anyone at that time conceived the idea of the second pump. My solar system is now working perfectly – though I wouldn’t pretend that it didn’t have plenty of teething troubles, to which the installers (Solar Power (UK) Ltd. of Rayne, Braintree) gave prompt and painstaking professional attention.

I pay my gas and electricity bills together by direct debit monthly to one supplier, Eon through an ‘Age Concern’ account. Eighteen months ago I was paying £110 per month. A year ago, when my solar heating system had been installed but was still having teething problems, my monthly payment was reduced to £70. I have just been informed that, from 1st December this year, I shall be paying £53 a month only – and that is after a long, hard winter and a far-less-than-perfect summer. The Building Society annual interest on the capital cost of the installation hadn’t been anything like the £684 annually that solar power is saving me – and that saving is tax-free!

Let no one tell me solar water heating doesn’t pay. Mine certainly does!

Writing about tax-free savings…….

…….reminded me that among the features of the Spending Review that brought joy to the hearts of all of us pensioners, was the retention of our Winter Fuel Allowance, free bus passes, free tv licences and free medical prescriptions. The national press had prophesied that the first two of these might well be dropped or at least means tested.

However, my sense of satisfaction was severely dented when I read the headline in one of the dailies that I trust, ‘Disabled and sick pay the price to save winter fuel allowance’. I read on: The main losers are those receiving Employment and Support Allowance, a payment of up to £97 a week for those unable to work because of ill health or disability. Under the changes, claimants will receive the benefit for only 12 months………..At the end of that time, some of those still claiming will either be forced to find work or given the Job Seekers’ Allowance instead, meaning they could be around £30 a week worse off. Others will be given a slice of the old benefit under a means tested basis. All of this comes on top of the £11bn chopped from the welfare budget in June’s emergency budget; cuts to the disability living allowance, housing benefit and child benefit, and a £3.2bn tax credit squeeze.

Is the un-means-tested winter fuel allowance paid to us pensioners, at the expense of others many of who may be worse off than at least some of ourselves? Ought we to receive a universal benefit, whatever our circumstances may be, while others lose theirs or are severely means tested? Should our eligibility for winter fuel allowance be means tested, or limited to those disabled or over a rather higher age than at present? I don’t like means-tested benefits. They are expensive to administer and some who really do need the extra money might be reluctant to fill in the required forms, disclosing their poverty. We oldies are sometimes proud!

I suggest a fairer idea would be to make the winter fuel benefit taxable, though I suspect that the suggestion will outrage many of my fellow pensioners. Our state retirement pension is already ‘means tested’ in that it is added onto any other income that we may have, and income tax is deducted from the total. Why not treat winter fuel allowances, in the same way? Those who have no private pension or other income to supplement their state pension would continue to get their benefit with no deductions. PAYE would deduct the appropriate sum from the total incomes of the better-off at source. I would still, I think, get about two thirds of my present winter fuel allowance. Others, whose private pension or other income bring them within the higher tax band, would retain about half of theirs.

It is a system that would surely be reasonable and not too difficult to administer. Why not apply it to other ‘universal’ benefits? The main objection that I can see is that our current income tax system needs to have more income ‘bands’ and that those who receive (I can’t bring myself to say ‘earn’) over a million pounds a year, pay just the same rate on their taxable income as the inhabitants of ‘Middle England’ with an income of perhaps £50,000 a year. It is a reform that could certainly be introduced by a resolute government that was not blinded by billionaires!

How the ‘other half’ lives!

How appropriate that just as the Chancellor was telling us all to tighten our belts, the Supreme Court in London was ruling on the divorce settlement of a couple of millionaires! The marriage of Katrin Radmacher, who is said to be worth more than £100 million and Nicolas Granatino had ended. The latter had hoped that the Supreme Court would help him get his hands on what he considered to be a fair share of his former wife’s fortune.

He failed, but we don’t have to worry. He won’t be joining the queue for ‘benefit’ from a hard-up British government. His ‘failure’ leaves him with a million pounds in cash, the use of a £2.5 million property rent-free for 15 years, a holiday home in the south of France until the youngest child of the former marriage is 22, a personal income of £76,000 a year for the next fifteen years, and child maintenance of £70,000 a year even though he is not the primary carer. He will also get £25,000 for a car, and most of his debts paid of by his ex-wife. Most of us, I think, could manage to live with that kind of failure! ‘We’re all in this together’, says the Chancellor. I doubt if Mr Granatino and the former Mrs Granatino, beset by their own personal problems, have even noticed that the society in which they live has a few financial problems of its own. If I may make a minor alteration the last verse of a once-popular folk ballad:

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure.
It’s the poor wot ‘as to pay.
Thus it was in former ages
And it’s just the same today!

Week 10.10

Tendring Topics……on line

The Coastal Academy

Last summer, as all Clactonians know, Colbayns High School and Bishops Park College were transformed into The Coastal Academy, which opened with the new school year in September 2009. The outward and visible sign of this was the appearance on our streets of lots of eleven-to-eighteen year olds wearing the blazer and tie of the new academy. All the pupils, both new and existing, of the former schools were supplied with a free school uniform and free sports gear. This new academy was clearly going to be better funded than either of the two schools from which it sprang! If money had anything to do with it, it would surely do very well indeed.

Has it? The Academy blazers are still in evidence, some as pristine as they were in September, others looking distinctly weather-beaten or battle-worn.

We should have a preliminary idea of the Academy’s academic achievements in a few months’ time when the school-leaving exam results are known. It will be a couple of years though before it will be possible to make a balanced assessment of the academy’s progress. An indication of the steepness of the road ahead is indicated by the recently published ‘truancy league tables’ showing the percentages of truancies (unauthorised absences from school) in 31 Essex secondary schools. The figures relate to the 2008/2009 academic year, the last before the advent of the Coastal Academy.

This is, of course, one of those league tables where the worst are at the top and the very best at the bottom. Leading, and far ahead of every other school in Essex, is Clacton’s former Bishops’ Park College with a truancy rate of 6 percent. Well behind Bishops’ Park but still ahead of every other school, is Colbayns High School with 2.7 percent truancy. Next down the table is Maltings Academy, Witham, with 2.5 percent and so on down to Colchester Royal Grammar School, at the bottom with no truancy at all.

The presence of Witham’s Maltings Academy in the ‘top three’ makes it clear that Academy status doesn’t provide a magic remedy for truancy. Why should it? I am sure that the causes of truancy lie in the home and the out-of-school environment and that it is there that it needs to be tackled. A close friend of mine assures me that the great divide in British society isn’t between the well off and the hard-up, the North and the South, the aristocracy and the rest of us, but between the parents or guardians who believe in the value of education for their child - and those who don’t. There can be no greater handicap for potentially gifted children than parents who take no interest in their education, put other considerations before giving them space and time for their homework, and let them know that the sooner they ‘get away from all that book learning’ and start bringing in some money, the better.

I can’t really see what even the most supportive school or academy can do about such a parental attitude but I am sure that the staff of the Coastal Academy are doing their best. I wish them all success.

A Soup Kitchen for Jaywick?

Just before the end of February, the local Daily Gazette’s front page bore the bold headline SCHOOL SOUP KITCHEN PLAN. The school concerned was the Frobisher School in Jaywick and the news story below the headline revealed that teachers there are so concerned about poor nutrition affecting children’s schoolwork that they have decided to do something about it.

Tracey Caffull, one of the school’s two head teachers was reported as saying that diet was a serious issue for the school as it had a massive effect on pupils’ learning. She said that the children were living ‘in massive deprivation’ and that she had been talking to the Salvation Army about setting up a soup kitchen on the lines of ‘the ones that the Salvation Army runs for homeless and hard-up people in poor areas’. I think she may have been referring to the Soup Run provided in Clacton’s town centre by Churches Together in Clacton, with which the Salvation Army plays an important part. If this charity were to be unable to help, she said that the school would set up its own kitchen.

Keith Bodsworth, the school’s business manager confirmed that, ‘The aim is to improve the nutritional standard of the food our children are getting, but we will not close the door to other people. We are really targeting the community as a whole, and it will be there to support people if they need it. We are a community school and if we can help those around, then we will'. He added that the kitchen would probably not be based in the school in Frobisher Drive but somewhere in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, where many of the pupils live.

I think that there is a big difference between providing soup or whatever for homeless people and those in squats or bed-sits with no cooking facilities as Churches Together does at present, and providing it for a community in which where there are cooking facilities, however basic, and the problem is that its members lack the money, or the skills, or the inclination, to use them.

I am not one of those who claim that ‘there is no poverty in England today’. I know that there is. I don’t believe though that there is any family in our area so poor that its child members are inevitably reduced to ‘massive deprivation’ and semi-starvation. I believe that in the Brooklands area of Jaywick and possibly other areas, there is a need for child-care social workers to investigate thoroughly, to advise, to support, to cajole and – if no other remedy is successful – to take whatever legal action may be available to prevent child neglect.

I can see great opportunities for the Tabloid Press here! Either there could be headlines about a tragic case of child neglect that could have been averted ‘if only the Health Visitors and/or Social Workers had done their job properly’ or equally bold headlines denouncing ‘Council snoopers who invade the privacy of Englishmen’s homes, probably to enforce some pettifogging regulation dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Brussels!’

They might even manage both!

Farewell ‘Readers Digest’

So the Readers Digest has proved to be one of the victims of the great recession and is no more! What on earth, I wonder, will doctors, dentists, solicitors and the like find to put on the magazine racks of their waiting rooms?

Those, I have to say, are the only places in which I ever read a copy. They were ideal for that purpose; filled with brief, always ‘wholesome’ articles, usually shortened and well written, culled from other publications. They were perfect for whiling away the time while waiting to have a tooth filled or blood-pressure taken, though rarely so gripping that there was a pang of regret at putting them down when your name was called by the receptionist.

I found them a little too ‘homespun and American’ for my personal taste, a little too ‘heart-warming’ in fact. What’s more, during the period of the Cold War (I don’t think I have actually seen a copy since) there was never an issue that didn’t contain a ‘reds under the bed’ attack on anything that could be considered to bear the taint of socialism. I did quite a lot of work for them in the 1970s and ‘80s and would tease the very friendly sub editor to whom I sent my work by suggesting that she was, of course, a CIA agent. She took it in good part and wanted to know whether my pay rates with the KGB were better!

The work that I did for them? I never contributed to the magazine, but I did make substantial contributions to some of the manuals that were, I suppose, spin-offs from the magazine sales. On my bookshelves as I write, I can see the ‘Readers Digest Complete DIY Manual’, ‘The Readers Digest, How to Fix Just About Anything’ and the ‘Readers Digest, Know your Rights’. To the first two of these I contributed the very substantial sections on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage and to the third, a popular manual about the law as it affects the householder and the individual, I contributed a short section about the law relating to ‘combined drains and private sewers’ – not really the most fascinating of subjects! There were one or two earlier manuals that I have lost and the names of which I have forgotten, but for which I wrote the ‘plumbing’ contents.

They paid generously but always bought the copyright of the material outright. With Readers Digest’s mammoth advertising campaigns and pushy (to say the least!) sales techniques, we authors would have done even better had our payment been a share of the royalties!

Commenting on Readers Digest’s demise in the Guardian, a columnist criticises the magazine for much the same reasons that I have, but has a word of praise for their manuals, conceding that ‘I’d never have tried to fix a tap without the guidance of the Readers Digest Book of Household Maintenance’. I think that the writer may have remembered wrongly the title of the manual but I have no doubt at all that the guidance had been mine!

Money well spent!

In September 1980, six months after I had retired from the Council’s service, and after I had assured myself of an adequate income from freelance writing, Heather and I spent a wonderful fortnight touring the then peaceful and united country of Jugoslavia in our motor-caravan.

The next year we decided to forego an overseas holiday and to dip into our savings to bring our bungalow up to late-twentieth century standards. We had an extension built at the rear, to house a fridge, freezer and spin-dryer and to provide some badly needed extra cupboard and storage space. It cost as much to build as it had to buy the bungalow thirty years earlier! We had already had our cavity walls infilled (by Rentokil) and I had installed fibreglass blanket insulation in the roof space. Now we disposed of the two Courtier solid fuel stoves (one with back boiler) sometimes supplemented by oil-filled electric radiators, that had been our means of space and water heating. We had gas fired central heating installed, thus eliminating the chilly ‘no go’ areas of the bungalow during every winter. We got rid of our old and dated bathroom suite and had a new suite installed. We had our windows double-glazed and wall-to-wall carpets fitted in our sitting room and hall.

Had we waited a few years we might well have obtained government or council grants towards much of that work. However, we had done it when we could afford to, for our own comfort and convenience, without any thought of ‘saving the planet’. We certainly never regretted what we did and when we did it.

Fixing my solar panels. March 2009

Last year (nearly thirty years later!) I decided to have solar panels fitted on my roof as part of a solar water heating system to supplement my existing gas boiler. It was expensive and I certainly won’t live long enough for its savings to equal the cost of installation. I was confident though that the savings it would make would be greater than the interest the money was earning in my savings account - and that it would add to the value of my home. There have been ‘teething problems’ but the system has fulfilled my expectations. I pay my combined gas and electricity bill by direct debit. A year ago this amounted to £125 a month (£1,500 a year). It is now £70 a month (£840 a year), a tax-free saving well worth having. What is more, my meters were read in mid-January and revealed that, despite December and early January’s bitter weather; I was £140 in credit. Possibly my monthly payments will be further reduced.

Let no one tell me that the call to insulate our homes and to supplement our present energy sources with wind and solar power, is all a big confidence trick. I have demonstrated that, as the tv adverts claim in quite another context, ‘It works for me!’

Week 13.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘The Year’s at the Spring….

…………and the day’s at the morn.
The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn.
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the World’

So sang Pippa, in Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, on a very similar morning and at much the same time as that on which I am typing these words. It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that all is right with today’s world, and I hope and believe that God isn’t confined to ‘his Heaven’ but is also present and active in his Creation.

Otherwise, I fully endorse Pippa’s sentiments. Even a world-weary old man like me feels a lift in his heart on such a morning, especially when looking out of the kitchen window I see the daffodils, golden in the early sunshine, blooming round the apple tree in my garden. Mind you the scene also brings back memories of the many, many similar spring mornings on which I looked out of that window at those same golden daffodils with Heather, my wife for sixty years, who is sadly no longer with me.

Wind-farm Progress

On recent visits to Clacton both my sons and daughters-in-law have driven along the sea front to see any signs of the developing wind-farm. There hasn’t really been a great deal to be seen. Some kind of structure was just visible and one or more craft near it were the only evidence that anything was taking place.

All that is due to change within the next few weeks. The Danish construction company’s heavy lift ship Titan 2 is getting ready for service at Harwich and will very shortly sail out to the Gunfleet Sands to erect the first turbine. Six of these have already arrived from Denmark and are to be erected on the foundations that have been prepared for them during the past six months.

The turbines will be commissioned in phases as they are erected and the electric cables between each turbine and the off-shore substation laid. It is expected that the first group will be fully operational before the end of the summer. The work of installation will continue until its completion some time next year. When the wind-farm is complete it is expected that it will generate 172 megawatts, enough electricity to meet the needs of 120,000 homes ….the equivalent of 90 percent of the homes in Colchester and the Tendring District.

Solar Heating Progress

It is good to see a ‘green’ project being pursued with vigour and, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, adhering to a timetable laid down many months ago.

I wish that I could feel quite the same of progress toward the installation of a solar powered water heating system for my bungalow, which should reduce markedly my own dependence upon gas for water heating (but see Late News on the Solar Front at the end of this item) It got off to a splendid start. Little more than a week after I had made my first tentative enquiry Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems’ surveyor had inspected my bungalow, made notes of my bungalow’s requirements and had confirmed my own belief that the solar heating installation would prove to be a pretty straight-forward job. Scarcely more than a week after that I had a phone call to inform me that the next day would see the fitting of the solar heating panels on my roof. This would be followed by a date on which the internal plumbing alterations and the connection of the solar heating system to the existing hot water supply system would take place.

Exactly as promised two very pleasant young men arrived with their van and did the necessary work on the roof of my bungalow quickly and efficiently. They fitted two solar panels, together with two much smaller panels one on each side of them. The purpose of these (photo-electric cells?) is to drive the pump that will circulate the antifreeze solution through the two solar panels and thence through my hot water system. The system will thus operate independently of the bungalow’s electricity supply.

The solar panels go up on my roof

The two young men told me that the remainder of the operation was usually carried out about a week after their visit. They advised me to phone Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems if I hadn’t heard from them by that time.

The roof job completed. To the left of the solar panels you can see the photo-electric cell operating the pump. My mobility scooter ('iron horse') complete with all-weather canopy, is in the foreground.

I didn’t hear from them and on 17th March I phoned as advised and asked when the job would be completed. The reply was unsettling. There was a component needed for my particular hot water system that they hadn’t yet been able to get hold of. They weren’t yet able to tell me when they’d be able to complete the job. Yes, they thought that it would be before Easter ….but couldn’t give a firm promise.

The claim that my system needed some unique component didn’t accord either with the assurance of the firm’s own surveyor that it would be a perfectly straightforward job, or with my own assessment of the situation.

It is a week later, and I have just phoned the firm again. This time I did at least learn which component it is that they're waiting for...........and it now makes sense. When the system is in operation water will be heated by the sun's radiation in a series of copper tubes within the glass-fronted solar panels on the roof. These will be connected to heat exchanging tubes within a heavily insulated copper cylinder in my roof space, thus heating the water in that cylinder.

The cold water supply to the hot water system will be connected to this cylinder instead of to the main storage cylinder below and a connecting pipe from the upper cylinder to the main one below will take its place. Thus all water flowing into the main storage cylinder will be pre-heated from the upper solar heated cylinder. In the winter it will supplement the boiler as a source of heat for hot water supply. In the summer it may well replace it altogether.

The missing component is, in fact, the special upper cylinder to be heated by the solar panels.

This is, of course, absolutely vital to the system and I am persuaded that the installers are doing their best to expedite its delivery. I shall just have to be patient. Sadly, I fear that those who know me best would not include patience among my most conspicuous characteristics!

Late News on the Solar Front!

I won't need to exercise my limited supply of patience after all. I wrote the above this morning (24th March) and at 3.45 p.m. this afternoon I received a phone call to say that the special cylinder had now arrived and that they would be calling on me tomorrow morning between 9.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., to complete the installation! I am more than pleased and hope that next week I'll be able to give you a glowing report of the system's installation and early functioning.

Golden (and diamond-studded!) Handshakes

When I referred a few weeks to Sir Fred Goodwin’s walking away from the ruins of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the age of fifty, with a pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds a year I really didn’t think that that was the last we would hear of the matter. Surely, I thought, either he will see the reason for the public outrage and relinquish at least part of that enormous pension, or the government will find some way of relieving him of it.

Well, I was right about our not having heard the last of the matter but quite wrong about Sir Fred losing any part of his pension either compulsorily or voluntarily. The latest news that we have heard about this sorry affair is that in addition to his almost three quarters of a million a year pension (well over £1,500 a day!!), he has received a lump sum payment of £3 million!

It certainly pays to be a top person! I have little doubt that if the irresponsibility or incompetence of any junior or middle ranking employees of the RBS had cost the bank even a few thousand pounds, they wouldn’t have been encouraged, urged or even bullied into resigning or taking early retirement. They’d have been summarily sacked!

Town Hall Jargon

I was both interested and pleased to see that the Local Government Association is campaigning to ban the use of ‘Town Hall jargon’ by local government officials. I hate it myself and hope that I never used it when I was a local government official. Words and phrases guaranteed to set my teeth on edge were ‘monies’ (instead of money), ‘human resources’ (instead of employees), ‘interface’, ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘scenario’ and ‘proactive’.

I also disliked people being asked on official forms not for their ‘sex’ but their ‘gender’. These days sexually explicit words that a generation or two ago would have resulted in the user being barred from any reputable pub, are heard daily on tv. Can we at the same time possibly have reached a stage in which ‘sex’ in its proper sense, ‘that which differentiates males from females’, has become a rude three-letter word that mustn’t on any account be used on official forms?

Among the Local Government Association’s pet hates are ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘can do culture’, ‘performance network’ and ‘lowlights’. Like me, they also include ‘interface’ among their dislikes.
‘Lowlights’, I have to say, is a word that I had never previously encountered. As the opposite of ‘highlights’ I can see that it could be quite effective. I can imagine myself using it sometime. Of the other phrases I share the LGA’s feelings but, like many of my own dislikes, I don’t think of them as being exclusively Town Hall jargon. Apart from ‘interface’ I heard none of them during my local government career and think that council officials who use them are imitating the go-ahead young men of the private sector. I can imagine them being part of the small-talk in an advertising agency, an insurance office or among ambitious young salesmen.

The late Sir John Betjeman lampooned this ‘new-speak’ in his poem The Executive, which clearly wasn’t referring to a Council official:

You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know
I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five

For vital off-the-record work (that’s talking transport-wise)
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin …and does she go? She flies!…….

……..and so on, in Sir John’s own special style.

A leading article in the Daily Gazette (recently the Coast Gazette and earlier the Evening Gazette) applauds the Local Government Association’s campaign. Dwellers in glass houses really should think twice though before throwing stones. It isn’t for nothing that sloppy, inaccurate and exaggerated writing is called journalese!

Post Office Local Banks?

‘What do Post Offices know about banking?’ asked a Radio 4 listener scornfully, at the suggestion that Post Offices might serve a useful role as local banks. ‘Quite a lot’, would have been my answer.

My current account has, for over half a century, been with the Co-op Bank. The nearest branch is in Colchester. However from my local (or any) Post Office I can with my debit card, draw up to £200 cash from my account at any time. I can also pay cheques into my account there and, when paying a visit to mainland Europe, can change my pounds sterling into Euros. Unspent Euros can be changed back again into pounds on my return.

Last year when I made such a trip I returned with forty Polish Zlotys and sixty Czech Krone in my wallet. My local post office couldn’t help but Clacton’s main post office in High Street instantly changed them back into pounds and pence.

The Post Office also manages savings accounts and insurances. Those, with the others I have mentioned, are I think something like three quarters of the services that ordinary people expect from a bank.

If some or all of the other services that we may seek in commercial banks were available from Post Offices, I would be very surprised if they failed to provide them at least as efficiently (and probably a lot less expensively!) than did those who have landed us in our current economic crisis.

‘A host of golden daffodils!’

These daffodils, possibly because they are on the north side of the church, are less advanced than those shown at the beginning of this blog. But this enormous host of ‘Easter Lilies’ will be a spectacular sight by the time the members of the congregation of St. James’ Church, Clacton gather for worship and thanksgiving on Easter morning! ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ they will surely rival those in the Lake District that delighted and inspired William Wordsworth some two hundred years ago.

Week 9.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Relative Risks

I was delighted to discover that Magnox Electric, the nuclear power organisation, is to pay a massive £400,000 in a fine and costs, for having allowed there to be a leak of radio-active waste from one of their sumps at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant over a period of fourteen years! The leakage was discovered only when a member of their staff, during a tea break, noticed that the level of liquid in the sump was just a little lower than it had been.

A spokesman for Magnox, interviewed on tv, made much of the fact that there had never been any risk to the public from this leakage. He clearly couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. If there has been no risk to the public this has obviously been simply due to good luck and was in no way to the credit of Magnox. The evidence produced in this case of negligence and disregard for public safety doesn’t give the public a great deal of confidence in the care that is taken when handling and storing highly dangerous radioactive materials.

Magnox should be getting used to this kind of thing. On 1st June 2001 they were fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £28,000 in costs after pleading guilty to six offences relating to unauthorised discharges of radioactive waste from their nuclear power stations at Bradwell and at Bridgewater in Devon.

Now we are told that there are proposals to reactivate the nuclear power stations at both Bradwell and Sizewell, just a few miles to the north of us on the Suffolk coast. I am astonished that a proposal to construct half a dozen totally innocuous wind turbines almost a mile from residential properties should have produced so much public outrage, and the construction of a potentially highly dangerous (remember Chernolbyl?) nuclear energy plant a few miles to the windward of the Essex holiday Coast and its many residents and visitors, so little.

I suppose that it is a case of out of sight (though across the Colne estuary from Jaywick, Bradwell Power Station is clearly in view) out of mind.

More Power to Local People

I am always pleased, if a little sceptical, when I hear politicians proposing to give ‘local communities’ more power and make them less dependent on instructions from Whitehall. It is, I have observed, the kind of promise that is much more often made by politicians in opposition than by those actually in power.

Perhaps this time the Conservative Party has a whole raft of proposals that will achieve this very desirable aim. I can’t say though that I am deeply impressed with the two proposals that have caught the attention of the news media.

One is that larger authorities at least should, like London, have directly elected mayors with considerable executive power. I don’t quite see how putting more power into the hands of one man can possibly be giving ‘more power to the community’ than giving it to an elected council representing every shade of political opinion in the area. It may well produce a more efficient authority, perhaps (since only one person will need to be persuaded) an authority more compliant with the will of the national government. It will certainly be less democratic though, just as the present administration in London is less democratic than the previous Greater London Council or the old London County Council.

If the government, or the opposition, really wants to put more power into the hands of local people they could try restoring to local authorities some of the powers that they once had and that have been taken away from them. One such measure might be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation* and permit local councils (every bit as democratically elected as members of the House of Commons) to decide whether or not to sell their council houses to sitting tenants. ‘Right to buy’ with its false promise of ‘home ownership for all’, bears at least some responsibility for the feverish rush to get onto the property ladder that triggered the present economic crisis.

The other proposal that has received the attention of the media? That’s the idea that local residents who decide that their council tax demand is too high should be empowered to hold a referendum on the subject, the result of which would, presumably be binding on the local authority.

Goodness me! Don’t we all always think that the Council Tax (not to mention VAT, fuel, alcohol and tobacco duties and income tax) is too high? This idea would lead to a referendum at the beginning of every financial year and to municipal services reducing year by year until they disappeared altogether! Perhaps that is precisely what some national politicians would like.

Mind you, the idea of a referendum on unnecessary or undesirable public spending has its attractions. Could we perhaps have one on whether we really need to spend millions of pounds keeping nuclear powered and nuclear-armed submarines prowling the world’s oceans?

* I am glad to see that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP is currently calling for the repeal of ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and the restoration of local authorities’ right to build houses for letting. I had thought that I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by New Labour.

Custodians of our Money.

I am not ashamed of the fact that since I first started writing Tendring Topics…in print in 1980, I have changed my mind radically on several major issues. Twenty-nine years ago I was a great believer in ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary and local elections. They ensured a strong government I thought. Now I’m an enthusiast for proportional representation. It may not produce such a strong government but it does produce one that is more representative of the electorate. Having lived through a couple of strong governments (of different political complexions!) I no longer believe that strength in a government is quite as desirable as I had once imagined?

Similarly, believing as I did then, that the Commonwealth could be welded into some kind of political and economic unit, I was a convinced Euro-sceptic. Now, I have no doubt at all that the United Kingdom’s best future is within a Europe that is closely united, both politically and economically.

Of one thing though I feel even more strongly convinced today than I did nearly three decades ago; that is that imprudent lending and borrowing is a path to both personal and public disaster. I have made this abundantly clear on many occasions in Tendring Topics both on line an in print. Today I have no doubt at all that it was irresponsible borrowing, only made possible by even more irresponsible lending, that has led to the current financial crisis.

The Clacton-on-Sea Branch of HBOS, in the town's Station Road. It was here that Heather and I obtained a mortgage in 1956 to purchase our bungalow in Dudley Road. Thanks to my spare-time freelance writing, it was paid off by 1971, only fifteen years later.

That being so, it came as something of a shock to find that HBOS (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) had been one of the most imprudent of those imprudent lenders. It was from what was then the Halifax Building Society that in 1956 Heather and I obtained a mortgage to purchase our home. I currently hold a few hundred shares in HBOS (my only stock-holding) and it is to an HBOS savings account that my savings ‘against a rainy day’ are entrusted. I therefore have made a tiny contribution to the stupid and irresponsible behaviour that precipitated the circumstances from which we are all suffering today.

HBOS is now, of course, part of the Lloyds TSB Group, the culmination of a series of mergers that make nonsense of the claims of politicians that we have a greater freedom of choice than ever before. Just a few years ago, those seeking a mortgage or a safe investment could choose between the rival claims of The Halifax Building Society, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank; four then-thoroughly-dependable financial institutions. Now they are all just one, and one that is surviving only thanks to Government help!

Practising what I preach!

Another enthusiasm which I have held since the 1980s and to which I have returned again and again in Tendring Topics both in print and on line has been for clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce and ultimately replace our reliance on coal, oil and gas. I don’t think that nuclear energy, with its lethal and indestructible residues, provides a safe and satisfactory answer and have always felt that our salvation lies in wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

The only one of which most of us as individuals can conveniently take advantage is solar power. I have always been heartened when, as in Clacton’s Old Road for instance, I have spotted one or two houses with solar panels on their roofs. These catch the sun’s energy and use it to heat the domestic hot water supply, reducing an otherwise steadily increasing annual expense, and making a small contribution towards ‘saving the planet’. It is, I am convinced, only by millions of such small contributions, as well as the large ones that can only be made regionally or nationally, that our planet can be saved from the effects of global warming.

I have been pleased to see others have solar water heating installations in their homes ……but have never done anything about it myself. ‘It’s still experimental’, I said, and, ‘If I were only twenty years younger, but at my age I could never hope to make sufficient annual saving to repay the cost of installation’.

Now I am taking the plunge. A few decades ago solar was still experimental in this country, but now it has been tried, tested and found effective and economical. It was the financial crisis that really made me change my mind though. It’s true that, at 87, I’ll never recover, from reduced fuel bills, the cost of installation. However, that reduction will certainly amount to more than the pitiful amount that this cost would have currently earned me in interest, and it will, I hope, be adding to the value of my home.

Last Monday morning (16th February) I phoned SunMaster Solar Energy Systems Ltd of Braintree, an Essex firm (that would please Lord Hanningfield!) with branches in Norwich and Kent. That very day their representative called to see me, largely I think to make sure that I was a serious enquirer and not a time-waster. Today (19th February), their surveyor made a thorough inspection and prepared a specification. He confirmed my own opinion (I am, after all, author of several books on domestic plumbing, hot water supply and drainage) that it would be a perfectly straightforward job. Installation will take two days, and I can expect the job to be done to my complete satisfaction some time in the next three or four weeks.

My bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. The right hand slope of the roof faces almost due south. It is there, just below the chimney stacks, that the two solar panel are to be sited.

I have been very impressed with the speed and efficiency with which SunMaster dealt with my enquiry and the technical survey. I hope that that augurs well for the future. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I intend to record progress and results on this blog.