Summary:
Rhubarb … rhubarb … build more houses … rhubarb … build a Britain long journey … fit for the future … robust action …
Oh, just read it for yourself … if you think it will make any difference … sticking plaster on an amputation …
Category Archives: Austerity cuts
Can productivity and growth be increased outside the South East except for Hinkley C?
Our Local Enterprise Partnership’s draft economic strategy is making enormous claims about how much it will increase productivity in Devon and Somerset – its predictions outstripping those of historic precedent and some of the most productive areas of the UK. This in spite of our ageing population and the effects of austerity on skills and training (our LEP’s investment in this sector appears to be limited to training only for Hinkley C nuclear plant).
Our councillors might well examine our LEPs claims with some disquiet:
“… Cities such as Stoke, Blackburn, Mansfield and Doncaster had productivity 25% below the national average, the Centre for Cities said. Raising all parts of the UK to the national productivity average would increase the size of the economy by £203bn – equivalent to Birmingham’s output four times over.
The report showed that cities outside the greater south-east had weaker productivity because they were failing to secure the higher-skilled work of productive sectors and firms.
“Firms choose to locate their high-skilled operations in cities which can offer them access to a high-skilled workforce and other relevant businesses, and will base lower value components in places where land and labour is cheaper,” the thinktank said.
“Barclays bases its high-value banking activities in London and its low-skilled call centre in Sunderland. Similarly, clothing company Asos has a large distribution centre with low-skilled jobs in Barnsley, but its headquarters is located [in London].”
The report said another factor explaining the regional divide was that highly productive sectors and firms made up a larger shares of jobs in cities in the greater south-east than in urban areas in other regions.
On average, cities in the region had a larger proportion of workers in sectors and firms that contributed most to national productivity – in 2015, the information and communications sector made up 7% of jobs in cities in the greater south-east, compared with just 3% in other cities. The financial services industry accounted for 6% of jobs in cities in the region compared with 4% of jobs in cities elsewhere in the country. …”
“Why do people care more about benefit ‘scroungers’ than billions lost to the rich?”
“Last year’s British Social Attitudes survey asked Britons about their feelings on this issue. Our analysis of this data (with Ben Baumberg Geiger of the University of Kent) revealed that the British public believes tax avoidance to be commonplace (around one third of taxpayers are assumed to have exploited a tax loophole). In moral terms, people seem rather ambivalent; less than half (48%) thought that legal tax avoidance was “usually or always wrong”.
By contrast, more than 60% of Britons believe it is “usually or always wrong” for poorer people to use legal loopholes to claim more benefits. In other words, people are significantly more likely to condemn poor people for using legal means to obtain more benefits than they are to condemn rich people for avoiding tax. This is a consistent finding across many different studies. For example, detailed interviews conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis found that people “tended to be far more exercised by the prospect of low-income groups exploiting the system than they were about high-income groups doing the same”.
This discrepancy is reflected in government priorities. Deep public antipathy towards benefit “scroungers” has been the rock upon which successive Conservative-led parliaments have built the case for austerity. Throughout his premiership, David Cameron, along with his chancellor, George Osborne, kept the opposition between “hardworking people” and lazy benefit claimants right at the centre of their messaging on spending cuts. Though gestures have been made towards addressing widespread tax avoidance by the wealthy, very little has actually been achieved. This stands in stark contrast to the scale and speed with which changes have been made to welfare legislation.
Will the Paradise Papers shift the public’s focus? The leaks alone are seemingly not enough. The 2016 British Social Attitudes survey was conducted just four months after the release of the Panama Papers. Even then, the British public remained more concerned about benefit claimants than tax avoiders.
…”
Inquiry: Housing for older people Communities and Local Government Committee
“The Communities and Local Government Committee is holding an inquiry on housing for older people. The Committee has set up this web forum to hear directly from older people about their experiences of moving home in later life. This will help us understand the challenges people face and help us to focus our inquiry on the key issues.
If you, or a family member, have recently moved home, are considering doing so, or have decided not to, we want to hear from you.
The web forum will be open until
Monday 27 November 2017.
If you would like to submit a comment but do not want it to be made public in this forum, please start your post with NOT FOR PUBLICATION.
Specifically, we are interested in your answers to any of following questions that apply to you:
Have you moved home recently or are you considering doing so?
If so, why?
Have you considered moving and then decided against it? What were the reasons for this?
Do you know where to obtain information and advice about moving? Have you ever sought this type of advice?
What are your experiences of obtaining finance to move?
Have you experience of adapting your home to make it more accessible?
How did you go about this and did you seek advice in doing so?
How do you feel your home affects your health and wellbeing?”
Have you experienced an improvement in your health and wellbeing as a result of moving?
…..”
How the other 1% lives – part 2
No worries about making ends meet or ‘just managing’ here!
“Her mother is the daughter of billionaire Bernie, the former chief executive of Formula One.
And Sophia Rutland, three, may be the luckiest girl in the UK – as her luxurious lifestyle is revealed on mother Tamara Ecclestone’s new reality show, Tamara’s World.
In a teaser for the new episode, the 33-year-old details the running of her £70 million mansion – which hosts more than 50 staff, as well as a sprawling playroom for her daughter, complete with a life-size dolls’ house and even her own ice palace.
A number of servants, clad in black, are seen cleaning various spots in the house, including a huge dining room, extensive walk-in wardrobe and a luxurious bathroom, complete with gold bath.
While the extensive household duties are carried out, Tamara is instead seen sweetly colouring with three-year-old Sophia in her pink and cream playroom. …
They tell her: ‘You’ve got pilates this morning, which I’ve confirmed for you. Then we’ve got a stylist coming in at 4, then we’re going to do your nails and pedicure straight after.’
Before they ask: ‘We just need to know when you want your massage tomorrow?’, while Tamara jokes in a VT: ‘My PAs help me get out the door! And to live the life I do.’
Assistants Danni and Megan themselves then detail their hectic working schedules, revealing: ‘It’s more than five full time jobs, and we have in excess of fifty staff.’
Tamara goes on to reveal she and Sophia have a number of personal butlers and housekeepers, who ‘keep the house presentable and make sure all the clothes are ironed and put away’.
She also gushes of her ‘amazing’ private chef Jonah, and her own personal dog walker – and laughs of their pets: ‘I’m not sure why we have 9 or 10 dogs!’
Further clips give insight into the family’s sun-soaked holidays, as well as the mother and daughter duo’s days spent baking and playing together at home.
While endless staff members are seen tending to the house in the footage, Tamara admits the 57-room pad is just as comfortable as a normal home.
‘It still feels homely despite there being so many people,’ she adds.
Tamara and Jay bought their Kensington home for £45million back in 2011, but it is believed to have doubled in value.
The brunette is the daughter of Bernie Ecclestone, the former chief executive of the Formula One Group. His involvement in the sport is thought to have resulted an estimated fortune of £2.5billion.
Tamara herself is thought to have an estimated net worth of £232million herself, and spent £7million on her wedding to Jay in 2013.
The pair said I do in front of 150 guests at the French Riviera’s most luxurious hotel, with Tamara dressed in a couture Vera Wang gown complete with 30 ft train and crystals on the bodice.
She took her first dance as Mrs. Rutland to a cover of Lionel Richie’s Endless Love, performed live by Mariah Carey — hired for £2.5 million.
Sir Elton John also played an hour-long set, dedicating his song Circle Of Life, from the soundtrack to Disney film The Lion King, to the happy couple. It is thought the singer was paid £1 million to attend. …”
“Right to buy is doomed unless we get more power, say councils”
Councils are warning that only one in every three homes being sold under the right-to-buy scheme is being replaced, as strict government rules add to the housing crisis.
Local authorities say that the right-to-buy scheme is under threat if they are not given the financial powers to build more council houses and replace homes that are sold. The LGA is calling on the Government to use the Budget later this month to allow councils to retain 100 per cent of right-to-buy receipts and have more freedom to borrow to invest. They also want flexibility to determine how they implement right-to-buy locally.
Cllr Martin Tett, the LGA’s Housing spokesman, said: “Families around the country desperately need more affordable homes and more routes into home-ownership. A model of Right to Buy that actually allows councils to build more homes would vastly increase the opportunities for these families. Current arrangements are restricting councils from being able to replace homes being sold under the scheme. The scheme will quickly become a thing of the past in England if councils continue to be prevented from building new homes and replacing those sold. If we are to stand a real chance of solving our housing shortage, councils need the funding and powers to replace any homes sold under right to buy quickly and reinvest in building more of the genuine affordable homes our communities desperately need.”
Source: Times p13 (pay wall)
“Cost of care will take up most of council tax within two years”
”Most of the council tax people pay will need to be spent on providing care for children and adults within two years, the LGA has warned.
It said almost 60 pence out of every £1 of council tax be taken up by the rising demand for social care and children’s services by 2020, leaving less money for other vital local services, like collecting bins, fixing potholes, buses, street lighting and food safety.
The LGA is calling on the Government to use the Autumn Budget to allow local government as a whole to keep all the business rates it collects to plug funding gaps.
Cllr Claire Kober, Chair of the LGA’s Resources Board, said: “Demand for services caring for adults and children continues to rise but core funding from central government to councils continues to go down. This means councils have no choice but to squeeze budgets from other services, such as roads, street lighting and bus services to cope. Councils will be asking people to pay similar levels of council tax while, at the same time, warning communities that the quality and quantity of services they enjoy could drop.
Local government in England faces a £5.8 billion funding gap by 2020. Even if councils stopped filling potholes, maintaining parks and open spaces, closed all children’s centres, libraries, museums, leisure centres, turned off every street light and shut all discretionary bus routes they still would not have saved enough money to plug this gap in just two years.”
Cllr Kober will be interviewed by ITV News today and the story is running across Sky News bulletins.”
Source: Mail p8, Times p2
“Number of pensioners living in rented homes may treble by 2035”
Of course, rich people will be able to afford flats in PegasusLife developments – with annual service charges higher than most people’s annual rents.
“Almost 1 million pensioners could be trapped in the private rented sector in 20 years, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation from rogue landlords, according to a renters’ rights campaign group.
There are 370,000 pensioner households currently paying rent to private landlords in the UK.
But campaigners expect that figure to almost treble to 995,000 by 2035-36 if housebuilding remains at current levels.
The Generation Rent campaign group has warned that these pensioners will be forced to rely on housing benefit to cover their rent, which will then pile pressure on the welfare budget.
New research from the lobby group also revealed that older renters are more likely to prefer secure tenancies with rent controls and tenancy guarantees.
Dan Wilson Craw, director of Generation Rent, said: “With most debates on housing focused on young adults, politicians risk neglecting the vast numbers of people who are already too old to get a mortgage and face a lifetime of renting.
“As they start retiring in greater numbers, the state will have to pick up the tab unless it makes some fundamental changes to the housing market.
“The answer is not further cuts to housing benefit, because that will only further immiserate people who have nowhere else to turn.
“Instead, we need years of investment in new homes to bring down rents and a transformation of the private rental market into a professional provider of long term homes.
“This means giving tenants protection from unfair evictions and putting a limit on rent rises.”
“Social care could drain local services cash dry, warns LGA”
“For every £1 of council tax, almost 60p could be spent on social care by 2020, taking away from “vital day-to-day services”, the Local Government Association has warned ahead of the Budget later this month.
The umbrella-group has called on the government to ensure councils could keep raising the local tax to keep providing services as the money is “running out fast”.
Clair Kober, chair of LGA’s resources board, said: “With the right funding and powers, local government can play a vital role in supporting central government to deliver its ambitions for everyone in our country.”
She added: “Demand for services caring for adults and children continues to rise but core funding from central government to councils continues to go down.
“This means councils have no choice but to squeeze budgets from other services – such as roads, street lighting and bus services – to cope.”
The association projected 56p could be spent on caring for the elderly, vulnerable adults and children, up from 41p in 2010-11, and that this would take away funds that could be spent on services such as waste collection, road repairs and bus services.
Almost half of all local authorities (168 councils) will no longer receive any revenue support grant funding from central government by 2019-20, the LGA point out in a new analysis.
Uncertainty was growing over how local services would be funded after 2020, as the Local Government Finance Bill, which was passing through parliament before the election, was not reintroduced in the Queen’s Speech, the association said.
This has made it uncertain whether councils would be able to keep all their income from business rates by the end of the decade.”
Stripped back local government and its consequences
“This week, the Grenfell Recovery Taskforce issued its first report into the response of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea after nine weeks of research. The findings are damning, as anyone following the story would expect, and focus on particular cultural failings in the council that worsened the response.
The report speaks of “a leadership vacuum”, with a “distant council” and a lack of emotional intelligence in dealing with survivors and the community. It says empathy and emotional intelligence need to be put at the heart of its recovery plans. “We have seen many good intentions, which have gone unrecognised by residents,” says the report.
“Often what has been lacking is the appropriate ‘style’ of delivery, where an approach that had empathy at its core would have had greater positive impact. Systems, policies and practice need to be designed with people’s current needs at the heart as opposed to what is good or convenient administrative practice.”
This comment speaks to one of the main failings of the council: to understand what the community needed, not just in terms of temporary accommodation, rehousing and the release of funds, but with regards to people centred response services. Many complained that the council seemed robotic in its responses, focusing on defending its approach rather than accepting and understanding that people viewed its actions as inadequate and working out precisely why.
It was a council that had become insular, disconnected and in particular distant from communities similar to those on the Lancaster West estate. Despite the tragedy being unprecedented, the council appears to have become fixated on behaving as though the recovery could be dealt with within traditional local government frameworks, notes the report, which says the council needs to be bolder.
The taskforce urges the government to encourage a “highly innovative” response responding to residents’ needs, rather than being “bound by tried and tested bureaucratic response systems that are not appropriate in these circumstances”. …
Kensington and Chelsea is an extreme example of the stripped-back local government we now see across Britain. This is due not just to austerity hollowing out council accounts and making it impossible to deliver services, but also to a philosophical shift in the way councils operate. Too many have shifted from providing hands-on, local services with a high level of resident involvement, to an aloof, threadbare service that consists of both councillors and staff who eschew frontline work and meetings for a rigid managerialism and dismissal of residents as obstacles and annoyances. …
Local politics is far closer to everyday lives than national politics; by its very nature, empathy and emotional intelligence are absolutely imperative to a functioning council. It’s tragic that the Grenfell tower fire and external criticisms were necessary for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to understand that.”
Public sector workers – here’s your “Pat on the Back”!
“Fewer social homes being built than at any time since Second World War, official figures reveal”
The article says the Government is concentrating on “affordable homes”. Affordability is calculated at offering a discount of 20% on the average price of other houses on a development. So, if the development has an average cost of £300,000 an affordable home (smaller and usually sited at the least attractive part of a development) would be £240,000. There is no such thing as a private “affordable rent”.
Social housing is built and controlled by councils or housing associations and rents are lower than in the private sector.
“Fewer social homes are being built than at any time since the Second World War, new official figures have revealed.
Government data shows just 5,380 new social homes were completed across England last year – down from 6,800 the previous year.
The number has plummeted from 39,560 in 2010/11 – the year the Conservatives came to power. …
… Responding to the latest figures, Labour said immediate action was needed. John Healey MP, the party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, said: “After the Grenfell Tower fire Theresa May admitted the Conservatives haven’t given enough attention to social housing. These shocking figures show she was right.
“The number of new social rented homes being built is now at the lowest level on record, and the number of new low-cost homes to buy is at just half the level it was under Labour. After seven years of failure on housing the Chancellor must use the Budget to tackle the housing crisis.”
Housing and Planning Minister Alok Sharma said: “These latest figures show progress but we know there is more to do. That’s why we have increased the affordable homes budget to more than £9bn and introduced a wider range of measures to boost building more affordable homes, supporting the different needs of a wide range of people.”
UK politics and corruption – it’s not (only) “Johnny Foreigner” to blame
This article, written in December 2016, foresaw developments this week. We have had the warnings, but where is the path to change when all the paths are obstructec by the corrupt?
“… Our media likes to write about crime and corruption as though they are the funny fetishes of Johnny Foreigner: Italian mafia, Russian oligarchs or Mexican drug lords. But this year alone, the former banker and anti-corruption campaigner Roman Borisovich made the claim that three-quarters of the money looted in Russia comes to Britain, the Italian mafia expert Roberto Saviano described the UK as “the most corrupt place on earth”, and our biggest bank was sued for its involvement in laundering Mexican drug money: appropriate, given than HSBC was founded by criminal drug dealers on the back of the Opium Wars.
This racket is big enough to have vast control over our politics. An enterprise dogged by criminal charges can pay to hush up the nation’s biggest broadsheet. It’s hard to look at party funding in the last two UK general elections without concluding that it was the donations of the financial sector and prominent tax dodgers which put David Cameron into Downing Street twice to ensure that they weren’t regulated after the 2008 crash.
And it’s not just the Tories. After trade unions, the biggest ‘donors’ to the Labour party before the 2015 elections were the accountancy firm PricewaterhoueCooper, who ‘gave’ in the form of £600,000 of research ‘help’. Then shadow-chancellor-now-TV-dancing-supermo Ed Balls effectively outsourced £200,000 worth of policy work to these much criticized wizards of tax accountancy for the mega-rich, while shadow business secretary Chukka Ummuna got £60,000 worth of ‘support’.
Not wanting to miss out on the action, the Liberal Democrats accepted 1371 hours of policy ‘technical support’ from PwC in 2015 alone, the year after the Luxemburg Leaks revealed the firm’s significant involvement in helping the hyper-rich slash their tax bills through complex accounting arrangements. It’s worth pondering on who wrote the maze of loopholes into the laws in the first place…
Once they leave office, the deal only gets better for our prominent politicians. Former British foreign secretaries like Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw and David Miliband have auctioned access to themselves for huge sums of money. Former British health secretaries like Alan Milburn, Virginia Bottomley and John Hutton have all quietly slipped from government into the private healthcare sector, and now make millions of pounds between them cashing in on NHS privatisations they (and their cousins) pushed through. Former British Chancellor George Osborne has seen his best man’s firm rake in £36 million from his bargain-basement privatisation of the Royal Mail. Former British prime minister Tony Blair used the links made in office to secure vast sums of money running round the globe as a lackey for the violent royal dictators of the United Arab Emirates, and working as an advisor, lobbyist and spin doctor to a cast of characters including Nursultan Äbishuly Nazarbayev, the dictator of Kazakhstan and Aleksandar Vučić: once Slobodan Milošević’s Information Minister, now Serbia’s prime minister.
Our country is represented in the world by a trade minister who was previously sacked as defence secretary for allowing a businessman funded by companies which “potentially stood to benefit from government decisions” to sit in on at least 40 meetings and a foreign secretary whose time as London Mayor included overseeing property deals described by the former chairman of the government’s Committee on Standards in Public Life as “having the smell of semi-corruption” involving large donations to the Conservative party. Do either of them have an eye to the second career profits of their predecessors? We’ll have to see.
And those who wish to buy influence get their way. David Cameron promised “no ifs, not buts, no new runways” at Heathrow. Theresa May came out publicly against the scheme. Boris Johnson and Zac Goldsmith both tied their reputations to their opposition to it. But it is going ahead, costing the Tories an MP and a bucket of political capital across marginal seats in West London.
It seems to me that there is a simple explanation for what would normally be seen as an astonishing act of political self-harm: as the organisation 10:10 puts it: “15% of the population took 70% of all flights in 2014. People in that 15% group earn more than £115,000 a year. They tend to have a second home abroad. And their most popular destinations? Tax havens.[1]” The third runway only makes sense if seen from the top of the towers of Canary Wharf. But in Britain, that’s the view that matters.
The scar of living in a country run by and for the rich is marked by more than a runway, though. Even if you ignore the vast quantity of wealth hidden in tax havens, Britain is the sixth most unequal country in the OECD, after Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the USA and Israel. This is a level of inequality of the scale that tears whole societies apart; or is only possible in places that have already been rent asunder: three of those countries have governments at war with their own citizens; and the USA just elected Donald Trump.
By some measures, the UK has nine of the ten poorest regions of Northern Europe, while London is the richest. We produce 18% less per hour worked than the G8 average, and real wages have fallen 10.4% since 2007: a figure only matched across the OECD by Greece. Children in England are among the least happy in the world, and in 2013, the UK was criticised by the UN for a mortality rate among under 5s that’s higher than in countries including the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Meanwhile, the bonfire of the London housing market sucks in ever more of our cash, ensuring the nation’s wealth is squandered on making homes in the most expensive city on earth ever-more expensive, rather than investing that capital in anything productive.
For those of us who seek answers to serious questions about how to build a just, sustainable economy in this archipelago, one of the first questions must surely be what vehicle we have to do this through. And whilst government is certainly necessary, the ancient British state; built to run an empire, seems utterly unfit for the purpose. Without the modifying influence of the EU, though, it’s all that England is left with.
In this context, any conversation about tax in Britain must include a thought about the constitutional position of our tax havens. Any discussion of regional inequality has to look at the vast centralisation of power in our supposedly sovereign parliament. Any talk of financial regulation has to ask why the City can have such vast influence within our politics. Any look at income inequality must also survey inequalities of political reach. Because once you accept that the state has a decisive role in our economy – and it does – you need next to ask who runs that state, in whose interests, and how that can change.
In 2016, millions of British people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to ‘take back control’. The remaining question, then, is a simple one: to whom will that control be returning? Will it be the same ruling class, using the same holes in the same wood-wormed constitution to squirrel away wealth and power and plunder the country like they plunder the planet? Or will the process force us to realise that Britain’s problem aren’t the fault of foreigners from whom we can escape; but come instead from our own failure to free ourselves from Medieval subjecthood, and fight for real democracy?
[1] This research was done by the Tyndall Centre, using the PwC list of tax havens.”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/britain-is-not-what-it-thinks-it-is/
Free child care ? Only if you can find it and that’s not easy
“The chaotic rollout of 30 hours’ free childcare policy hit families in high-rent metropolitan areas the hardest, HuffPost UK can reveal.
Inner London, Outer London, East of England and the South East suffered most from the botched policy launch in September, with as many as 40% of parents unable to access the free childcare promised to them by Theresa May.
Cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire were also left with a vast shortage of places, with cash-strapped providers telling the Government they would have to charge for a place or face running at a loss.
The Government has also admitted 10% of eligible families across the country were still unable to access free childcare today, more than two months on from the policy’s launch.
Labour’s shadow early years minister Tracy Brabin MP said: “This is yet more evidence that the Government’s 30 hour free childcare policy is seriously under-funded, something that is being felt particularly starkly in areas where property costs are typically higher. …”
You can’t make it up: Persimmon wants more government help for developers!
“Housebuilder Persimmon has urged the Government to push ahead with simplifying the planning system as its order book for new homes continues to rise.
The company said in a trading update on Wednesday that, despite efforts to force local councils to identify sites for housing, “achieving detailed planning consent for the land identified is proving as challenging as ever”.
Under the National Planning Policy Framework, which was introduced by ministers in 2012, councils must draw up plans to build homes in their areas. However, it is estimated that almost half of councils are yet to publish a draft local plan.
Persimmon said it was “keen to work with all stakeholders taking part in the Government’s housing white paper consultation” in order to make sure that the planning process is simplified, which it says would result in more homes being built.
The white paper, which was published in February, sets out a raft of measures intended to stimulate the housing market.
Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of Persimmon, said: “A lot of good work has been done on the planning system but more progress needs to be made and that would hopefully be of benefit to the whole of the UK economy.”
He said that sales of homes had strengthened after the summer period, a traditionally quieter time for house purchases.
Persimmon said on Wednesday that trading in the past four months had been driven by attractive mortgage rates and the Government’s Help to Buy scheme. It reported that it has around £909m of forward sales reserved beyond 2017, an increase of 10pc on the same point last year.
It added that sales rates had been flat on the prior year because of a surge in sales after the Brexit referendum, although they were 14pc up on the same period two years ago.
Shares in the firm were down 3.76pc to £27.66 on Wednesday, although the company remains one of the best performing stocks on the index. …”
“Private equity firm made struggling care home operator take costly loan”
“Britain’s second biggest care home operator was made to borrow money through a very expensive loan from its private equity owner in a deal designed to extract £890m in cash from the struggling business.
The disclosures are likely to raise fresh concerns over the future of Four Seasons Health Care, which operates more than 300 care homes across the UK, and has been drowning in debt.
Described in reports as teetering on the brink of ruin, Four Seasons has been hammered by cuts to council care budgets brought on by years of austerity. This month, its private equity owner, Terra Firma, will plead with lenders to approve a financial rescue package.
However, filings in the tax haven of Luxembourg and data from the Paradise Papers reveal how Terra Firma hoped to make a vast profit from the business after acquiring it in 2012.
Four Seasons was made to borrow £220m from Terra Firma subsidiaries. The repayment terms were huge – 15% interest a year, on a compound basis, over 10 years. By 2022, when it was due to be repaid, Four Seasons would have owed its controlling shareholder four times the original sum.
The debt was later written off because of the financial struggles at Four Seasons. However, the bond stated a nominal repayment value of £890m. The intention seems to have been to extract profits from any future sale of the business largely tax-free – a manoeuvre that will raise concerns about whether buyout groups are suitable owners for businesses that form a key part of Britain’s care infrastructure. …”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/08/private-equity-terra-firma-care-home-four-seasons-loan
“We want our Brexit cash boost – NHS boss”
“The health service should get the cash boost it was promised during the EU referendum, the head of the NHS in England is expected to say later.
Simon Stevens will use controversial claims used by Vote Leave to put the case for more money in a speech later.
With waiting times worsening, he will say trust in politics will be damaged if the NHS does not get more.
During the referendum it was claimed £350m a week was sent to the EU and that would be better spent on the NHS.
The claim was widely contested at the time and ever since – it did not take into account the rebate the UK had nor the fact the UK benefited from investment from the EU. Some argued it proved highly influential in the referendum result.
‘Honour the promises’
The speech by Mr Stevens at the NHS Providers’ annual conference of health managers is highly political, coming just a fortnight before the Budget.
And it is being made as three highly-influential health think-tanks – the King’s Fund, the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation – publish a joint report calling for an extra £4bn to be given to health next year. That amounts to eight times more than health spending is due to rise by.
Mr Stevens is not expected to say exactly how much he wants, but instead will argue the health service needs a significant boost in funding beyond what has already been promised by ministers.
He will tell delegates gathered in Birmingham: “The NHS wasn’t on the ballot paper, but it was on the Battle Bus. Vote Leave for a better funded health service – £350m a week.
“Rather than our criticising these clear Brexit funding commitments to NHS patients – promises entered into by cabinet ministers and by MPs – the public want to see them honoured.
“Trust in democratic politics will not be strengthened if anyone now tries to argue: ‘You voted Brexit, partly for a better funded health service. But precisely because of Brexit, you now can’t have one.’
“A modern NHS is itself part of the practical answer to the deep social concerns that gave rise to Brexit.
“At a time of national division, an NHS that brings us together. An institution that tops the list of what people say makes them proudest to be British. Ahead of the Army, the monarchy or the BBC. Unifying young and old, town and country, the struggling and the better off.”
Targets ‘being missed’
NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson has also given his backing to extra money. He pointed out key targets for A&E, routine operations and cancer care were now being widely missed.
“The Budget is an important opportunity, at the beginning of this Parliament, to protect care quality for patients and service users and help the NHS break out of the downward spiral in which it is currently trapped.
“There isn’t enough funding to cope.”
The government has promised the NHS frontline budget will be £8bn a year higher by 2022 – once inflation is taken into account – than it is now.
But that does not take into account the whole health budget – which also includes spending on things such as training and healthy lifestyle services, like stop smoking services.
Once that is factored in, the current average annual increase are running at less than 1%.
Historically, the service has enjoyed rises of around 4% to cover the cost of the ageing population and new drugs.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “Research shows spending on the NHS is in line with most other European countries, and the public can be reassured that the government is committed to continued investment in the health service.”
Is Swire after Pritti Patel’s job? Or any ministerial post with foreign travel?
Owl realised after reporting about Swire’s stinging criticism of Pritti Patel that it had missed the most blindingly obvious reason for his jibes about her. He desperately wants another crack at the Foreign Office!
Why? Well, here are a few possible reasons:
1. He supports Bojo, thinks they would make a great pair – and he might even think he could do his job if Bojo screws up much more.
2. He’s been terribly unhappy as a lowly constituency MP since he lost his foreign office bagman job and it would give him a terrific boost.
3. Many questions he asks in Parliament are about other countries, fewer about this country, hardly any about East Devon – so he would be in his comfort zone. Plus he could use his old excuse of not being able to speak about East Devon in Parliament because it would conflict with his bigger, better job.
4. He enjoys his £2000 per month job as Chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council – but not half as much as he would enjoy being at the FO.
5. He could visit his constituency even less often, using the excuse of having to jet-set.
6. He could spend more time in London doing things like supporting the Royal Marsden hospital.
7. He wouldn’t have to see or hear so much about Claire Wright.
8. He could keep out of the way of the East Devon Alliance.
9. He could keep out of the way of local protesters about austerity cuts (NHS, education, environment)
10. He would be far too busy to worry about over-development of expensive properties and under-provision of social housing in East Devon – and unable to comment on it anyway – see 3 above.
Is it on the cards? Well, anything is on the cards these days … though May having sacked him, she would likely have to be ousted first.
120,170 English children live in temporary accommodation
“It is an “abuse of human rights” that in the sixth richest economy thousands of people are living in “Dickensian conditions”, David Lammy has said.
An astonishing 78,180 households are living in temporary accommodation (TA), such as hostels and BnBs, and that means 120,170 children do not have a permanent home, MPs heard during a debate in Parliament on the “hidden” epidemic.
The Tottenham Labour MP hit out at the dearth of social homes in the country and voiced anger that a measly ten social homes were built in Grenfell-hit Kensington and Chelsea with council cash since 1990.
“Over the years, I have heard horror stories (about TA) of needles found in stairwells, of children sharing bathrooms with strangers, of vulnerable women being abused and exploited – and in the end this story comes back to a chronic problem of a decimation in our social housing,” he said.
A Local Government Association analysis found as much as £2m-a-day was being spent on TA by councils, amounting to around £2.6 billion in the past three years.
Siobhain McDonagh, Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, who secured the debate, said: “Perhaps the most visible indication of the broken housing market is the thousands of people sleeping on our streets, but the homelessness crisis this country faces is far greater, and it is hidden.
He went on to say two families in his constituency had been living in TA for more than 10 years.
“Temporary accommodation is becoming permanent accommodation,” he said.
He hit out at the sale of social housing under the right-to-buy scheme and said just 1,102 social homes were built with government money in England since 2016, adding: “The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – the borough that has been at the centre of the Grenfell storm – built just ten new council-funded social homes since 1990.”
One in ten households have been in TA for more than five years and for some families in the London boroughs of Harrow and Camden the period was as long as 19 years.
More than 28% of households in TA were housed outside their local authority area, an increase of 248% between March 2011 and March 2017.
Labour MP Frank Field branded the movement of families “worse than the Poor Law”.
He said: “In the Poor Law you were sent back to the village they thought you came from, under these rules you’re sent to any old village or city aren’t you, providing the local authority can actually dump families on them.”
Wes Streeting said youngsters in cramped TA in his constituency of Ilford North were experiencing mental health problems because of the conditions.
One mother lived in one room in a hostel with her 15-year-old daughter.
“Her daughter was preparing for her GCSEs but was having to revise for her exams and do her homework under the duvet with a torch at night,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see families live in those kinds of conditions.”
Streeting was also approached by an 11-year-old boy for help during a school visit, he said.
“I went to the head teacher’s office and I met with him,” he said. “The reason he wanted to see me, he said ‘you grew up in a council flat, didn’t you? Can you help me and my mum and my two brothers, because we currently live in one room in a hostel’.”
He added: “This country is going backwards not forwards, and it is simply intolerable.”
Bob Blackman, Tory MP for Harrow East, said many households struggle to scrape together a deposit for a rented property but that 32,000 families in England could benefit if the Government invests £31 million a year into a project to help.
He said such a scheme could save the temporary accommodation budget £1.8 billion over three years.
Housing Minister Marcus Jones said the Government was making progress on getting people out of TA but was “not complacent” and had set up a homelessness reduction task force to tackle the issue.
“The quality of TA is of course extremely important,” he said, saying councils had a legal duty to provide good housing.
“We are committed to ending rough sleeping and reducing homelessness overall and we are therefore setting up a homelessness reduction task force,” he added.
In October, Theresa May announced a £2bn pot of grant money to build affordable housing, stating councils and housing associations can bid for the cash to build, and in areas with high rent, the homes can be social rent, rather than “affordable” rents, which can be up to 80% of market rent.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/david-lammy-dickensian_uk_5a01de30e4b066c2c03a73d7
“NHS cannot continue ‘in red zone’, providers’ leader warns”
“Hospitals in England are spending £900 less per person than Germany, an expert has warned.
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, a trade association that represents acute, ambulance, community and mental health services, said the argument for additional funding for the health service was clear as he warned that it could not continue to operate in the “red zone”.
He said UK health spending needed to be about 13% higher to match German or French levels.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the UK spent £2,777 per person on healthcare in 2014.
Speaking at the NHS Providers conference in Birmingham, Hopson described the effects of the NHS being in the middle of the “longest and deepest” financial squeeze in its history.
He pointed out that last year, the NHS in England had missed all four major targets – the four-hour A&E standard, the 18-week elective surgery waiting time standard, the expectation that cancer patients would begin treatment within 62 days and the ambulance response time target.
Hopson added that the NHS could no longer meet performance standards on current funding levels. He also warned that the health service was “slipping back” on improvements made throughout the 2000s.
“The simple point is that if we want the best care, we have to pay for it. UK health spending would need to be around £24bn, or 13% higher, to match current German or French levels of health spending,” Hopson said.
“If we wanted to spend as much per head of population as the French do, we’d need to be spending £300 a year more per person. To match the Germans, we’d need to be spending £900 a year more per person. Sobering figures which show that, in the end, as my Dad used to say, you get what you pay for.”
Hopson added: “We are now trying to run the NHS above its sustainable limits, well into the red zone … and [there is] a growing, tangible frustration that the hard-fought gains of the 2000s across a range of measures – for example, waiting times and single-sex wards – are starting to slip back at increasing pace.”
He said the NHS budget and staff numbers were growing, but they were not keeping up with demand and to meet performance standards.”
East Devon Watch 