Bunk up or bunk off?

Cameron and Clegg’s bedroom tax is a classic example of a policy which, superficially, looks logical but, in practice, is pernicious.

Many councils and housing associations had schemes which encouraged and sensitively enabled people to move to smaller accommodation when they were ready to do so. But now the carrots have been thrown away and been replaced by a tax stick.

If the alleged justification for the bedroom tax is principled – ‘we shouldn’t be subsidising a spare room’ – you only have to ask why the policy doesn’t apply to pensioners to see that that line doesn’t stack up.

The government has been desperate to present an image of those being hit by the tax as single idlers rattling around in large houses. The truth is very different. 416,000 of the 660,000 households being hit have a resident with a disability, including more than 75,000 in Yorkshire and Humberside and the East Midlands.

The other argument for the bedroom tax is that it will free up accommodation for other families. Except that in most areas there simply isn’t smaller accommodation that can be offered. And now we’re healing squeals from Conservative MPs saying that rural areas should be exempt from the bedroom tax because there is little alternative accommodation – but that’s no less true in urban areas.

Where there is some accommodation, it is mostly in the private sector with higher rents than the property being vacated, which defeats the government’s objective of saving money. In fact, there is now a real risk that the bedroom tax will end up costing more than it saves. The National Audit Office says that the government has got its sums wrong.

The real cost of the bedroom tax is overwhelmingly going to be paid by households containing households with disabilities. On average, they will lose £720 a year. Most of the small minority who can move will have to shell out a small fortune in removal and re-settlement costs. But there’s a lot more pain than just the cost. The Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation has described the policy as “an unfair, ill-planned disaster that is hurting our poorest families.”

The best way of tackling the growing housing crisis is to build more affordable homes to buy and to let, not by penalising those households who have the least choice.

Tips

While the summer can often be a quiet time for the news cycle, it would appear that Eric Pickles has been trying to break the monotony with a range of tips for councils

First, he told us about the support for local high streets, and announced ‘dedicated teams of experts’ to assist local leaders. Now, on that very same day, the CLG Committee took evidence from Mary Portas, the government-appointed high street renewal guru, backed with £1.2m for Portas Pilots. Strangely, we learn that, despite her requests, Ms Portas has never met Mr Pickles and she knew absolutely nothing about the new training and mentoring proposals. How curious?

Then, he moved on to parking. Mr Pickles’ has an ambition for ‘shoppers to have a 15 minute grace period to park on double yellow lines without penalty’. The proposal has been condemned by a wide range of organizations, but this wasn’t mentioned. He referred rather disparagingly to the income that councils receive from parking charges and fines. Yet, that same day, the Federation of Small Businesses published its research on this issue, which confirmed that such income has actually fallen in real terms over the last 5 years.

As he directed public anger towards parking policies and traffic wardens, one might have thought that Mr Pickles would be desperate to draw our attention to the one council, Aberystwyth, that axed its traffic wardens to save money and to placate the drivers who railed against them. Of course, within 6 months - after parking chaos, road rage and fisticuffs, congestion and regular gridlocks – everyone was demanding their return. Perhaps that explains the silence?

Mr Pickles then turned his attention to the fire service…. or rather, firefighters’ pensions. Not unimportant, of course. However, there was complete silence about the scale of the cuts being made in fire service cover throughout the country. How curious?

Next, Mr Pickles told us about his planned tax changes for granny annexes. Gosh, it’s great news, he told us, for all those households – nearly all in the top council tax bands and containing quite a few mansions – who will receive an average near £500 cut in council tax. However, he was completely silent about the higher council tax bills being imposed on millions of the poorest families by cutting funding for council tax benefit. Why, I wondered?

Then he turned his attention to those naughty councils that had increased their cash reserves. Mind you, he didn’t mention that reserves had fallen in a quarter of councils, nor that the vast majority of the increased total related to already ear-marked schemes. Never mind, perhaps he missed the comments of CIPFA and other professional bodies which didn’t share his perspective.

Of course, his support for coastal towns is welcome; that extra 5% in the £29m fund could make all the difference. But, for some reason there was no mention of the huge additional challenges facing many of those coastal towns – especially in Essex and Kent – which have suddenly found themselves having to cope with an influx of households being forced out of central London by benefit changes.

Then, why not raise a glass to celebrate that 100 pubs have been listed as assets of community value? Let’s just forget that, over the past 2 years, the number of pub closures has risen from 12 to 18 a week, and more than 200 pubs have been turned into shops.

We should all welcome the increase in new home starts. But, there’s no reference to his decision to cut the budget for investment in affordable housing by 60%, nor that housing completions are at their peacetime lowest level since the 1920s.

More worryingly, Mr Pickles is lauding the Help to Buy scheme. Why is it that just about every serious research body, right across the political spectrum, is unanimous in saying not just that this scheme is wrong, but that it’s positively dangerous? The very last thing we should be doing is fueling inflation in a still over-priced market and, thus, actually disabling even more families from becoming owner-occupiers.

Of course, I’m pleased that Mr Pickles is helping a few councils with homelessness. But, why no acknowledgement that homelessness is on an upward trend as a direct result of the policies he’s implemented?

Unsurprisingly, last year’s obsession with refuse collection made a re-appearance. But, I searched in vain for the sentence “I’ve wasted a quarter of a billion pounds of public money trying to persuade councils to move back to weekly rubbish collections, but only one did so.”

Who said the summer can be a dull time for news?

Say one thing, do another

Up and down the country, we are beginning to see the real implications of the massive cuts that the government has made in local government funding. This month’s announcements about the closures of libraries, swimming pools, SureStart centres are just the start. The biggest funding cuts are still to come and, over the summer, Eric Pickles quietly announced a further £1bn cut in council funding.

Service cuts and increased charges for services are taking place in councils of all political controls and none. To those who suggest that ‘there wouldn’t be these problems if politics was taken out of local government’, I simply note that the councils closest to financial meltdown are controlled by Independents.

However, the government has been determinedly political in making the funding cuts. Millions of pounds are being switched from north to south, from urban to rural, and from the poorest to the wealthiest areas. But even that isn’t stopping service cuts in southern Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils, which rather gives the lie to suggestions that the cuts arise from political incompetence or perversity.

This switch is also being forced through in other spending areas. Last year, the government tried to make the same sort of funding changes in the NHS. Leading doctors managed to block the proposals, saying that the proposed changes were completely unjustified on health grounds. That hasn’t stopped the government trying again this year. It intends to cut nearly £50m a year from the NHS in Sheffield and give it to Surrey – a proposal supported by Nick Clegg, somewhat undermining his thin claim to be standing up for the city.

However, I will support Nick Clegg’s proposal to provide free school meals to 5 and 6 year olds. What observers might find strange is that when councils like Hull and Southwark provided free school meals, local Liberal Democrats described it as “disgraceful profligacy” and, when they took control of those councils, stopped the provision altogether. Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes twittered that the policy was “wasting extraordinary amounts”. At least we know that ‘Say one thing, do another’ is safe in Mr Clegg’s hands.

Their Red tape, your wages and rights?

It is being suggested that Whitehall departments will be legally obliged to scrap red tape and that ministers would be required to scrap twice as many existing rules for any new rule they wished to introduce.

Of course, there have been more announcements about ‘crusades against red tape’ than Frank Sinatra had final tours. And, it is absolutely correct that, where rules or regulations are unnecessary or counter-productive, we should do away with them. For that, we need to be ever vigilant.

Last November, the Government claimed that an initial “one in, one out” rule for new Whitehall regulation introduced in January 2011 had reduced the costs on businesses by almost £1 billion. It wasn’t true. David Cameron followed that by claiming that red tape should be attacked with the same vigour as “beating Hitler”. He hasn’t.

Enshrining it in law will test the Government’s rhetoric on reducing the regulatory burden to the limit. As one insider put it “The key question is what is regarded as a regulation. The Treasury likes to pretend that changes to the tax code are not red tape although they provoke the most complaints.” 

Similarly, some of those who continually demand cuts in laws and regulations – are regularly calling for new laws and regulations to tackle new sorts of crimes. Just think of the last few weeks with the demands for action on internet harassment and trolling.

But the real difficulty is that the vast majority of rules and regulations were introduced to provide protection – for individuals, but also for businesses. When some business organisations (like the Institute of Directors) and some politicians (like UKIP) talk about ‘doing away with red tape to save billions’, what they actually mean is doing away with the minimum wage, minimum protections on sickness and holiday pay, health and safety laws etc.

Their red tape is your wage and rights.

Dial Cameron and Clegg for Chaos

The 1997 Blair government inherited a National Health Service that was on its knees – with patients waiting literally years for operations in crumbling hospitals which had been built before the NHS was founded in 1948. Over the following decade, that government rebuilt and reformed the NHS, with more nurses, more doctors, more operations, shorter waiting times and over 100 new hospitals. I didn’t agree with every reform, but it was no wonder that public satisfaction with the NHS was at a record high by 2010.

Unfortunately, this government’s record on the NHS is shameful. David Cameron promised “I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS”. He assured nurses there would be no top-down reorganisations. He went round hospitals promising patients he would save Accident and Emergency Departments from closure. And what has happened? The deficit went up last year while over 4,000 nurses were cut. £3 billion was wasted on a top-down reorganisation. And the very A&E units David Cameron promised to save are closing down.

The recent Keogh review contained challenging but accurate picture of care standards and failings at 14 NHS trusts. We must, however, remember that the problems identified in these hospitals are not typical of the NHS or of the care given by NHS staff. We should seek to learn from this report and not use it to tarnish the many doctors, nurses and NHS staff who look after us in our NHS. The vast majority of doctors and nurses working in the NHS perform to a very high standard day in, day out, but everyone in the country will be worried that some hospitals are letting people down. Sir Bruce Keogh’s excellent and important report found that the most serious problems arose where there were “inadequate numbers of nursing staff”.

We should all be horrified by the massive exercise of vandalism that has destroyed NHS Direct. This is a mess entirely of the government’s own making. We had a single, trusted national service and they decided to break it up into 46 cut-price contracts, where essentially computers have replaced nurses. And the contractors have now decided that they can’t even provide a reduced service for the price they promised.

So what have we now got? “The computer says ‘No’. Go to A&E.” Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up with record numbers going to A&E and the return of patients spending hours on trolleys in corridors?

Muddying the water

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of people who are employed on zero-hours’ contracts. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some employers are seeking to exploit the current economic uncertainty.

Recently, I’ve met constituents who, following a period of unemployment, have found jobs working regular hours but are employed on zero-hours contracts. Some have been told they have to work exclusively for one employer, but with no guarantee that they will get enough work to pay the bills.  Others have had to commit to making themselves available for work at times when they are uncertain that they can make appropriate child-care arrangements at such short-notice. For them, zero-hours contracts mean daily stress and insecurity.

After a decade when we implemented legislation on the minimum wage, agency workers, holiday and parental leave entitlements to protect employees and fair competition, it now appears that we are in a period where some employers are pursuing a race to see who can exploit workers the most. This can’t continue.

Understanding and tackling the issue hasn’t been helped by the determined attempts by some employers and parts of the media to muddy the water. We do need to distinguish between what and what is not acceptable. Of course, we need flexibility. But flexibility should never be used to try to justify exploitation.

There are some long-standing arrangements where zero-hours’ contracts are appropriate and acceptable – for example, supply arrangements for teachers and doctors or occasional stewarding at events.

But what should be banned is employers insisting that zero-hours workers must be available even when there is no guarantee of any work. We should stop zero-hours contracts that require workers to work exclusively for one business. And we should end the misuse of zero-hours contracts where employees are, in practice, working regular hours over a sustained period.

Such employment practices are bad for employees, bad for good employers and fair competition, and bad for the economy if increasing numbers of people are uncertain about their ability to invest for the future. It’s time to act now.

Charitable relief

Many local and national charities breathed a sigh of relief last week when Local Government and Communities Secretary of State Eric Pickles lost his legal fight to scrap the collection of union subscriptions through salaries. Actually, this court case didn’t involve charities at all, the outcome was important for them because of that other important law – the law of unintended consequences. Let me explain.

About thirty years ago, various charities approached both public and private employers to see whether they would implement a scheme which allowed an employee to make a donation to a charity of their choice by direct deduction from their wages. This proposal was modelled on the already existing scheme which enabled employees to pay their trade union dues by direct deduction (check off), which had been implemented by the vast majority of private and public employers. As a result, millions of pounds each year have been donated to national and local charities.

Fast forward to this year. Eric Pickles, as part of his strategy to undermine trade unions but presented under the guise of ‘saving money’, first told councils that they must end check-off and then announced that he would end check-off for civil servants in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Logically, if check-off for trade union dues – which relate to both individual and collective agreements between employees, their representatives and employers, often under-pinned by law – could not be allowed, how could a scheme for charitable donations – with no relationship to the employer’s functions at all – possibly be justified?

Bluntly, if check-off schemes were stopped, it seems inevitable that the charitable donations’ schemes would quickly follow. The result would be a dramatic loss of income for many charities, which would then face a massive task of approaching each of the individual employees to get them to set up individual direct debits as an alternative.

Fortunately, the PCS trade union took Mr Pickles to the High Court. The judges said the move was a breach of contract and has ordered DCLG to reverse the decision and pay all legal costs. During the proceedings, it was revealed the ‘check off’ system costs DCLG just £300 a year to administer. So the £90,000 legal bill, which will now have to be picked up by the taxpayer on behalf of Mr Pickles, could have paid for the scheme for the next 300 years.

In the wrong lobby

David Cameron’s judgment has been suspect on a number of issues and you would of presumed that he – and his partner-in-arms, Nick Clegg – would have paused for thought before they pressed ahead with another measure which will make things worse and not better.

This time, it’s a Bill about lobbying. Nearly everyone, including the vast majority of the public, believes that we need to take action to regulate lobbying and make it transparent. Back in 2010, David Cameron described lobbying as “the next big scandal waiting to happen.” In the three years since, whilst his Ministers and the Conservative Party have become mired in a series of lobbying scandals, there was silence.

Then, from nowhere, Cameron and Clegg have managed to produce a Bill that is so bad that it has achieved the unique feat of uniting transparency campaigners and the lobbying industry against it. Only they could produce a Bill which wouldn’t stop lobbyist Lynton Crosby – whose company has been paid a fortune by the tobacco companies to lobby on their behalf - from advising them about tobacco policy, but could stop an organization like Cancer UK from campaigning about it.

Local charities and organisations could have their voices gagged. So, student bodies might be prevented from campaigning about the Liberal Democrat broken promise on tuition fees; parent groups could be restricted from campaigning about the local costs of childcare; or community groups could be hindered in their campaigns about a local library or Surestart centre.

Charities, community groups and other organisations play a huge part in our national and local democracy. It doesn’t matter if we agree or disagree with what they say – that’s all part of a healthy democracy.

This Bill is an attempt to gag charities and other campaigners. The National Association of Voluntary Organisations is coordinating opposition from a wide range of national charities. Local charities and community groups might want to add their voice before it is too late.

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.