The last post?

The Royal Mail and the Post Office aren’t just part of our heritage, they’re a crucial

part of the lives of  families and businesses. This is especially true in rural areas, where the local post office acts as a focal point for communities.

43% of older people in rural areas use their local Post Office to access cash. Thousands of small rural businesses rely on postal services for ensuring customers get their goods and services on time, efficiently, reliably and at a reasonable price. Crucially, by law, the Royal Mail has to deliver mail to people six days a week, regardless of where they live. This is not the case in many countries.

Given that background, one has to ask why Messrs Cameron and Clegg are so determined to press ahead with the dangerous privatisation of Royal Mail, a proposal which they have failed to justify and which clearly doesn’t provide good value for the taxpayer.

Having refused last year, it is only after considerable pressure that the Government has now caved in and worked out the arrangements for a 10 year Inter-Business Agreement (IBA) between the Royal Mail and the Post Office. This is a vital link for the sustainability of our Post Office network.

However, there is no guarantee that a privatised Royal Mail will continue to support and use the Post Office network. In fact, it is more likely that it would want to break the historic link between the two.

Rural postal services will be under threat if Royal Mail is privatised because these

are the most costly to operate. To put it simply, profits on delivering urban post are subsidising rural post deliveries. Already in the UK, private parcel delivery firms, who operate in the interests of shareholders and not the public service, routinely charge a

significant premium for delivering to remote and rural areas. In some cases, they just refuse to deliver goods to these locations altogether.

Collections are also at risk. Did you know that more than 6500 post office collections had been scrapped in the last year? And new rules, implemented from June, inevitably mean that there will be fewer post boxes in future.

For some rural communities, the last post? Quite likely.

Badger cull is simply bonkers

Despite being cloaked in secrecy, the government’s badger cull have began this week.

There is a long-standing problem with bovine TB in the UK. But, there is a huge amount of contradictory evidence about whether badgers give TB to cattle or cattle give it to badgers. 

There is also no scientific evidence that culling badgers actually deals with the problem of TB in cattle; indeed a past trial shows it could actually make it worse. That was why the last Labour Government decided not to cull badgers, but to look for vaccination as a long term solution, as there is considerable scientific evidence that that policy would work

I’ve made no secret of my opposition to this cull. In March 2011, I went to 10 Downing Street with the Badger Protection League to hand in a large petition against the cull. It appears that my view is shared by the vast majority of local people.

There is a healthy badger population in my constituency. Although many local residents have never seen them, a number of local groups and individuals have been quietly ensuring that their habitat is protected. These groups are very concerned about the cull proposals and the potential impact on local wildlife.”

The government's own analysis says that it will cost more than it saves, put a huge strain on police given the expected protests, and will actually spread bovine TB in the short term as badgers are disrupted by the shooting. That’s why Cameron and Clegg’s determination to press ahead is simply bonkers.

Of course, having softened people up with a badger cull, the government will then be able to move on to its real agenda – its commitment to lifting the ban on fox-hunting.

Time to drive out ‘cowboy’ letting agents

I chair the all-party Communities and Local Government Committee in the House of Commons. We’ve been researching and reviewing what has been happening in the private rented housing sector and we’ve now published our report and recommendations for action.

The first thing we all agreed was that action must be taken to tackle sharp practice and abuse by letting agents.

Amazingly letting agents are subject to less control than estate agents. This lack of regulation is giving rise to sharp practice and abuse by some letting agents. We were told that the letting sector was the property industry’s ‘Wild West’. ’Cowboy’ agents who rip off landlords and tenants have to be stopped. They need to play by new rules or get out of the sector.

We say that regulation for letting agents must, at the very least, be brought up to the level of that for estate agents. This would give the Office of Fair Trading the power to ban agents who act improperly. It would also put in place new rules to ensure the safe treatment of landlords’ and tenants’ money.

Secondly, we demanded that action be taken to crack down on hidden and unreasonable fees and charges imposed by letting agents.

Agents should be required to tell tenants about fees before they start the letting process.

We confirmed that unreasonable fees and opaque charges are not confined to a few rogue agents. Many well-known high street agents are just as guilty. We say that agents must make tenants aware from the outset of the fees they intend to charge. This means that all property listings–on websites, in print or in agents’ windows–must be accompanied by a full breakdown of fees.

Thirdly, we confirmed that while the private rented sector has grown significantly in the past decade, it does not yet offer many renters what they are looking for.

In particular, the security desired by many families is not available within the private rented sector. We heard from one father whose 10 year old daughter had already had to move home seven times in her life. Letting agents should not be chasing renewal fees. Instead they should be working to ensure the length of tenancies meets the needs of both tenants and landlords.

With the sector providing homes to an increasing number of families, barriers to longer tenancies have to be removed. However, in return for offering longer tenancies, landlords should be able to evict tenants much more quickly when they fail to pay their rent. In addition, mortgage lenders should remove conditions that limit tenancies to one year.

Fourthly, we want to see renting as an attractive alternative to owner occupation.

The market has to better meet the needs of renters. Tenants and landlords need to be much better informed about their rights and responsibilities. Bad landlords should be driven out of the sector.

The legislation governing the private rented sector has evolved over many years and often in response to specific problems at a particular point in time. Far from providing clarity, the result is a bewildering regulatory framework. It should be simplified and all parties made aware of their rights and responsibilities. Tenants and landlords are often unaware of their rights and responsibilities.

So, we called for the legislation covering the private rented sector to be consolidated and made easier to understand. After this, there should be a publicity campaign to promote awareness of tenants’ and landlords’ rights and responsibilities. As part of this review, the Government should work with groups representing tenants, landlords and agents to bring forward a standard, plain language tenancy agreement on which all agreements should be based. Included within this standard agreement should be an easy-to-read fact sheet, setting out the key rights and responsibilities of the landlord and the tenant.

Fifthly, we could not avoid expressing our concern about the physical standard of much private rented property.

It is clearly unacceptable that taxpayers’ money is being used to pay housing benefit to landlords for substandard properties. We’ve called for local authorities to be given the ability to recoup housing benefit payments when a landlord is convicted of letting property below legal standards. Similarly, tenants should be able to reclaim rent paid from their own resources if their landlord is convicted.

We also think local councils must be given more freedom and flexibility to raise standards. Centrally-imposed bureaucracy and constraints on licensing schemes and enforcement should be reduced, but councils must have the power to require landlords to be part of a recognised accreditation scheme and have the flexibility to develop approaches to licensing, accreditation, and enforcement that meet the needs of their areas. There should then be heavy penalties for noncompliance.

We’ve also called on the Government to

• end the vicious circle where, in some areas, over-inflated levels of housing benefit drive up rents, in turn increasing the housing benefit bill still further,
• to tackle evasion of capital gains and income tax by some private landlords, and
• come up with proposals to increase the supply of housing across all tenures of housing.

You can read our full report on The Private Rented Sector at www.parliament.uk/clgcom

Was it something I said?

Last week, I wrote about how I was backing a Which campaign - Calling Time on Nuisance Calls and Texts. (Time to call time http://clivebettsmp.blogspot.co.uk/)

Of course, the only problem about speaking out like this is that lots of people contact you to say that they are also infuriated by nuisance calls and texts and that they want me to do something about it immediately. As we don’t live in a dictatorship with me in control, that isn’t possible.

Even if the current government could be persuaded to act, it would still take time to change the law and implement new regulations. And, it’s worth remembering that the current government is instinctively against what it describes as ‘red tape’. It thinks that ‘the market knows best’. So, for example, if you don’t want nuisance calls, don’t answer the phone.

Fortunately, there is now a sufficient number of MPs, across the political spectrum, who are persuaded that – whatever their personal views – their constituents are being driven mad by nuisance calls and texts and they expect their elected representatives to do something about it.

So, I’m delighted that The Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons is planning to hold an inquiry into Nuisance Telephone Calls and Text Messages.
The Committee recognises that OFCOM and the Information Commissioner's Office both have regulatory and enforcement responsibilities. Further, the Telephone Preference Service allows individuals to have their telephone number removed from relevant marketing lists. But, we all know it isn’t working.
The Committee has now invited written evidence from those who wish to contribute to the inquiry. This means YOU! Tell them what you think.

Make your short written submission in Word format, put "Nuisance Calls" in the subject line and send it to cmsev@parliament.uk by Thursday 15 August 2013.

Banking on more failure

George Osborne is ducking the radical banking reform we need and which the cross-party Banking Standards Commission has demanded over the course of five reports.

The Government is simply failing to stand up to the banks on key issues including the safety of major institutions, boosting choice for consumers, increasing financial inclusion, the high risk-high bonus culture and on stimulating economic growth.

It’s clear that George Osborne and Nick Clegg have been so busy promoting myths about the global financial crisis and the reasons for the UK’s current economic situation that they’ve begun to believe them. That may not only explain their failed economic strategy, but also go some way to explain why they’re missing the point on banking reform.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the global crisis did not have its root in UK government expenditure, but was sparked when Lehman Brothers collapsed in New York in September 2008 and hit most major economies in the West. The problem lay, not in public expenditure but, in irresponsible private borrowing and lending fuelled by incompetent and irresponsible bankers. The scale of the UK’s current borrowing is because we nationalised private debt to prevent the banks collapsing.

That’s why we cannot allow a repetition of the risks to the taxpayer in the future, which is why banks must be reformed in the UK and globally.

Banks have consistently fought change. In January 2011 the then Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond said: “There was a period of remorse and apology for banks - I think that period needs to be over.” Really?

Since then we have had scandals including:

• The mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI), for which banks have already put £14 billion aside to cover the cost of compensation
• Attempts to rig the LIBOR benchmark, for which US and UK regulators have so far fined banks a total of £1.7 billion.
• The mis-selling of interest rate swaps. The FSA has estimated that more than 40,000 swaps have been sold to small and medium businesses since 2001. The largest banks have already put aside just over £1.1bn to cover the mis-selling costs

Unless the government gets to grips with financial services reform, based on the all-party Parliamentary Commission recommendations, the only thing we should bank on is more failure.

Time to call time

I don’t know anyone who isn’t getting increasingly infuriated by the number of nuisance phone calls to their home phones. And now the problem has been extended with unwanted calls and texts to mobile phones.

The latest research by Which shows that nearly one in ten people received 50 unwanted calls or more in the last month, mainly from Payment Protection Insurance and accident claim companies. Even when people take action by signing up to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), they still received on average ten unsolicited calls in the last month.

It is suggested that people are often targeted with nuisance calls and texts because at some point they ‘ticked the box’ giving consent to companies not only to contact them but also to pass on their personal data to third parties. I don’t believe a word of it. It is clear that many call centre companies take absolutely no regard for the laws on privacy and will just pursue anyone for whom they have a telephone number.

And, this isn’t confined to overseas call centres, as is demonstrated by the recent hefty fine for a Welsh call centre, currently featured in a series of TV programmes. Unfortunately, far too often, these callers hide behind ‘withheld’ or phony (sic) international numbers that make it difficult for people to report in the expectation of action being taken.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the telephone network operators aren’t really bothered by all this as, after all, they are making a lot of money out of both criminal and unlawful calls and spam. The network operators have all sorts of technical ways in which this can be reduced eg spam filtering technology, and only transmitting multiple calls from registered phones.

This is why I’m backing a Which campaign - Calling Time on Nuisance Calls and Texts campaign. Find out more, and add your support at www.which.co.uk/callingtime

I agree with Nick

Back in 1997, the incoming Labour government inherited an awful legacy from the  Thatcher and Major Conservative governments. Our infrastructure was collapsing. School and hospital buildings were falling apart, and roads and railways were crumbling. It required a huge commitment of public investment to begin to put things right.

Since the arrival of the current Coalition government in 2010, it has cut capital infrastructure investment by £5.6bn. It’s little wonder that construction industry orders and output have reduced dramatically and that there are 84.000 fewer construction workers in jobs than 3 years ago.

Both the CBI and the TUC have been consistent in arguing for capital investment. As the CBI said “our creaking infrastructure still lags behind other countries and we cannot afford further delays in getting spades in the ground.”

Anyone listening to Cameron and Osborne might have thought they’d listened and got the message as, last week, they launched ‘the most comprehensive, ambitious and long-lasting capital investment plans’.

The truth is disturbingly different.

• In May 2011, having slashed the existing school building programme, the government promised 261 schools will be rebuilt. Today, construction has started on just one (1);
• Last September, the government announced a plan to get £20bn of pension fund investment in infrastructure. Today, just £1bn has been committed;
• Last year, the government promised that ‘tens of thousands of households’ would have signed up to the Green Deal. Today, just four (4) households have signed;
• In 2015, we will actually be spending £10 billion less on infrastructure than we spent in 2010, and it is to be cut in each successive year
• Investment in the government funded construction pipeline is set to fall by almost a quarter (23 per cent) over the four years from 2011-12 to 2014-15

Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has admitted that “the gap between intention, announcement and delivery is quite significant”. Do you know what? I agree with Nick. But what seems to be escaping his notice is that it is Nick who is making the announcements and failing in the delivery. 

Time for OFMAUDE?

Every so often, the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude suddenly appears in the limelight, makes a statement, and then disappears until it’s his turn again.

It reminds me of one of those low budget horror movies, where ‘the body’ awakes, lifts the lid, rises from the coffin, sucks the lifeblood out of the gullible public, and then returns to the box until the next time.

Mr Maude’s appearances inevitably feature his latest slippery statement on the government’s performance in delivering on its promised ‘bonfire of the quangos’.

You may suggest that I’m being unkind in the use of the word ‘slippery’. But, each time Mr Maude speaks, he redefines the issues, claims success, and disappears before he can properly be held to account. The National Audit Office critically says that there is no system in place to measure any savings or the service impact of these quango changes.

For instance, when Mr Maude claimed he’d abolished 106 quangos, a detailed analysis showed it was just 45. When he claims that he’s abolished quangos, he’s often done nothing of the sort.

My favourite example concerns the announcement that the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances (ACHS) – a quango - had been “abolished” in the morning, only to discover that a Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee (HSAC) – somehow re-defined as not a quango, but to do exactly the same job - had been established in the afternoon! Classic Yes Minister.

And then Mr Maude conveniently forgets all the new quangos that his government is busily creating. The completely unnecessary and costly top-down NHS reorganization is creating hundreds of new quangos. The NHS Commissioning Board alone will have over 3,000 staff and an annual budget of £80 billion.

The Education Secretary keeps announcing new quangos, although he calls them academies or free schools. Last month’s Queen’s Speech produced another 6 new quangos, including OFNUKE – a new nuclear energy regulator – and OFSHOP – a new supermarket regulator.

Perhaps the Government should create an OFMAUDE – a regulator who would prevent Mr Maude making any statement about quangos unless the contents had been independently verified?

Tough on crime – not this lot

Vandalism, dangerous dogs and nuisance neighbours make families’ lives a misery. People want to know that if they are a victim of crime - or if they are being regularly harassed by yobs on their street - then the police will have the power and capability to restore peace as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why I strongly supported the measures – new laws, new penalties, additional resources – that Tony Blair’s government committed to the fight against crime and anti-social behaviour and, as a result, it fell considerably.

But, as I’ve argued before, I’m worried the clock is now being turned back. I make no apology for returning to the issue because it is so important. On top of big cuts to neighbourhood police, the Cameron/Clegg coalition wants to weaken police powers to fight anti-social behaviour. I’m clear that they need to rethink these policies, as we need stronger action against crime instead of their weak approach.

Home Secretary Theresa May plans to water down Asbos so that someone who keeps ignoring police warnings, court orders and injunctions to stop terrorising the local estate will no longer be guilty of a crime. Instead, she plans to introduce the Community Trigger – and, no, it isn’t one attached to a shotgun! - which gives people the right to demand that police deal with anti-social behaviour, meaning forces would have to investigate any incident reported by at least five people or any three complaints by the same person. The reality is that victims who complain three times will only have the right to a review, and this is just the minimum requirement with the authorities able to wait much longer before taking further action if they choose to.

What this will mean in practice has been discovered in the Government’s own pilot schemes in Manchester, Brighton and Richmond. These show that of 44,011 antisocial behaviour incidents, the Community Trigger was only successfully activated 13 times.

The Government’s plans are also weak on support for victims of repeated harassment. There are too many loopholes to let offenders off if police resources are tight. And, all this is to happen when the Government is cutting thousands of frontline police officers.

This all goes to show that this Government simply doesn’t understand the strains and pressures some of our communities are facing. Even more worrying is that it doesn’t appear to be listening to the concerns those communities, and their elected representatives, are expressing.

Welfare reform – heading towards the rocks?

Not infrequently, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, recalls being made redundant and facing life on the dole. Of course, most people being sent down the road are not so fortunate as to be able to rely on the wealthy in-laws.

Less frequently mentioned nowadays was his second enforced redundancy after just two years as Leader of the Conservative Party.Why do I mention this now? I will take IDS at his own words and, therefore, not underestimate the determination of a quiet man. However, word on the street is that IDS’s welfare reform programme is heading towards the rocks. If that results, he will be facing his own interview on the Work Programme in the near future.

The Treasury has been consistently sceptical about IDS’s welfare reform programme. Forget the objectives; forget the specific policies. It’s the practical delivery of the programme within the financial parameters that’s the key problem. However, it’s also important to look at the unintended (or were they?) financial and social consequences.

Let’s just consider a few elements:

• DWP has already been forced to ditch three of the four proposed Universal Credit pathfinders because the IT systems – even for this limited application – are nowhere near ready.
• Insiders are now confirming that there is no chance of 1 million people receiving universal credit by April 2014, as IDS promised in November 2011.
• Applications for discretionary housing payments (DHP) in April, as a consequence of the bedroom tax, leapt from 5,700 last year to more than 25,000 this year and many more will claim when they find out about them. The budget for DHPs will shortly be exhausted, or so constrained that arrears will take a further leap.
• As the DHP budget runs out, there will be thousands of bad news stories about the impact on adults with disabilities and on children who are no longer able to stay with one parent, after relationship breakdown.
• The costs of collecting the bedroom tax, including managing arrears, could well take up most of the extra income.
• A  housing association at the heart of the first direct payment pathfinder  experienced a 29 per cent rise in people contacting its financial support team in the last year, and a 19% rise in the total amount of debt referred.
• Rent arrears in these pathfinders are already increasing dramatically. The reality is that ‘direct by default’ is already being carefully ditched.
• The welfare reform agenda will increase costs in a whole range of other service areas, say 95% of senior council officers. None of these costs were included in the DWP impact assessment.
• It is clear that DWP simply didn’t understand or take account of the frequency of changes in personal circumstances which affect housing and some other benefits which they are trying to incorporate into the universal credit system

Of course, if the government had really been serious about subsidising under-occupation, they would not have excluded pensioners from the scope of the bedroom tax. Not that I am advocating an expansion of the bedroom tax, rather the opposite.

Perhaps the biggest unintended consequence of IDS’s plans is that, because of the necessary extra provision for increases in arrears, increasing costs of collection and advice, and possibly increased borrowing costs social housing providers are cutting their investment plans for this year by an estimated £1bn plus, mainly impacting on the construction industry and building materials’ providers. So, at the very time that the government is rushing around trying to find good-value infrastructure investment projects that can be on site quickly, it scuppers over £1bn that fits the bill.

It has not been a good few weeks for IDS. He

• called for people to voluntarily return winter fuel payments. Just 200 did so.
• lost a major court battle to keep the locations of thousands of workfare placements secret. The judge said the DWP had “a paucity of compelling evidence” to back its claims. Sounds familiar!
• was defeated when the Court of Appeal ruled that workers had been unlawfully made to do unpaid work
• has again been rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority over the deliberate misuse of statistics.

In November 2003, Iain Duncan Smith released his novel The Devil’s Tune. The critics panned it. "Really, it's terrible ... terrible, terrible, terrible" was one of the more generous.  The book never made it into paperback.

Now, with welfare reform being “terrible, terrible….”, perhaps IDS is determined to mark his place in history with the greatest crash on the rocks of all time. The dreadful prospect is that millions of the poorest families will be the ones most affected.

This article was originally published on the Local Government Chronicle website on the 4th of June 2013. http://www.lgcplus.com/briefings/a-long-list-of-costs-and-casualties/5059171.article