Tendring Topics.......on Line

Welcome Northumberlandia!

          Where seams of coal – or other valuable natural material – are close to the earth’s surface, opencast mining provides an inexpensive and relatively safe way of extracting it.  It does leave a ruined landscape though – an enormous hole in the ground and tons and tons of rock, clay and soil ‘spoil’.   There are various ways of dealing with this problem.   Who, for instance, would guess that the delightful lake, venue of every kind of water sport that, on a recent visit, I could see from my bedroom window in the Haus am See Hotel in Olbersdorf in eastern Germany, was once an opencast lignite (‘brown coal’) mine?

            Rather nearer home American landscape architect Charles Jencks has found an even more imaginative way of dealing with the aftermath of opencast mining in Northumberland.  From 1.5 million tons of rock and clay spoil from a local mine he has created the enormous reclining figure of a woman (Northumberlandia!) as the centrepiece of an attractive country park.   The figure is 1,300 ft. long and 112 ft. high at its highest point. The recumbent figure is encircled by carefully planned and sited footpaths. 

She is naked but not, I think, in a way that will cause offence.  She is surely much more attractive than the male figures cut into the chalk hills of the southern shires. Northumberlandia  certainly complements that other iconic local figure, the well-loved Angel of the North.  I am not at all sure, mind you, that this newly arrived curvaceous and very earthy lady is an appropriate companion for an angel.  Perhaps it is just as well that they are a few miles apart and strictly immobile!     Last week, she was officially declared ‘open to the public' by the Princess Royal.  I hope that she, and the country park of which she is the central feature, will attract many visitors.

            My only criticism is of her name.  Northumberlandia surely is a bit of a mouthful for northerners and southerners alike.  I have no doubt that local people will soon think of an appropriate and less long-winded title.  My own suggestion would be Geordina, as a tribute to the nickname by which her fellow northern English are happy to be known?

Some Modern Myths

          A disillusioned blog reader has written to me expressing his disgust at the fact that the then Housing and Local Government Minister Grant Shapps had said in the course of a newspaper interview that Social Housing should be renamed Tax Funded Housing.   He hoped presumably to arouse the resentment of other tax payers. My correspondent points out that Mr Shapps is himself a Tax Funded Minister and that he and all his parliamentary colleagues are tax funded MPs!   Perhaps we should be grateful that the former Minister for Housing and Local Government has been ‘promoted’ (is his new job really more important?) to that of joint Chairman of the Conservative Party.

            The idea that folk in social housing are uniquely supported out of taxation is just one of the modern myths that divide our society.  There is, for instance, a general belief that those in Social Housing are work-shy drop-outs living off the State.  I know from my own experience (and am assured that the situation hasn’t changed materially in that respect) that most tenants either do have a job that pays only the minimum wage or little more, or are pensioners with no capital and no occupational pension.

            There is a similar myth that housing benefit, helping tenants in the private sector, is just for the unemployed.   In fact, a great many claimants are hard working people whose salary is just too low to pay an exorbitant rent, or folk who have retired after having been a shop assistant or something similar all their lives, and who are now surviving on a state pension.

            Finally there is the particularly noxious belief encouraged by the government that all public service workers (including doctors, nurses and ancillary health workers and therapists, fire fighters, teachers, the police and so on) are ‘a drain on the economy, funded by the‘productive’ part of society the ‘private` sector. This, of course includes moneylenders, those involved with the betting ‘industry’, proprietors and employees of escort agencies and massage parlours, beauty and make-up artists.

            My correspondent speculates on how different the world would look if we were all rewarded in accordance with the contribution that we make to society.  Heading the list would be those who produce the food that we eat, the buildings that we live and work in and the clothes that we wear - agricultural workers, builders and factory workers making items that everybody needs. Somewhere in the middle would be those who provide the services that those essential workers and all the rest of us need (most of today’s public services).  Right at the very end would come the makers and vendors of luxury goods, of  designer clothing and of junk food and drinks, together with money lenders, gamblers and those who currently make a fortune by moving money from one account to another - just about a total reversal of the present position in fact!

             That certainly would be the day - and I had thought that some of my ideas were pretty utopian!

This year?..........next year?........sometime?.............    

            When the Tendring District Council introduced its controversial refuse collection/recycling scheme earlier this year there was a storm of angry protest from local householders.   One of the more justified complaints was that in at least one respect, less material was being recycled under the new scheme than had been under the old one.

Those of us who had co-operated with the council’s recycling efforts (there has always been a substantial minority who didn’t!) had put out our green boxes every week with paper and cardboard waste, metal cans of all descriptions and most plastics – including, for instance, plastic bags, yoghurt and margarine containers and other plastic food containers, as well as plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles used for cleaning fluids and so on, together with our black plastic bag filed with unrecyclable refuse for landfil..   

With the new system was introduced we were all issued with a red box into which we put our waste paper and cardboard to be collected on alternate weeks.  The existing green box was to be used for plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles only, and was to be put out for collection on the other alternate weeks.  The weekly collection of our non-recyclable rubbish continued under the new system, but we were asked also to put out every week a new locked-lid container with waste food.   Plastic bags and plastic containers other than bottles, which had previously been collected for recycling, now had to go into the black plastic bags for landfill.   These plastic items comprised a considerable proportion of many householders’ refuse.  Failure to collect them for recycling seemed to nullify the whole purpose of the new scheme.

Enquirers at the Council’s offices were told that the Council was aware of this problem and intended to solve it.  In the future there would be a comprehensive collection of plastics.  No date was ever given or suggested but enquirers undoubtedly hoped that this would take place within months, rather than years.

We now know that it won’t!   Tendring Council’s hopes of expanding the present system rest on a new recycling sorting centre to be opened in Basildon.   It will, says the Clacton Gazette recover recyclable materials such as metal, plastic and glass. Work on the new sorting centre hasn’t yet started, but the County Council hopes that it will start sometime in 2013 and will be completed by 2015, still three years away!   It isn’t even quite certain yet that the centre will be started or that, if it is ever in action, it will take plastics not covered by the present scheme.  Tendring’s ‘Cabinet Member for the Environment’, Councillor Nick Turner, is reported as saying, ‘We don’t know the fine details yet, but as far as we are led to believe, we will be able to collect more plastics’.  Oh yes, and the final paragraph of the Gazette’s report tells us that the sorting centre site 'is currently waiting for planning permission!’  This year?...........next year?.........sometime?........never?

‘Lies, damned lies – and statistics!’

In tv interviews I have heard economics expert after economic expert express surprise at the fact that although Britain’s economy is undoubtedly in a double dip recession with no signs of an early recovery, unemployment figures haven’t been rising as one would have expected.  They have either remained static or have fallen slightly.

A study by Sheffield Hallam University led by Professor Steve Fothergill and welcomed by Tendring Council leader Neil Stock suggests that the reason could be that the state of our economy is established by an independent body and is beyond dispute, while the unemployment statistics are based on data selected by the government.   The study finds that unemployment in seaside towns in the south of England is much worse than official figures suggest.  In our own Tendring District of north-east Essex, for example, the government figure for unemployment is 4.2 percent.  The study suggests that the true figure is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the official figure, with almost one in ten people out of work.

One explanation of the discrepancy is that since the 1980s successive governments have hidden the real unemployment figures by moving unemployed people onto sickness and incapacity benefit. Now this process is being reversed but there is still a long way to go.  Another factor is the number of unemployed people disqualified from claiming Job Seekers Allowance because they have savings or because they have a partner who is working.

I certainly remember in the 1980s a friend of mine, in his early sixties, who was told that he could draw his retirement pension early if he undertook not to look for work.  Sixty-five year old Peter Bloomfield of Enfield, interviewed by a Gazette reporter, confirmed that this practice of the Thatcher years continued into the Blair governments of the 1990s.  ‘When I was unemployed in the 1990s, they put me onto incapacity benefit, even though I was only unemployed.  I was told that because of my age I wouldn’t find work’.

In conclusion Professor Fothergill makes a point that I have made over and over again in this blog.  ‘Our figures cast serious doubt on the likely impact of  government initiatives such as the Work Programme and Universal Credit, which are founded on the assumption that unemployment can be brought down simply by encouraging the unemployed to look for work.  There has to be jobs for people to go to.

           

           

            

Week 37.2011 20.9.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’


So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.



In my back garden are two apple trees (in blossom) a damson tree, a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and four silver birches.  I do try to practise what I preach!

 Between 1974 and 1980, while I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I remember that the Trees Working Party, under the chairmanship of tree enthusiast Councillor Malcolm Holloway, was one of the Council’s most successful working groups. Completely non-political, the Working Party encouraged tree planting as a condition of new housing, commercial or industrial development, and helped to preserve existing trees on public land by enlisting volunteer spare-time tree wardens throughout the district to report acts of vandalism and to water local street trees in times of drought. I recall that we organised a children’s essay competition on the importance of trees to humankind. This was judged by the editor of the East Essex Gazette (now the Clacton Gazette) and certificates and small prizes were presented to the winner and runners up. The Dutch Elm Disease epidemic was at its peak during the late 1970s. The Working Party made the public aware of this threat to the English countryside and encouraged replacement of diseased trees. At that time the Council had a ‘tree nursery’ on land beside Holland Brook near the Thorpe-le-Soken sewage treatment works. On it ‘tree whips’ were grown into saplings ready to be planted out in public places. This received publicity both in the local and regional press and on tv.

The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.

I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.

In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!

NIMBY!

Unemployment

The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.

Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.

They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!

Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.

Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.

This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!


Tuberculosis stages a comeback!

A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.


Heather had to gain a stone in weight before she could go to Papworth for surgery. She had just achieved that aim when this pcture was taken at Nayland Sanatorum.

The new ‘wonder drug’ streptomycin had just appeared on the scene. It was expensive and in short supply. It was given only to patients who were very ill indeed but not beyond all hope. Heather fell into that category. Her right lung had never been affected and that made recovery a possibility. A course of streptomycin was supplemented by P.A.S (para-aminosalicylic acid) and the  partial collapse of the left lung by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space below the diaphragm, a pneumo-peritoneum (PP). ( How extraordinary that I can remember these medical terms after half a century but can’t remember the name of someone I was talking to this morning!)

It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.


It had been a life-saving operation.  It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure.  When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..




Heather happily camping in the 1970s

Heather wasn’t one to moan and groan. She gave me two fine sons who, in their turn, gave us three wonderful grandchildren of all of whom we had every reason to be proud. She was a good and untiring cook, an expert with the needle and with the sewing machine and a great make-do-and-mender! She enjoyed life too though her physical activities were limited. She was hardly an ‘outdoor girl’ but she thoroughly enjoyed the camping holidays that we took every year.

No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!

That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.

Week 35.10 31st August 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

An Expensive Mistake

I always felt that Tendring District Council’s previous Tendring First administration performed pretty well on the whole. I have no doubt that its members had the well-being of the district and its inhabitants as their first concern. They were acknowledged by the Government’s Audit Commission to be ‘the best’ local authority in Essex, far outshining the County Council despite the latter’s constant self-congratulation.

They made one or two silly mistakes though. One of the most disastrous was
INTEND, the private company set up to perform the miracle of ‘regenerating’ the Tendring District. I imagine that its name was considered to be clever play on words. All it did for me was to remind me that ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. The sole reason for its existence was the idea that, as a private company, it would have access to funds that were not available to a public authority. Why should it? I can’t think of any grants that a private company could apply for to which a public authority has no access.

Nor, I think, are there any such loans. I would have expected a private company to have more, not less, difficulty in raising loans at a reasonable interest rate. If I were in the money-lending business I’d certainly prefer to lend to a public authority. The directors of limited liability companies can declare themselves bankrupt and walk away from their debts. With a local council there might be bureaucratic delays, but payment will always be made in the end. Since INTEND has been established, it has identified areas of the Tendring District where regeneration is badly needed and suggested how this might be done – and that’s about it. Lots of local residents could have done that for free. It cost the Council £1.26 million!

Now, it seems, even Councillor David Lines, leader of Tendring First and former director and chairman of the company, has conceded that the whole enterprise may have been an expensive mistake. We all make mistakes but it is refreshing to hear someone prominent in public life admit that he may have been wrong! I don’t believe that there is anything that INTEND has done, or indeed could have done, that couldn’t be done at least as efficiently and cost effectively by the Council itself and its own staff.

There is an ingrained popular belief, fostered by the popular press, that ‘the private sector’ is always more go-ahead, more efficient and more cost-effective than the public sector. The public sector is populated by desk-bound bureaucrats, swathed in red tape, who spend their days sending each other memoranda suggesting ways in which enterprise can be frustrated and hopes dashed. The private sector on the other hand comprises groundbreaking scientists, thrusting entrepreneurs and eager hard-working factory workers all intent on making us wealthier, and the world a happier place to live in.

I have worked in both the public and the private sectors and I know that this simply isn’t true. Where public sector work is farmed out to the private sector (marking national school examinations and paying student grants come instantly to my mind) it has, as often as not, failed dismally. The public sector, providing schools, hospitals, emergency services, the highways, street lighting, law and order, parks and gardens, cemeteries and crematoria, public health, housing standards, clean air, safe food and drink, is responsible for all the services that make for civilised life. The private and the public sectors both have an important role in modern society. It is, I believe, a serious mistake to suggest that one is more important than the other or that one should be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

I told you so!

When the terms of the Coalition Government’s Emergency Budget were first announced my immediate reaction was that, as usual, the really poor, dependent on Government services, would be hardest hit. The comfortable off and the wealthy would suffer less and the seriously rich wouldn’t experience the least inconvenience. This, I thought, would become even more obvious in the autumn when the cuts would really begin to bite.

The prestigious Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is Britain’s leading impartial authority on financial matters. It has no association with any political party or movement. I was glad to discover that its professional assessment of the Budget and its likely effects is much the same as my thoroughly inexpert one. The poor will pay a higher proportion of their income than the wealthy toward reducing the deficit, and the lower the income the higher that proportion will be.

Needless to say the Government doesn’t agree. As David Cameron was on holiday in Cornwall it was left to his deputy, Nick Clegg to refute the IFS assessment. I can’t believe that he enjoyed doing so and his argument certainly failed to impress. He claimed that the IFS gave a one-sided assessment of the situation. They didn’t take into account the effect that the Budget would have on getting people off benefit and into paid work, and therefore improving their situation. I suppose that that argument might have had a little validity if there were work waiting for those who came off benefit. But there isn’t – and the employment situation is destined to worsen as the cuts in public services really come into effect. A news bulletin recently reported that 5,000 small private enterprises were already failing because they relied for their survival on contracts with local authorities.

The hope that the private sector will be able to offer employment to the thousands likely to lose their jobs in the public sector is a vain one. Cut public sector finance to the bone and the first to suffer will be their private sector contractors. Public and private sectors are inextricably linked. They are like conjoined twins? Anything, positive or negative, that you do to one will inevitably affect the other.

What is going on at County Hall?

A few weeks ago I commented in this blog about the County Council’s plan to make £300 million of efficiency savings by 2013. This was to be achieved by ‘buying better’ (£150 million), by ‘working with partners’ (£25 million), ‘sharing and trading services (£10 million), ‘working smarter’ (£85 million) and 'thinking ahead on IT '(£40 million).

Crucial to this ambitious programme (which seemed to me more like a wish list than a plan of action) was a multi-million pound deal with international computer and software giant IBM, with its headquarters in the USA and its tentacles worldwide. Lord Hanningfield who, a few weeks earlier had been demanding that Essex jobs should go to Essex men and women, announced this deal for which he claimed personal credit, not long before his retirement from the Leadership of the County Council.

Effects so far have been the axing of 275 line manager posts at County Hall and a rise in the sum paid out to 'outside consultancies’ from £14.4 million in 2005/6 to £25.3 million in 2008/9. I look forward to learning how much the County Council paid out for these consultancies in 2009/10 – and how much saving has so far been accomplished to justify this outlay.

In charge of the transformation scheme, and on a six figure salary, has been Chief Information Officer Mark Briggs, an IT whiz kid who is claimed to have had experience in updating software at 300 council sites and in the USA, his wife Victoria, also an IT expert, was Project Manager, Solutions Development Executive and Senior Programme Officer. (Isn’t it just a little unusual for a wife to hold a senior position – or is it three senior positions? - in a local government department of which her husband is head?) Another senior member of the team was Gareth Allen, Chief Software Architect.

Now it seems that the whole programme – and the County Council’s hopes of saving £300 million – may be in jeopardy. Mrs Briggs resigned her post (or posts) in July after only two years service, and both Mark Briggs and Gareth Allen are believed to have been relieved of their duties and are on indefinite leave. An anonymous inside source is reported to have told the Coastal Daily Gazette that Mr Briggs ‘was escorted out of County Hall last month’.

A County Council spokesman said, ‘Essex County Council does not comment on individual staffing matters. In line with best practice guidelines, we use a leave of absence as part of our resolution procedures’.

No doubt all will ultimately be revealed. In the meantime I shall be ruefully reflecting on the fact that it is that lot at the County Hall who receive by far the greatest share of the Council Tax we pay each year. What a pity all this didn’t emerge before the County Council elections.

An ‘insider’s’ knowledge

Unlike the Gazette, I don’t have an anonymous source within the County Hall. I do though have a very knowledgeable and experienced inside source of information about local authority ‘outsourcing’ IT services.

He says that typically the Managers and Councillors of an authority are approached by the ‘outsourcers’ salesmen and, ‘are first wound up over the cost of the impending need ‘to refresh’ all their PCs, Servers and Software. Then they are offered a deal that really only spreads the cost of this over the full period of the contract, instead of as a one-off expense. Under the deal offered by the ‘outsourcer’ the Council has to define all its IT needs at the start. The answer to these is priced very competitively, probably at less than the running cost of the existing in-house team.

However the contract, which typically is quite long (seven years for instance) specifies that all additional IT needs must be met by the contractor at an additional price. Because of the speed of progress in IT development, it is a very safe bet that over a seven year period lots of new IT needs will surface, and will be charged at a premium rate in a non-competitive way. This means that the outsourcer makes a huge profit from the additional hardware and systems.

Users also discover that while their previous IT department was flexible and tried to be helpful, the new company (which may be operating a help desk from a call centre in Scotland or the like) will do exactly what is in the contract. Anything else is chargeable. The new supplier is likely to be totally rule-bound (often by the ‘good practice’ that the Council thought was a good thing to build into the contract!) and as a result quite unhelpful, whereas the previous in-house team will have been pragmatic, putting the needs of the council and its staff first.

Strategically, Councils who outsource in this way lose completely their own IT expertise and have no choice but to renew the contract when it ends. There may be a rollover clause to re-award it or it may have to go out to tender again. If it does the incumbent will be at a huge advantage and very likely to get it again.

Of course, the County Council's outsourcer may not be like that at all. Let’s hope that its quite different from some of its competitors, because the funds that the County Council is using for this experiment in outsourcing came from our pockets, handbags and bank accounts.

It is beginning to look though Lord Hanningfield’s coup may not have beensuch a triumph after all. The saved £300 million seems to be receding further and further into the distance!