Redistributing wealth

There was an epic post over at Devil's Kitchen the other day, pulling together Guardian pieces, Tim Worstall and Ol' Blue Eyes, covering the government's proposed cap on Housing Benefit. Therein the Devil summarises the problem by quoting a comment from the Guardian piece.

To sum up, some people are effectively being given a pre-tax income of £77,000 for doing nothing, and people far poorer than that are paying for it through taxation. The chancellor claims this is unfair and you disagree. Right.

The case point being that housing benefit is paid based on average rents in each area, so in posh Camden unemployed folk, folk on low income, foreigners and the incapacitated can claim £1000 a week or so, paid for out of the tax that everyone else has to pay.

After discussing the issue with people who know about this sort of thing, and my own wee flag I like to wave about how you can pretty much buy a house in Hull if you're on Job Seeker's Allowance, it seems that the problem lies in the 'Local Connection' section of the 1996 Housing Act, which essentially penalizes claimants and councils who seek better value further afield.

I suggested doing something about this one the government's Spending Challenge website.

So I was rather surprised this morning to read on the BBC that the government were acting on my suggestion.

Alas, I didn't bother reading the article until later. The thrust seems to be to move unemployed folk from poverty ghettos to more affluent areas, which is kind of the opposite of what I had in mind.

JAY'S POLITICAL BLOG reads it as:-

On the surface, this idea is not bad in itself. Many people do move to wherever a job takes them. But as Mr Balls says, the coalition has already cut millions of pounds from funding for the jobless. He is absolutely right to accuse the Tories and the Liberal Democrats of taking money away from the poorer regions whose economies need regeneration; a move which will, in turn, only serve to slow the overall economic recovery, if not take Britain back in recession.

By encouraging people to move to more prosperous areas where the jobs are more likely to be, that is exactly what the Conservative-Liberal coalition are doing.

My take is that in Hull you've got fourth generation unemployed people, the cost of living is very low, the housing benefit bill per claimant is low compared to Camden, Westminster and Islington.

So, if you've got unemployed and unemployable people, why keep them in broom cupboards in the most expensive areas when they could quite merrily have a higher standard of living and more space elsewhere.

What could happen is that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats would be taking housing benefit money away from the richer regions and moving it to the poorer areas.

Me, I used to live in expensive West Hampstead, I had a nice job and could afford it, unemployment got me, my self-confidence was shot to fuck, I moved five miles west to Wembley where rent was so much cheaper and I could survive on minimum wage until my self-confidence rose to the heady heights it is today.

I'm fucking great me.

Cashing in while they still can

God knows where I read it, but there was a thing about whats going down in Greece where civil servants get paid a huge lump sum when they retire, and they can retire from the age of 45, its all unsustainable and as a result of the government trying to do something about it, the country is on fire and dragging the European Union into the flames.

Anyhoo, elsewhere in the European Union, on the sunny shores of Camden, Jim Wintour, the Housing Director chap, has resigned from his £158,000 a year job. Tracy suggests three reasons:-

Much speculation as to why he quit:

A. He finally met and experienced first hand the gaggle of truly awful graspy, lying, devious so-called 'leading' tenant reps we have lurking about in Camden and thought 'what the fook get me out of here'.

B. He has taken the fall for a workforce that is a law unto itself.

C. He made the mistake of giving interviews to a local newspaper and admitted that the council was at fault over a matter to do with the housing of a local disabled woman who died in her council flat. This type of behaviour (displaying a degree of integrity) is wholly unacceptable when working for the 'firm' and will be punished accordingly.

I've heard differently, that he actually emailed out his reasons for leaving to all the council employees, that like in Greece, Jim Wintour heard that the powers that be were going to be tinkering with retirement packages, so he's jumped to maximise his pension.

However much is in his pension pot must dwarf the £158,000 he's currently on.

Kids ages and fathers

In both of these stories I'm somewhat concerned by the ages of the youngest children and the relationships with the father.

Miss Essma Marjam: youngest child - 5 months

'I'm separated from my husband. He's a solicitor in Derby, but I don't know if he's working at the moment. He doesn't pay anything towards the kids. Things are quite difficult between us.

Miss Nimco Hassan Ibrahim: youngest child - 4 years

After eight months working as a bus driver, Mr Yusuf began living on benefits. When they were stopped in March 2004, he left the country.

Also I think I'm quite jealous of her TV, Playstation 3 and high speed internet connection.

Both these ladies appear to be taking the piss.

Veolia fly-tipping in Camden

I read a well interesting piece on Schneier the other day, it changed the way I think about risks, security and rules

...yet another conference presenter complaining about security awareness training. He was talking about the difficulty of getting employees at his company to actually follow his security policies: encrypting data on memory sticks, not sharing passwords, not logging in from untrusted wireless networks. "We have to make people understand the risks," he said.

It seems to me that his co-workers understand the risks better than he does. They know what the real risks are at work, and that they all revolve around not getting the job done. Those risks are real and tangible, and employees feel them all the time. The risks of not following security procedures are much less real. Maybe the employee will get caught, but probably not. And even if he does get caught, the penalties aren't serious.

Anyhoo, last night we made elderberry and blackberry tart, here's a photie. It was yummy, even more so as we'd picked the berries ourselves bushes along the wee alley at the bottom of my road, by the West Hampstead Thameslink tracks, here on google maps.

I was somewhat surprised this afternoon to find that all the bushes and trees had been trimmed and cut back. This is kind of a good thing, its nice to think that our council tax goes to pay for tidying up overgrown alleys. Crikey, the number of times I've had to duck to get by overhanging branches, and then been terrified by suspended spiders.

The other week I went along to a meeting of the Camden Federation of Tenants and Residents Associations, they were quite annoyed that the council caretaking services had been out-sourced as part of a cost saving exercise. I'm all for cost-saving myself, it sounds like a good idea, but this particular cost saving saved about £19,000 at the same time as the council recruited a couple of new assistant directors on £100,000+ salaries. And also, when the private company the outsourcing went to was conducting a pilot scheme to check their standards, they were found to be crap, so the council changed the specification to allow them to get the contract. It all seems a little dodgy to me.

Veolia are the mob who got the contract to provide a lower standard of cleaning services to council tenants.

On my way to the bank today I saw three different Veolia chaps pushing their trolleys around the street, sweeping just a little. I saw them in Maidenhead last week, and furthermore, I saw them down the far end of the Thameslink alley last week, starting to cut back the overhanging bushes.

Here's a rather relevant photie of the alley, and what's that sign attached to the lamppost? Lets take a closer look.


Hmm, now I wouldn't dream of doing anything that could land me a £20,000 fine. I'm thousands of pounds in debt already. But I guess if you're a big company with a caretaking contract, and you have the choice of carrying all the cut bits of bush and tree down the alley to a van you've hired, and then taking it to some kind of proper composty waste dump, or you could just sling it over a fence and no one will find out, you weigh up the risks and take whichever option seems most cost-effective.

So, of course all the cutting have been slung over the fence next to the railway lines, heaps and heaps of it, every last bit. Absolutely none has been taken away to be properly disposed of.

This isn't quite the cost-saving I expect from the council. I expect cost-savings without breaking any laws, that's just my natural 'rule of law' inate philosophy of life. Maybe Veolia don't have the same philosophy, therefore they need the risk of being prosecuted for fly-tipping to be more of a real risk, to cost them money, and not just a cost they can pass on to the council.

It doesn't even make sense, according to the Veolia website they have several composting sites for disposal of green garden waste, yet instead of taking it there, they just chucked it over the fence. That's just laziness, thats not what we paid for, that's taking the piss. Veolia are full of shit.

Back when I was doing volunteering on Hampstead Heath for Heath Hands, we used to make dead-wood fences out of cutoff bits of trees and bushes, the rangers told us where to lay, but this is not a dead wood fence, this is clearly fly-tipping, chucking stuff over the fence cos they can't be bothered taking it to a van for composting.

Here's the bit on the Network Rail webpage about how they work with British Transport Police to find and prosecute fly-tippers.

Wouldn't it be cool if they got fined £20,000 for fly-tipping.

Why are we more crap now?

The other day I went along to a meeting at Camden Town Hall, I'm not entirely sure who organised it, or associated websites, I just scribbled notes of anything interesting I heard until I was told to stop.

The backstory is that Camden Council are currently trying to sell off some of its housing stock, whilst at the same time some groups are demanding that the council stop the selling off and build more council housing. A lot of the current housing stock is uninhabitable and needs repairs and upgrading.

An interesting thing that I scribbled was:-

Last year the council only just managed to repair and renovate 100 properties, whilst in the 1930s they were able to build 600 new properties from scratch in a year.

How can this be so?

Are we not wealthier and more skilled now?

Here's a pie chart I've knocked up, I've made up all the proportions myself.

I think I could be in the minority of people at the meeting in how I think the various factors are significant. Everyone was right, but how you divvy up the various factors is different.

For one, although building new houses costs money, Camden has a surplus of £80 million, and have neatly demonstrated that they're capable of spending it on hiring assistant directors with overblown salaries. I don't think that campaigning for more money to be extracted from taxpayers will be very significant in helping bring about the end result of more newly built council houses.

I think the biggest stumbling block now, compared to the 1930s, is planning permissions and health and safety and accessability regulations. They take up a load of time and effort and lawyers and experts on paperwork, before anything actually happens.

Sure, if the 'Political will' issue is resolved, somehow a whole raft of pro-house building councillors are elected, then they could ride rough shod over any planning restrictions and legalities, and reassign money from other areas of the council, but it's a difficult one to tackle. You gotta convince people to change their minds, to vote for other candidates than whoever they usually do.