Week 27 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money’

            These days, of course, it wouldn’t be the king but the Chancellor of the Exchequer.   For me, Chancellor George Osborne lost all credibility and respect when, at the same time as introducing an austerity programme that penalised the poor and disadvantaged, he reduced the liability for income tax of the seriously wealthy; those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!   Quite apart from the flagrant injustice of penalising the poor and rewarding the rich, I find it incredible that any Chancellor of a country with a serious deficit problem should deliberately, and despite widespread protest, cut off a source of revenue. That the source consisted of very wealthy people who would barely notice the loss compounds the irresponsibility of the action.

             The Chancellor expects to be credited with ‘helping the poor’ when he raises the threshold of liability for income tax, thus ‘taking thousands of low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether’. It isn’t only the poor who are helped.  Raising the tax liability threshold benefits all income tax payers, including the very wealthiest.  What’s more, being ‘taken out of the income tax system altogether’ automatically makes those affected into second class citizens, patronised by ‘we tax-payers who have to support a nation full of slackers and scroungers!

            Last week’s financial statement continued the tradition that the Chancellor and his colleagues have established.  Can they possibly really believe that the poor are to blame for their poverty and that that there is work in plenty available for those who genuinely seek it?  Extending to seven days the time that elapses before an unemployed person can sign on to claim job-seekers’ allowance suggests that they do.  Unemployed and penniless people and their families still need to eat, pay the rent, and buy other necessities during those seven days.  How else can those without savings do so without resorting to the ‘help’ of a loan-shark or one of those pay-day loans that are so deceptively easy to obtain and so very, very difficult to pay off.

            It isn’t likely that very many people will criticise the decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to elderly Brits. living in countries enjoying milder winters than those in the UK. It hadn’t even occurred to me that those who choose to live permanently overseas had been receiving it!  The countries affected are residents in European Union countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including France but excluding Italy.   At first glance that seems ridiculous. Surely winters in, for instance, Calais and Rouen must more closely resemble those in Britain than do winters in Naples or Palermo?

            Probably so – but the decision is made by a comparison between the average winter temperature in south-west England and the average winter temperature throughout the country concerned.   Italy’s average winter temperature is brought down by the permanently snow-capped Italian Alps and by the peaks of the Apennines extending down ‘the spine’ of Italy. I doubt if many, if any, ex-pats live among those peaks…………… but rules are rules!

            I really don’t understand why the Chancellor is so reluctant to use income tax to make winter fuel allowance and other benefits fairer, and yield revenue to narrow that deficit much more easily and painlessly than anything that he has done so far.  The state retirement pension is subject to income tax.  I can see no valid reason why all benefits (in fact, all sources of income) shouldn’t be similarly taxed.

            The only conclusion that I can reach is that the Chancellor’s political outlook, and that of his colleagues sees something morally wrong  in the idea that we should be taxed in accordance with our ability to pay.   A couple of pence in the pound on VAT or customs duty may lose a few votes, but it is tolerable because ‘the rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ pay exactly the same amount.  That clearly is the government’s idea of us ‘all being in this together’.

            A tax for rich and poor alike based proportionately on ability to pay?  Unthinkable – that’s the road to red revolution and the end of civilisation for ‘people like us’ (with a Rolls in the garage, a yacht in the marina, and a second home in Majorca).

            Mrs Thatcher must have had much the same idea when she replaced the rating system for the local financing of local government by the Poll Tax.   Rate demands had, admittedly very imperfectly, reflected the wealth or poverty of the householder.   The poll tax was the same for us all, the millionaire, the slum dweller and the rural cottager.  A late 14^th century version of the Poll Tax triggered the Peasants’ Revolt.  The late 20^th century version triggered revolt against Mrs Thatcher and her government and led to her eventual downfall at the hands of her own supporters. I think it unlikely that I shall still be around to see the eventual consequences in the 21^st century, of robbing the poor to make the wealthy even richer.

Clacton County High School

          My two sons were both pupils at Clacton County High School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  Both did very well there and I have always followed the progress of the school with a warm interest.

            I was very pleased therefore to read in the Clacton Gazette that the CCHS is in the top twenty percent of schools for raising pupils’ educational standards from admission at 11 to completing their GCSE examinations at 16.   Sue Williamson, chief executive of the Secondary School Admission Test education group, is reported as saying ‘Clacton County High School should be congratulated for their stunning performance in adding value to their students’ achievements.  It is one of the best schools in the country in outperforming expectations for their pupils and improving their future prospects.  There is plenty that other schools could learn from their success’.

            So far, so good.  It isn’t quite the whole story though.   On a back page of the same Gazette are to be found tables showing the percentage of pupils from each school and educational  establishment in Colchester and the Tendring District who went on to University or other Higher Education Institution.  These give a rather different picture.   Out of 110 school leavers from Clacton County High School 44 percent went on to Higher Education Institutions but only 6 percent went to the top third of these (that is, to a good university).  Not a single pupil from any school or other institution within the Tendring District gained admission to either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.  Things have been very different in the not-too-distant past.

  Peter Hall B.A.(Cantab) aged 21, on his graduation day. Selwyn College Chapel is in the background.  He was subsequently made an M.A.     

My elder son left Clacton County High School in 1970 at the age of 17, having sat and passed his ‘A’ level exams with outstanding results,. He had been  accepted by Selwyn College, Cambridge to begin his life there as an undergraduate from September 1971. He would then be just 18.  He spent his ‘gap year’ working in the store room of the Eastern Electricity Board HQ in Clacton, learning something of the ‘real world’ of work before he began his studies.  In 1971 he was one of  at least four CCHS sixth formers who became students at Cambridge University, all of whom graduated with honours.  Those four I knew about personally.  There may well have been others whom I didn’t know who started at either Oxford of Cambridge that same year.

       I don’t believe that young men and women of Clacton at the end of the 1960s were cleverer than those of the first decade of the 21^st century.  While it is possible that they were prepared to work and study harder (there certainly weren’t the distractions then that there are today) I think that their expectations and those of their teachers were higher, and that their teachers were more inspiring – and perhaps more skilled.

            Clacton County High School has proved itself brilliant at instilling a basic education into what may sometimes have been unpromising and perhaps resistant human material.  I believe though that the low percentage of pupils gaining admission to the best Universities – and none at all to Oxford and Cambridge – demonstrates that the school is failing its more gifted and hard-working pupils.   

           

   .

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!