Week 3 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

Helping to ‘Save the Planet’…….and make a profit!

            It isn’t all that often that the most responsible course of action, the course of action that ultimately benefits our fellow men and women, is also the most financially profitable one.  This has recently happened in Colchester though and is extremely satisfying to all who are concerned about the need to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and those who believe, as I do, in the value of local government.

            Two years ago, in 2011, Colchester Borough Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on 850 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes, thus using the sun’s rays to generate electricity to power those homes and to feed any surplus back into the national grid.  I have little doubt that, at the time they faced – and faced down – criticism from Climate Change Deniers and those who are convinced that all attempts to use renewable sources of energy are devilish schemes dreamed up by ‘Brussels’ to impoverish us Brits and to line the pockets of ‘foreign’ investors.

            Now the scheme is bearing fruit and confounding its critics.  Tenants get between £100 and £150 off their electricity bills each year and Colchester Council gets a share of the tariff paid by the National Grid.   Councillor Paul Smith, the Council’s financial supremo, recently reported that he had received the first cheque from the Electricity Authority.   It was for the first three-quarters of 2012 and amounted to £60,000.  He believes that over the 25 year period of the contract, the scheme will net more than £2 million for the Council.

            Solar power is worth having.  My own very modest solar water heating system demonstrates that very effectively.  From March through to October, if there are between six and seven hours of sunshine, my single solar panel will supply all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours.  When there is less than that, and even during the winter months, an hour or two’s sunshine will preheat the water flowing into my boiler to 20 or 30 degrees, thus reducing the amount of gas needed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to the required level.

Empowering Head Teachers

          The government encourages local schools to ‘cast off the fetters’ of the local education authority and become free schools or academies, deciding on their own curricula and purchasing their own text books, teaching aids and so on.  ‘They know what they want far better than some bureaucrat employed by the County Council does!’

            Quite so, but head teachers are skilled at teaching, not at buying equipment.  It is unreasonable to expect them to be also wise and responsible purchasers, able to spot the unreliable supplier and the glib but dodgy sales representative.  A month or so ago BBC’s Panorama tv programme featured head teachers who had been brought to nervous breakdown, resignation from their posts, and the verge of suicide because they had failed in a task for which they had never been trained and had allowed con men to sell them substandard equipment.    Typically they had been offered, and had paid for, computers for every pupil at what was ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’ price only to find interminable delays in delivery, that they had bought substandard equipment that couldn’t be made to work or broke down soon after being delivered, or wasn’t sufficiently sturdy to stand up to use (and misuse) by exuberant pre-teenagers.

            The ‘pen-pushers at the County Hall’, with long experience of bulk purchase, would probably have been able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the genuine from the phoney.  Those though, are not the skills imparted at Teachers’ Training Colleges.  Head Teachers can’t be expected to have them.

 

            Something of the sort seems to have happened just outside our area.  Honywood Community Science School, in Coggeshall, became an academy in May 2011 gaining independence – and an extra £200,000 added to its annual budget.  In October each of the 1,200 pupils was given a £400 iPad tablet.   There is no suggestion that these were in any way faulty but they were, by their nature, fragile.  Within a year 489 (40% of the total) had been damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced.

            Head Teacher Simon Mason told the Gazette that the high breakage rate had been due to inadequate protection cases and says that the number of broken iPads has fallen significantly since the cases were replaced. Presumably when he ordered the iPads in the first instance he had also chosen their cases?  He is reported as saying, ‘The tablet is integral to Honeywood’s focus on independent pupil-led learning.   Pupils are encouraged to find their own ways to learn and present their work, and the teacher’s role is to facilitate rather than direct’.

            Goodness, that’s impressive.  If I were a parent seeking a good secondary school for my offspring, those two sentences alone would be enough to persuade me to look elsewhere!

            Peter Inson, retired former headmaster living in East Mersea believes that giving gadgets to children free is an ill-advised idea.   The Gazette also reports him as saying, ‘I am not a technophobe, but I would be concerned about what pupils are using them for. An iPad gives them instant access to the internet’.

            Surely teachers, whether ‘head’ or assistant, are best engaged in doing what they are trained to do – teaching (even perhaps ‘directing’!) children and leave purchasing to those who can claim expertise in that field; ‘those bureaucrats at County Hall’ for instance.

What’s a job worth?

          That question is prompted by the news that members of the House of Commons have recently been asked to reveal, in guaranteed anonymity, what they feel their salaries ought to be.   A comfortable majority replied that they felt they deserved a 32 percent rise.

            This surely demonstrates, what some of us have suspected for some time, that members of parliament live in a different world from most of their constituents.  MPs currently receive an annual salary in excess of £65,000 a year and enjoy long holidays, generous expense allowances (even nowadays when it is much more difficult to fiddle them!) and quite a few worth-while perks; lots of free lunches and dinners for instance and, for those who nod, cheer and jeer ‘in the House’ at the right moments and troop dutifully into the division lobby when required, overseas trips to exciting and exotic places at the tax-payers’ expense.  Most of the rest of us, I think, would feel that they are doing quite nicely.

            A Conservative MP (but it could have just as easily been one from Labour or the Lib.Dems) when asked to comment on tv, declared that many MPs could earn twice as much outside parliament but gave it all up to serve poor suffering humanity.  He may have brought some of his tv viewers to tears with his portrayal of an MP’s wife explaining to the children on Christmas Eve that Santa Claus wouldn’t be visiting them this year because their daddy had nobly chosen to serve the community instead of concentrating on making more and even more money.

            I wonder that no-one has thought of relying on the market forces that rule most aspects of our lives these days, to determine the proper level of MPs salaries.   While there are at least two or three applicants on the short list for each vacancy that occurs (and many more hopeful applicants have been eliminated by the local political parties long before the election) salaries are obviously generous enough to attract them.   Now that we’re ‘all in this together’, cutting MPs and Ministers’ salaries and allowances might be among the hard and painful decisions that should be made.    So far, those who have made such decisions have had to endure very little personal hardship and even less pain.

The Danish Example

          If anyone had told me eighteen months ago that I would be hooked on a tv (BBC4) who-done-it with a sub-plot about the election of the Mayor of Copenhagen, with the leading actor a dour woman detective on the brink of middle age and with the dialogue in Danish but with English subtitles, I would have thought they were mad. If they went on to say that I would be at least equally captivated by a tv serial in the same  language about a Danish woman prime minister and her problems in holding together a fragile coalition while coping with her conscience and problems within her own family, I’d have really thought they should be sectioned!

            Yet I have been entranced by three series (I thought that the first was the best) of ‘The Killing’, featuring Sara Lund, the unsmiling cardigan-wearing Copenhagen woman detective, and am currently hooked on the second series of Borgen, in which likeable Birgitte Nyburg, Denmark’s fictional Prime Minister, struggles with her conscience, an unruly coalition government, and her family problems.   We have also had The Bridge in which a particularly gruesome murder which left the victim at the midpoint of the international bridge joining Denmark and Sweden, is solved by co-operation between Swedish aspergic woman detective Saga Noren and a male Danish detective from Copenhagen.  Although The Bridge held me, I couldn’t warm to Saga Noren as I had to Sara Lund!

            I wasn’r alone in my enthusiasm for these Scandinavian dramas.   Readers’ letters in the Radio Times and elsewhere in the national press make it clear that this enthusiasm is widespread throughout the UK particularly among viewers who have had a surfeit of inane quizzes, ‘reality’ programmes, cookery programmes, celebrity worship, and wealthy people seeking an ‘escape to the country’..

            These Danish offerings seem too to have an edge on most British crime and political dramas.  I have felt ‘at home’ among the characters and in the landscape.  It’s not surprising perhaps.  The Danish landscape is similar to that of Essex and Suffolk and most of us, particularly those who are natives of eastern England, certainly have Danish ancestors!  In Borgen, the political drama currently broadcast on Saturday evenings, there's a fragile coalition government struggling with its finances.  The fact that this (taking place against a background of power struggles and domestic upheaval) holds the attention and interest of viewers, is a tribute to the skill of the producers and script-writers.

            These tv dramas have aroused British public interest in the country that produced them and have inspired a number of feature articles on Denmark in the popular press. We were once, admittedly a thousand years ago, united.  Like us the Danes have a constitutional monarchy.  Like us they are members of the European Union but have their own currency and not the Euro.  There though the similarity ends.

            Whereas the UK has the widest gap between the very rich and the very poor of any developed and democratic European country, Denmark has already achieved what I (a voice crying in the wilderness!) have been advocating in this blog for several years; one of the narrowest gaps between rich and poor in the civilised world.  One article that I read commented with amazement that a Danish solicitor’s income is only twice that of his office cleaner.   And why should it be more than that – they have similar needs, both work hard at their particular task and while the solicitor’s work is interesting and challenging, that of the cleaner is tiring, boring and repetitive?.  The solicitor’s education and training took much longer than the cleaner’s but in Denmark university education is free (as it was in the UK before the advent of the Thatcher/Blair axis!) and there are generous grants for students.  In the UK it has been conceded that it is not unreasonable for the pay of the most senior positions in the public service to be limited to no more than ten times that of the most humble worker. That surely is still a ridiculously high differential -  but in the private sector the idea that there should be any such relationship whatsoever  produces outrage!

            Denmark has, by our standards, a very high rate of income tax but it seems that the Danes pay it happily, believing it is used in the national interest and not for such stupid, extravagant and totally counter-productive purposes as maintaining a fleet of nuclear submarines patrolling the high seas and failing to deter either terrorists or ‘rogue states’ from their nefarious activities.

            There’s a lot that our politicians and business men and women, as well as our tv programme producers, could learn from our Danish cousins and EU partners.  I wish that I thought there was the slightest chance of their being prepared to do so!

              

         

 

           

Week 34 2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

Paying for Daytime Television

          For the two years following the accident in 2004 that resulted in my wife becoming increasingly disabled, she and I watched a good deal of both daytime and evening television. After her life came to an end in 2006 I watched ‘the box’ much less. I was desperately seeking busyness to help fill the gaping, and aching, space that her death had left in my life.

Since then the years have taken their toll.  I have moved from my mid-eighties to my early-nineties!  My physical activities have become increasingly limited and I again find myself watching tv both in daytime and in the evening.  The digital revolution, and the freeview box with integral recorder, have widened my choice.  On daytime commercial tv there is very little new to watch.  However, old age has one unexpected, if somewhat mixed, blessing.  Although I may recall a great deal of one of the Midsomer Murders or  Murder She Wrote episodes when I see either of them again for the second, or possibly the third, time – I rarely remember who-dun-it, and how and why!

            I do remember from the past the adverts filling the commercial breaks that irritatingly punctuate commercial tv programmes.  Some are entertaining and are regularly updated by the advertisers (I have in mind some of the Specsavers adverts and the always-entertaining Meercat adverts by Comparethemarket.com).  Others, repeated ad nauseum, are infuriating.  In particular I can’t bear that character who strides across the tv screen shouting maniacally that with his products, if you buy one, you get one free.  BOGOF indeed!

            Over the years these adverts have changed, reflecting the national mood. In the early years of the new millennium they seemed to be dominated by two themes.  One of them was all about ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers eager to inform viewers that if they had an accident that wasn’t their fault, they could be entitled to generous compensation.  These public spirited and altruistic professionals would ensure that those accident victims received every penny of it if only their help were sought.  The ‘other side’ would have to pay the legal expenses.  It was surely unfortunate that the presenter of one of these adverts was an actor best known to most of us as a bent copper in The Bill.

            The other theme, and this was surely the more noxious, was the offer by  money-lenders to give financial ‘help’ to people who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow.  It doesn’t matter, these warm-hearted philanthropists insisted, if you’re old, unemployed, on benefit, and have a disastrous credit record. Get in touch with us.  We may be able to help’ 

            Others aimed at a slightly different class of viewer.  We were shown a lower middle-class householder (unquestionably a Daily Mail reader!) who had everything;  a nice home, a good job, a beautiful wife and marvellous kids, but there was just one tiny little flaw in this earthly paradise.  He and his wife were, well ‘a bit messy with money’.  There were two or three credit card debts to service, one or two HP agreements, the mortgage on their lovely home, and so on.  It could be something of a nightmare – especially to one whose mind was focussed on higher things; like for instance, whether or not the local football team would keep its place in the First Division at the end of this season.

            The tangle of family debts needed no longer  be a problem.  Those warm-hearted money-lenders would gather all of them together and take them over, so the instalments could be paid tidily, month after month.  Who knows, they added, it might even be possible to lend that delightful family more money to provide some of the other essentials of modern suburban life – a second car for the wife?  Perhaps a family holiday in the Bahamas?

            The benevolent money lenders are no longer quite so blatant.  A few months ago they were pushing their latest idea. Everyone, they said, at sometime or other faced a domestic crisis that needed a relatively small sum of money (perhaps £200 or £300) to settle.  Unfortunately these crises had a habit of occurring just a week or two before payday.   The answer was a payday loan.  Give them a ring and within minutes the two or three hundred pounds would be in your bank account.  It could be repaid on payday with what seemed a very small amount of interest. Easy – but the snag was that what was left of the borrower’s pay wouldn’t then be enough to last the next month.  The answer to that?  Perhaps another payday loan, and another after that – with the interest beginning to become anything but a ‘small amount’.  Following adverse publicity in the news media payday loan adverts are now becoming rarer

            Ambulance chasing lawyers still make their appearance on commercial tv offering ‘no win ….no fee’ services to accident victims.  They do seem to be a little less brash, a bit more grave and professional, than they once were. 

            The latest trend in daytime tv advertising is possibly a response to a realisation by members of the public that there’s little hope of becoming rich by diligence and hard work these days.  It is publishing opportunities for gambling – ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   There are a surprising number of on-line Bingo games available to hopeful fortune seekers.  There’s Sun Bingo. There’s Foxy Bingo, and there’s Tombola.   There may well be others.   There’s an occasional advert for the National Lottery and for on-line roulette. There are also what I think of as disguised lotteries within the fabric of tv programmes.. ‘Secret Dealers’ and ‘Dickinson’s Real Deal’ for instance, always feature a ‘competition’ with  a single prize of several thousand pounds for phoning in, or texting, the correct answer to an easy (much too easy) question. A typical question might be.  Brussels is the capital city of (A) Bulgaria? (B) Switzerland? or (C) Belgium?   Viewers who think they know the answer are invited to phone or text A, B, or C to a given phone  or text number.  There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of correct answers submitted.  As there is only one ‘winner’ the ‘competition’ really amounts to yet another lottery.

            It seems sad that so many of us appear to be hoping, by means of one or other forms of gambling, to win a life-changing sum of money to escape from the ordinariness of our every day lives. ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   It’s not very likely though that it will be.  The only certain regular winners are the organisers of the gambling game or the Lottery.  They have to make a profit and pay their very considerable advertising or sponsorship costs.

Colchester Council ‘harnesses the sun!’

          A report in last Friday’s (17^th Aug.) local daily Gazette reinforced my confidence in the value of true localism – the devolution of the powers of central government to elected local authorities and the freedom of those local authorities to use those powers wisely.

Last July Colchester Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on the roofs of 563 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes.  They had intended to provide the same service for 2,000 of those homes but central government (‘Nanny knows best dear) had cut their financial support.

            The fruits of the council’s decision are now being harvested and a very bountiful harvest it is proving to be.  Mrs Iliffe-Weston, one of the tenants involved, told the Gazette that for the six months from February to August 2011 her electricity bill had been £331.96 but that for the equivalent six months this year (most of which were not noted for their periods of warm sunshine!) it was just £96.33! 

            The good lady heeded the sage advice that if something seems too good to be true – it probably is!  She thought that there may have been a mistake and, as she definitely did not want a surprise bill of £1000 later, she phoned the Electricity supplier.  They assured her that the bill was correct and that the reduction was due to the photo-voltaic panels on her roof.

            I am not a bit surprised.  The installation on my roof is much smaller and less ambitious.   I have just two small photo-voltaic (I have always called them photo-electric) cells, servicing my solar water heating system. When the fluid in the solar water-heating panel on my roof is a few degrees warmer than the water in my hot water storage cylinder, those photo-electric cells activate the pump to circulate that fluid through the heat exchanger in the storage cylinder. The system is thus self-contained, needing no electricity from the grid.

            .   In weather such as we are having as I write (18^th Aug.) I don’t need to switch on my gas boiler o at all.  In the winter, and on overcast summer days, the solar panel doesn’t produce all the hot water I need but, in summer and winter alike, it preheats the water in the storage cylinder before it circulates through the boiler, which therefore needs to burn less gas to bring it to the required temperature.

            I pay my combined gas and electricity bill monthly by direct debit. My solar heating system has reduced those payments by £30 a month.  My saving is therefore in the region of £360 a year – not quite in the same league as that of Mrs Iliffe-Weston but then mine doesn’t take up so much of my roof surface and, I imagine, cost less to install.

            Congratulations to Colchester Council. As well as doing their bit for the environment, their initiative means that nearly 600 Colchester householders have a few extra pounds in their pockets to spend, and thus to help the country out of the recession.  Pity the Council didn’t get the central government support for which they had hoped – but there, central government has probably got other urgent concerns like nuclear submarines to service and multi-millionaires to keep on-side!