There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
All good, but are you expecting the “currently non-dregee’d” to end up £50k in debt?
Your scheme succeeds or fails depending on where the costs fall.
A better way would be to let them train in apprenticeships but then offer an exam they can take when ready to get the BA in plumbing. Cost for that would be a few hundred maybe
A question for any gamers here, got a PS5 for Christmas (digital edition) and looking for advice on any games to get for it.
Already bought myself a 12 month PSN Extra subscription to go for it and been playing FFVII Remake which has been fun to replay a newer version of something I first played decades ago, though I was disappointed to realise last night that Remake is only the first third of the game and thus I've already nearly finished that story, was expecting it to be the full game not split into a "trilogy".
Used to have a collection of every generation of consoles I'd had from NES onwards, with FFVII to FFXIII being main games I loved on prior PlayStation generations, but lost all my old consoles and games in a move a few years ago.
Never been a big fan of shooters, prefer strategy, RPG or action or adventure games though normally play strategy more on the PC.
Any recommendations? Doesn't have to be the newest but does have to be something I can download digitally.
The tone was a bit more statesmanlike than usual. He looks more prime ministerial than Badenoch.
He can't become Prime Minister though without gaining more 2024 Tory voters to add to the 2024 Labour voters he has already gained to add to the 14% who voted for his party in 2024. At the moment though the vast majority of the former are sticking with Kemi and some would go LD rather than vote for Farage so Kemi also attracts some voters Farage can't reach
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
The tone was a bit more statesmanlike than usual. He looks more prime ministerial than Badenoch.
He can't become Prime Minister though without gaining more 2024 Tory voters to add to the 2024 Labour voters he has already gained to add to the 14% who voted for his party in 2024. At the moment though the vast majority of the former are sticking with Kemi and some would go LD rather than vote for Farage so Kemi also attracts some voters Farage can't reach
He can in a hung parliament, he makes a pact with lib dems to push pr through and then goto the country once implemented. It would be highly amusing if it happened
Even with the biannual 'X getting an honour disgraces the honours system' ritual which is as trite and predictable as it gets, the Sadiq Khan knighthood criticism seems incredibly lame.
Everyone knows that top politicians and civil servants get honours just because of their positions (and that donors are in with a good shout of getting something too), rather than doing something extra, so even political failures are going to get them. I don't know or even care if Khan is a good mayor of London as I don't live there, but it's clearly not a ridiculous award on the basis of the system we have, it's frankly more surprising that Livingstone and Johnson don't have knighthoods after being elected mayor twice.
And since everyone knows politicians get honours even if they are some failure any attempt by one side to criticise the other for it is such a load of hypocritical shite it cannot be accepted.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
All good, but are you expecting the “currently non-dregee’d” to end up £50k in debt?
Your scheme succeeds or fails depending on where the costs fall.
A better way would be to let them train in apprenticeships but then offer an exam they can take when ready to get the BA in plumbing. Cost for that would be a few hundred maybe
The problem with apprenticeships is quality and company commitment.
In my scheme, the universities become the organisers of the learning component of the apprenticeship, with placements at participating companies.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
c.22,000 per day.
Seriously impressive. I tried for a 10k average in 2023 and fell 300 short.
Opportunity to boast: my 2024 target was 5.2 million steps, i.e. 100k per week, over 14k a day. And I made it with a week to spare. When I was 64, I was averaging around 7k a day, so I've doubled that in 4 years. (Motivation was ill health in my early 60s, so not entirely pointless. And, of course, it's easier when one's retired).
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
Just been announced by Whispering Bob Harris on Radio 2 that Johnnie Walker has passed away.
No surprise but very sad nonetheless. Grew up with him on Radio 1 School Lunch slot
Someone up in Heaven will be singing "Come Up and see Me make me Smile"
His career spanned a period when there were many top class DJs, but of course back then they had the advantage of being able to select their own music. It is of course done by algorithm now, and the DJs are required only to blather innocuously between the plays.
Are there any remaining Kemi fans on PB, or is she now universally believed a dud ?
Kemi's plan is to stay quiet for 2-3+ years before she rolls out lots of policy reviews. By that time people will have long made their minds up on her, and the Conservative Party, and they will land totally flat and be completely ignored.
CCHQ wants to communicate that the "quietness" is down to the focus on this and internal Conservative party structures, whereas it's actually down to her passivity and lack of energy and drive.
She doesn't seem to understand the party is like a cornered rat at the moment and needs to fight for its life.
To be fair that strategy worked fine for Starmer, and he never even got as far as the policy reviews!
Starmer won by default as the Tories imploded and it was 14 years since Labour were in office and the personnel had virtually all changed since then.
That's not an option for Kemi.
There has been this spell of faux outrage from Tories that (a) Labour won and (b) Labour are saying the economy and large parts of the country are broken. The reason why Labour won by default off such a thin bit is because the Tories had patently broken the economy and the country.
Badenoch doesn’t want to accept anything was done wrong and instead wants to retreat to her comfort zone of attacking woke. May be appealing to Leon nd other obsessive, but most people just want things fixed. Starmer isn’t making any friends, but people won’t forget what the Tories did to them.
I would assume that 1st term opposition is usually around refusing to accept anything was done wrong (or counter intuitively suggesting people actually wanted you to go further than you did), because that's an easier and more comforting position to take.
It may only be when a loss is sufficiently massive that a party cannot ignore that they messed up that they take actual action (as opposed to token comments about learning lessons etc, or that the only problem was competence). But even then it is not a guarantee.
The hope, for 1st term opposition, is that the new government does such a lousy job you can get back in without having to address any faultlines in your voting coalition or major policy reconsiderations. It still just kicks the can down the road, but it's better, on an individual leader level, to have that happen when you have some power.
The tone was a bit more statesmanlike than usual. He looks more prime ministerial than Badenoch.
He can't become Prime Minister though without gaining more 2024 Tory voters to add to the 2024 Labour voters he has already gained to add to the 14% who voted for his party in 2024. At the moment though the vast majority of the former are sticking with Kemi and some would go LD rather than vote for Farage so Kemi also attracts some voters Farage can't reach
He can in a hung parliament, he makes a pact with lib dems to push pr through and then goto the country once implemented. It would be highly amusing if it happened
Even if it did on current polls PR would ironically make a Tory and Reform government more likely, whereas on current polls a Labour minority government supported by the LDs is more likely under FPTP. So the LDs would not necessarily back Reform on that now
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Exemptions from business rates and employer NI for anyone investing in the area?
Congratulations - all you've done is moved the employment from Boro to Redcar...
And that's at best - most schemes of the type you describe just bring in work until the tax benefits run out - at which point the factory is closed and moved to the next location of discounts.
You’re not interested in making traditional factories, you’re interested in new technology drivers that relocate the 20somethings who can’t afford to live on their own in places like Bracknell and Reading. They can and should use the opportunity to save like crazy, so when they relocate back to the SE and SW they can afford a deposit on somewhere to live.
The traditional factories you talk about don't exist anymore.
If you want to manufacture labour intensive products - you need to do it where labour is cheap - it's why most clothing is made in India / Bangladesh unless it's prestige and expensive or fast fashion where the shop trades some markup for faster supply. As I've posted in the past the companies that still sell UK manufactured clothing aren't doing it at prices the general public are willing to pay - my quick google doesn't show me a UK manufactured shirt for less than £100 and few people (this site excepted) are willing to pay that for a single shirt..
If you want to manufacturer other things you will discover that automation has continually removed jobs from the process to the extent that for plastic box manufacturing it's 1 man and a forklift putting pellets in at one end and transporting stacks of boxes into the lorry at the other end..
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
From the theatre of operations to the operating theatre.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
All good, but are you expecting the “currently non-dregee’d” to end up £50k in debt?
Your scheme succeeds or fails depending on where the costs fall.
A better way would be to let them train in apprenticeships but then offer an exam they can take when ready to get the BA in plumbing. Cost for that would be a few hundred maybe
The problem with apprenticeships is quality and company commitment.
In my scheme, the universities become the organisers of the learning component of the apprenticeship, with placements at participating companies.
The problem there is I work in software development, I have seen the quality of graduates fresh from university having done a course. You find the good ones tend to be those that would have made good software developers even if they had relied on teaching themselves. The remainder tend to be pretty meh and need extensive work to get up to standard
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
The apprenticeships the levy can fund are organised in a very complicated way. Simplify the scheme!
I can't find the example I saw I while ago but the course was something relatively simple.
cost £400 for those who were paying their own way and £1800 for those using apprenticeship funding...
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
The Russians were accusing the Ukrainians of using them to “steal” their wounded, a while back.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
The apprenticeships the levy can fund are organised in a very complicated way. Simplify the scheme!
I can't find the example I saw I while ago but the course was something relatively simple.
cost £400 for those who were paying their own way and £1800 for those using apprenticeship funding...
That almost sound like American healthcare.
US Twitter is waking up today to the concept of a “Pharmacy Benefit Manager”, most of which they knew nothing about before a couple of hours ago, but represents a complex system of billing and rebates that makes a lot of profit for no work in the US healthcare system.
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
From the theatre of operations to the operating theatre.
Bad taste? Moi?
That’s literally what they were for. The original MOD release on the project talked about cutting an average of X minutes from injury to field hospital.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
I'd say it's pretty much the Telegraph still trying to flog it's dead culture war narrative.
It's an eye opener how many of their comparative statistics have one or other side in a Covid year.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Completely off topic on the subject of steps @BlancheLivermore I need the front door replaced and was asked where I want the letterbox and I am considering just telling them not to bother with one as I never get any useful post anyway. What happens at this point?
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
I'd say it's pretty much the Telegraph still trying to flog it's dead culture war narrative.
It's an eye opener how many of their comparative statistics have one or other side in a Covid year.
I thtink there's some mileage in some 'culture war' issues, but media commentators seem spectacularly bad at selecting the issues or knowing when to push hard and when to dial it back.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Which is why I suggested the tax break on training and the more deprived the area the greater the break. One of the key problems in deprived area's being that people don't have skills they need
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (I have one apple each day, which makes counting easy).
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (I have one apple each day, which makes counting easy).
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
If they are getting free houses then they shouold not be complaining , they can always say no and pay their own way. Should be a mandatory item for benefits after a short period.
He's making a serious play for younger voters with all the wittering on about Churchill.
Do younger voters know/care who Churchill was? Especially if they haven't 'done' WWII in history at school!
They'll know who he was, almost certainly. Caring will depend on if a particular perception or Churchill becomes part of the intended tribal experience.
Like how people who continue to bang on about Thatcher, on left and right, with the kind of passion as if they had been there at the time. You don't seen it quite as much now. (not that people cannot care about political history, but the intensity was so overblown for a long time).
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (snip)
Yeah, I can go a bit insane with metrics. I had 91 apples - I have a gap between my teeth at the back, and I hate the feeling apple skin has when it gets trapped in the gap. I managed 107 satsumas, though.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (I have one apple each day, which makes counting easy).
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
How long have they been doing that for? The timing is interesting.
"Heavy lift" drones (Malloy 400 - payload 180kg ie 400lbs for the name?) were supplied in September 2023, and UK has been looking at the casualty evacuation possibility.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Before the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 we had things called Industrial Training Boards. Firms paid a levy to these Boards BUT could recoup these levies, and indeed more, if they sent staff on appropriate courses. I was a director of a company which ran a small group of pharmacies and we usually had someone on day release from one shop for some appropriate course. The staff seemed to enjoy them and they all picked up useful qualifications and. probably more importantly, the idea that 'education' didn't finish at school.
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
The Russians were accusing the Ukrainians of using them to “steal” their wounded, a while back.
Ha, as opposed to what the Russians were abserved doing to their own wounded on the battlefield?
Perhaps the best news of today was nearly 200 Ukranian PoWs being exchanged, some of whom had been captured in the early days of the war. Because of course they were, the Russians aren’t capturing anyone alive at the moment.
Ukraine has allegedly taken dozens of NorKs today though, which will be rather amusing to see how it plays out.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Completely off topic on the subject of steps @BlancheLivermore I need the front door replaced and was asked where I want the letterbox and I am considering just telling them not to bother with one as I never get any useful post anyway. What happens at this point?
I'm not sure..
There's no legal requirement to have a letterbox. You'll make it easier for your postie if you have a recycling bin next to the front door with a 'Mail' sign on it
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I’d heard about the man-evac drones, but not actually seen evidence of them in theatre.
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
How long have they been doing that for? The timing is interesting.
"Heavy lift" drones (Malloy 400 - payload 180kg ie 400lbs for the name?) were supplied in September 2023, and UK has been looking at the casualty evacuation possibility.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Before the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 we had things called Industrial Training Boards. Firms paid a levy to these Boards BUT could recoup these levies, and indeed more, if they sent staff on appropriate courses. I was a director of a company which ran a small group of pharmacies and we usually had someone on day release from one shop for some appropriate course. The staff seemed to enjoy them and they all picked up useful qualifications and. probably more importantly, the idea that 'education' didn't finish at school.
I suspect a large part of the problem these days is that boards think a lot more short term. Investing in training has a longer term payback than they are looking. The average cost of recruiting a new hire is around 6k, often a couple of training courses for someone already working for you would work out cheaper
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (I have one apple each day, which makes counting easy).
Did you keep the doctor away?
They stopped doing home visits around 1980, I recall!
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Completely off topic on the subject of steps @BlancheLivermore I need the front door replaced and was asked where I want the letterbox and I am considering just telling them not to bother with one as I never get any useful post anyway. What happens at this point?
My dad has a funny anecdote about letterboxes (fnarr, fnarr). Some companies liked bills settled well before Christmas, so they can pay staff bonuses. He got a phone call from the boss of a transport company just before Christmas, effing and blinding at him because he had not been paid. My dad said he had sent a cheque in the post weeks before. He phoned the bank up, cancelled the cheque he had sent, and made a special trip to deliver a new cheque.
A couple of years later, he got a phone call from the boss of the transport company. They had been making a new entrance into their yard, and had found a postbox in a wall no-one had known about. Except, perhaps, a relief postman who had delivered a load of mail into it one November. Including the cheque from my dad...
They had a good laugh about it, and my dad said it was good of the man to phone him up to tell him.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Before the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 we had things called Industrial Training Boards. Firms paid a levy to these Boards BUT could recoup these levies, and indeed more, if they sent staff on appropriate courses. I was a director of a company which ran a small group of pharmacies and we usually had someone on day release from one shop for some appropriate course. The staff seemed to enjoy them and they all picked up useful qualifications and. probably more importantly, the idea that 'education' didn't finish at school.
I suspect a large part of the problem these days is that boards think a lot more short term. Investing in training has a longer term payback than they are looking. The average cost of recruiting a new hire is around 6k, often a couple of training courses for someone already working for you would work out cheaper
Different budgets, the same reason the NHS ends up paying £2-3k a shift for a contractor doctor.
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Keeping count of the number of bananas you eat is almost an example of nominative determinism, I fear. (snip)
Yeah, I can go a bit insane with metrics. I had 91 apples - I have a gap between my teeth at the back, and I hate the feeling apple skin has when it gets trapped in the gap. I managed 107 satsumas, though.
Perhaps you should link to your "Fruit I have Eaten" spreadsheet on here.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
That's a problem with the apprenticeship levy - and can be fixed by opening up what it can be used for.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Before the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 we had things called Industrial Training Boards. Firms paid a levy to these Boards BUT could recoup these levies, and indeed more, if they sent staff on appropriate courses. I was a director of a company which ran a small group of pharmacies and we usually had someone on day release from one shop for some appropriate course. The staff seemed to enjoy them and they all picked up useful qualifications and. probably more importantly, the idea that 'education' didn't finish at school.
I suspect a large part of the problem these days is that boards think a lot more short term. Investing in training has a longer term payback than they are looking. The average cost of recruiting a new hire is around 6k, often a couple of training courses for someone already working for you would work out cheaper
That short term thinking is why we've got problems!
Can't say I enjoy NYE much. I think it's basically always shit and I often go to bed before midnight, so I don't have to endure Jools Holland, the Wokeworks and Auld Lang Syne.
I quite like New Year's Day and the concert though.
A question for any gamers here, got a PS5 for Christmas (digital edition) and looking for advice on any games to get for it.
Already bought myself a 12 month PSN Extra subscription to go for it and been playing FFVII Remake which has been fun to replay a newer version of something I first played decades ago, though I was disappointed to realise last night that Remake is only the first third of the game and thus I've already nearly finished that story, was expecting it to be the full game not split into a "trilogy".
Used to have a collection of every generation of consoles I'd had from NES onwards, with FFVII to FFXIII being main games I loved on prior PlayStation generations, but lost all my old consoles and games in a move a few years ago.
Never been a big fan of shooters, prefer strategy, RPG or action or adventure games though normally play strategy more on the PC.
Any recommendations? Doesn't have to be the newest but does have to be something I can download digitally.
If you like RPGs then Balder’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are both excellent, probably the former if you are keen on strategy while Cyberpunk is more action oriented.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
The thing is how do you "level up"? Even if you look at probably the best local example of Bishop Auckland the levelling up hasn't carried the town with it...
How is 'levelling up' even defined.
A 'Waitrose' lifestyle at 'Asda' prices might be desired but that's unachievable without a generational improvement in skillsets.
So instead the country gets various levels of 'Waitrose' lifestyle at 'Waitrose' prices or 'Asda' lifestyle at 'Asda' prices.
The fortunate ones are those who can have a 'Waitrose' lifestyle at 'Asda' prices ie the affluent in cheaper areas.
The unfortunate are those who get an 'Asda' lifestyle at 'Waitrose' prices ie many of the young and poor in southern England.
It is about individuals and unlocking their potential. So you need to govern them the infrastructure - education - to succeed and mechanisms to get back on track if they mess up.
Also transport. So much of left behind Britain is an hour or more from anywhere with opportunity. There is poverty in London and the SE too, of course, but access to opportunity is rarely the issue that it is in, say, Loftus or Consett or Nelson or Skelmersdale.
You can’t do that everywhere - we need to select 2-3 hubs - e.g. Manchester / Leeds-Sheffield and invest to make them regional magnets. Unfortunately the return from, say, investing in better transport links to Carlisle is going to be relatively limited
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Can't say I enjoy NYE much. I think it's basically always shit and I often go to bed before midnight, so I don't have to endure Jools Holland, the Wokeworks and Auld Lang Syne.
I quite like New Year's Day and the concert though.
Not going to be watching it this year, but the Jools Holland show is usually pretty good, especially when you dig into the technical details of a show with a massive clock on screen that was actually filmed about three weeks ago.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
It will only get more expensive and more difficult the longer they leave it, and it will never be popular or politically convenient to do it, so it's like they want it to burn down.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
Next-gen warfare has moved on considerably in the last couple of years.
I was researching a commercial drone project last week and came across this, a Chinese small VTOL plane drone that costs from $15k, but could easily draw out much more expensive air defences and expose their location a long way away. https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html
There’s a huge market for these for farmers, mappers etc, and there would be an even bigger market for a not-Chinese version by military and domestic emergency services in the West. It does 90% of what a police helicopter can do for 1% of the cost.
90kmh speed ? Easy prey for the air-air drones which are increasingly used. And are cheaper.
But yes, such systems will take over a significant part of manned aircraft roles. Particularly helicopters, which are both expensive and slow.
It’s awfully similar to the larger Ukranian suicide drones which have been hitting military airfields and oil refineries all over Russia in the last few months.
Manned helicopters for commercial or emergency use are so ridiculously expensive. The average air ambulance, for which you’ll see a collecting tin in every flying club, runs around £10k an hour.
If you could launch five search drones and then direct the helicopter to the incident site, you could save the price of the drones in months. You can run the five drones with one man.
The Ukrainians have been using man carrying drones on the battlefield to evacuate casualties.
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
I thought it was forward positions? Ie they need active troops on the ground to load the casualties into the drone. The value is that it means that active soldiers are not deployed away from the front on medivac duty.
If it is no man’s land it would only work for ambulatory casualties who are in a position to self load but not self evacuate, so the use case would be quite limited
Just finished work for the year, and I've walked 8,153,760 steps in 2024 (plus a few more when I forgot my phone)
Seriously impressive!
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125 steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
Completely off topic on the subject of steps @BlancheLivermore I need the front door replaced and was asked where I want the letterbox and I am considering just telling them not to bother with one as I never get any useful post anyway. What happens at this point?
I'm not sure..
There's no legal requirement to have a letterbox. You'll make it easier for your postie if you have a recycling bin next to the front door with a 'Mail' sign on it
I have a box attached to the side of my house for the post to go in: seems to work well.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
It will only get more expensive and more difficult the longer they leave it, and it will never be popular or politically convenient to do it, so it's like they want it to burn down.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
Repair it, use the Houses of Parliament to house the homeless and build a new parliament in Horden.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
It will only get more expensive and more difficult the longer they leave it, and it will never be popular or politically convenient to do it, so it's like they want it to burn down.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
Repair it, use the Houses of Parliament to house the homeless and build a new parliament in Horden.
Better than their head in the sand current approach.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
Where are these areas where rent and Local Housing Allowance align? To my eye it is specifically designed not to do so.
The latter is defined as the 30th percentile of the local market rate for the property to which the household is entitled.
That is if you are in a larger property you only get the rate for what you are "entitled" to, and it is not related to the property, So if you are entitled to 2 bedrooms (eg couple with 2 kids under 10, or 2 kids of the same under 18 *), you only get the 2 bedroom rate in a 3 bedroom house.
That is, the bedroom tax never went away in this calculation.
Then it is minus several years of rent increases in the area since it is only updated with market rents every X years when the Government feels a political need.
According to the HoC Library, increases since 2010 have been in Apr 2013, Apr 2014, Apr 2019, Apr 2023, and Apr 2024. So 5 years out of 14, all in the run up to Elections. I'm not quite sure about that that 2023 increase.
One possible wrinkle is if the sending Council send some money, but I am not sure how these schemes work.
There is one angle on this, that rent increases are here (I am told by agents) up rather more than house values this year. I don't know about elsewhere. It won't affect by decisions on rent level for my Ts, since I don't do "swallow the market rent level or get out"; I have my own policy.
Here, the market rent on an OK 2 bed mid-terrace is around £700-750 pcm this year, where it would have been £475-500 pcm in 2017. The price since then for such a house is up from approx £75-80k to somewhere around £100-110k. CPI Inflation since 2017 is up 31%.
Part of the extra recent market rent increase has been regulatory cost push, then mortgage cost push, but this year more supply shortage vs demand as people have been pulling out.
Here, LHA for 2 bedrooms is £546 pcm, after a biggish catch up to help the Tories at the Election.
* This may be 16, but I would need to go rabbit-holing to check.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
The Telegraph has a very rarified readership. It's relatively popular because they used some clever marketing techniques and offered some good deals but they are rapidly being seen as a non tabloid Express and few of their original subscribers carry it without some degree of embarrassment.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
Also wondering what sort of shape the stonework is in and whether stone from the original sites is still to be had. It was gash the first time round, but some at least has been replaced during the C20 I believe. Even so ... they ought to be opening up new quarries to match, if necessary.
Not that I have done any research - but it is the sort of thing that might be an issue. Skilled craftspeople, too, more generally. The sort of workmanship on Big House Developer sites won't be good enough for the HoP.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
I've got a better idea: temporarily abolish the Scottish parliament and move Westminster to Edinburgh.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
The problem is the cost is going to be many times the cost of the winter fuel payment that was removed so there is zero chance of it being approved this Parliament.
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
It will only get more expensive and more difficult the longer they leave it, and it will never be popular or politically convenient to do it, so it's like they want it to burn down.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
Repair it, use the Houses of Parliament to house the homeless and build a new parliament in Horden.
I'm going to continue advocating it being in Bradford.
I want to see how quickly Northern Power Rail and HS2 is built in full...
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
I've got a better idea: temporarily abolish the Scottish parliament and move Westminster to Edinburgh.
A simpler approach would be to put Parliament into recess until the job is done.
Kemi Badenoch will be in trouble after the May locals if Reform pip her and outperform expectations, and probably in terminal trouble after the May 2026 round.
At the moment, that's what I expect to happen.
I thought the May locals had been cancelled, prior to the latest inept attempt to reorganise local government?
Counties that are already unitary will definitely have elections. Of the counties that are still two-tier, I don't think anyone is expecting them all to play nicely and agree a plan in the next fortnight. It's only the tranche of counties that come up with a plan for the next wave where there's talk of cancelling the elections, because there will be a new council along in a minute. (Going live in 2026?)
It's a mess, but it's the existing mess. And the Dictator Starmer stuff came from people still adjusting to being out of power themselves.
(Me? I'm fairly happy with the model- the bottom-up map of regions and powers seems a lot like the approach Spain took to decentralise after Franco.)
Essex county council will vote next week to scrap May's county council elections and hold a Mayoral and unitary election in 2026 as the next Essex local elections if Southend and Thurrock unitaries agree.
In which case there will never be a county or district election in Essex again
They'd be voting to request the elections be postponed by the Government - Essex CC does not have the power to scrap its own elections.
I'm a bit doubtful permission will be given in these cases. Creation of unitary authorities is no straightforward matter simply in terms of the logistics, employment implications and so on. It seems to me a bit unlikely that a new unitary would be ready to begin by May 2026 - probably more like 2027, in which case a newly elected County Council would be best to steer it.
It's not impossible by any means, but I'm a bit sceptical these requests will be granted.
Interesting discussion. @hyufd do you have any details of what is happening in Essex. We have the same issue in Surrey with that vote coming up in a week, I think, but it seems impossible to believe that it can be organised in time and that there will not be serious objections. From a politics point of view the Tories would like to cancel the May elections and the LDs not, because the Tories will almost certainly lose the county and the LDs might win it in May. From a practical point of view the Tories want a Surrey wide unitary and the LDs want it broken down into 2 or 3 Unitaries. Also a couple of boroughs might want to move from Surrey to London if the change happens.
That is a hell of a lot to sort out at short notice with lots of arguments and looks likes disaster waiting to happen if rushed. Is Essex similar? Is it being rushed by pressure from the Govt?
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
The problem is the cost is going to be many times the cost of the winter fuel payment that was removed so there is zero chance of it being approved this Parliament.
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
Very brave of Hain to mention the possibility of it being easy to burn down.
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
Which area? Council tax in Central London is really cheap.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
The problem is the cost is going to be many times the cost of the winter fuel payment that was removed so there is zero chance of it being approved this Parliament.
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
Very brave of Hain to mention the possibility of it being easy to burn down.
I don't think it's easy to burn down - the issue is more likely that dodgy wiring or similar triggers a blaze that is hard to contain...
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
Which area? Council tax in Central London is really cheap.
Westminster - ever since Khan came in the precept has gone up by the maximum while council tax was controlled
Since 2022 Labour has also controlled the council, increasing taxes, cutting services and sending me letters asking for voluntary contributions
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
The apprenticeships the levy can fund are organised in a very complicated way. Simplify the scheme!
I can't find the example I saw I while ago but the course was something relatively simple.
cost £400 for those who were paying their own way and £1800 for those using apprenticeship funding...
That almost sound like American healthcare.
US Twitter is waking up today to the concept of a “Pharmacy Benefit Manager”, most of which they knew nothing about before a couple of hours ago, but represents a complex system of billing and rebates that makes a lot of profit for no work in the US healthcare system.
And are organisation largely bought up by the insurance companies - who thus take two bites of the cake.
Reform of the system needs to keep the incentives to develop new drugs - but it’s still largely the pharma who get the blames for nosebleed drug costs.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
It will only get more expensive and more difficult the longer they leave it, and it will never be popular or politically convenient to do it, so it's like they want it to burn down.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
Repair it, use the Houses of Parliament to house the homeless and build a new parliament in Horden.
I'm going to continue advocating it being in Bradford.
I want to see how quickly Northern Power Rail and HS2 is built in full...
NPR wasn't going to Bratford. It got talked about when the City complained about being missed off, but a diversion through the city centre adds cost and journey time. Then we had the "we've scrapped HS2A to fund northern transport" where on the hilarious list of uncosted fantasies was a new HS link to Bratford where you could get to Manchester in impossible minutes and it was only going to cost £stopit
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
The problem is the cost is going to be many times the cost of the winter fuel payment that was removed so there is zero chance of it being approved this Parliament.
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
I'd laugh my socks off if the whole lot came crashing down tbh
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
Which area? Council tax in Central London is really cheap.
Westminster - ever since Khan came in the precept has gone up by the maximum while council tax was controlled
Since 2022 Labour has also controlled the council, increasing taxes, cutting services and sending me letters asking for voluntary contributions
Same as me. I pay three times as much in France. I don't know if you have connections in the UK outside London but Westminster is as cheap as it gets.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
Also wondering what sort of shape the stonework is in and whether stone from the original sites is still to be had. It was gash the first time round, but some at least has been replaced during the C20 I believe. Even so ... they ought to be opening up new quarries to match, if necessary.
Not that I have done any research - but it is the sort of thing that might be an issue. Skilled craftspeople, too, more generally. The sort of workmanship on Big House Developer sites won't be good enough for the HoP.
"Gash" may be a bit cruel; perhaps more likely the designers / builders made false assumptions about the industrial environment and were cost-engineering by reducing spec for an inappropriate product. And stone was laid incorrectly (eg not "respecting the bedding plane" ie the natural structure - imagine slate on end).
PoW stone came from Yorkshire (Anson), North Notts (Mansfield Woodhouse), or North Derbys (Bolsover). Replacement in the 1920s came from Rutland. The Rutland Quarry is still open.
TBF, much of London is built out of cheap stuff - why do you think they covered much of it up with Stucco; it's so they can sell it to the people with more money than sense (times don't change - gullibles are still wetting themselves for thrown-up Georgian houses).
I'd have thought Victorian and later would be better. I suspect a lot of it is, but Parliament wanted a monument to themselves.
It's also about not maintaining things *now* and leaving it for the next lot to do the non-sexy spend. One reason we have had never ending appeals for restoration of Victorian churches since the 70s/80s is that thousand were built or heavily restored in 1870-1900 as grandiose self-monuments to the funders, and then left alone for a century.
That's how my parents got themselves a Derbyshire Hall with 5000 sqft and 10 acres - no maintenance done since the Victorians, and empty for 2 years, plus fashion. So it was the same price as a good Edwardian 4 bed detached - £25k in 1976, but took 25 years to restore. Now listing still keeps the prices down.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
If they are getting free houses then they shouold not be complaining , they can always say no and pay their own way. Should be a mandatory item for benefits after a short period.
You’re missing the point, malc. This is the richer cities exporting their social problems to poorer areas.
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
Which area? Council tax in Central London is really cheap.
Westminster - ever since Khan came in the precept has gone up by the maximum while council tax was controlled
Since 2022 Labour has also controlled the council, increasing taxes, cutting services and sending me letters asking for voluntary contributions
Same as me. I pay three times as much in France. I don't know if you have connections in the UK outside London but Westminster is as cheap as it gets.
Afaics Central London has had artificially depressed Council Taxes since Mrs Thatcher. The same applies to business rates imo.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
The problem is the cost is going to be many times the cost of the winter fuel payment that was removed so there is zero chance of it being approved this Parliament.
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
I'd laugh my socks off if the whole lot came crashing down tbh
I wouldn't but that's exactly where it's heading due to the dipsticks who live in it.
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
I'd say it's pretty much the Telegraph still trying to flog it's dead culture war narrative.
It's an eye opener how many of their comparative statistics have one or other side in a Covid year.
Partly but it also looks like it's coordinated from CCHQ. The same article with the same quotes is in the Mail and the Express. You wonder why they do this?
Slightly on topic about the uselessness of the current Conservative Party, who have been briefing their client press on twice reelected Sadiq Khan being rewarded for failure with a knighthood.
They don't say whether the not reelected Conservative mayor for West Midlands also got his knighthood as a reward for failure.
Two of three Tory candidates so far beaten by Khan were rewarded with peerages - not mere knights they - as an indication of their success?
Under Khan my taxes have gone up, the services have got worse and there is no cheerleader for London.
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
Which area? Council tax in Central London is really cheap.
Westminster - ever since Khan came in the precept has gone up by the maximum while council tax was controlled
Since 2022 Labour has also controlled the council, increasing taxes, cutting services and sending me letters asking for voluntary contributions
Same as me. I pay three times as much in France. I don't know if you have connections in the UK outside London but Westminster is as cheap as it gets.
Our son came round with his 3 children this morning and said he had taken them to the nearby park to play on the swings first
Later this afternoon we received the news that a male had hung himself on those swings earlier in the day, and before my son had been there, and had chosen the park as he didn't want his mother to see his suicide
Terrible story and let us pray that many with the same thoughts contact the Samaritans or get help before they commit suicide
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
Also wondering what sort of shape the stonework is in and whether stone from the original sites is still to be had. It was gash the first time round, but some at least has been replaced during the C20 I believe. Even so ... they ought to be opening up new quarries to match, if necessary.
Not that I have done any research - but it is the sort of thing that might be an issue. Skilled craftspeople, too, more generally. The sort of workmanship on Big House Developer sites won't be good enough for the HoP.
Scrap the place and put the no good wasters in a warehouse shed, sure one of the big supermarkets has one going spare.
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
If they are getting free houses then they shouold not be complaining , they can always say no and pay their own way. Should be a mandatory item for benefits after a short period.
You’re missing the point, malc. This is the richer cities exporting their social problems to poorer areas.
Levelling down, not up.
Is Brum rich?
Doesn't it merely reflect how little social housing and how little funding these councils have?
On topic. Badenoch needs to do something unexpected. The Blair playbook is still the best. I remember early on him being asked what he thought about people making obscene amounts of money and he said he had no problem with David Beckham making a million.
Chasing the farmers and rich pensioners isn't the way to go for a Tory. Just too predictable. The best advice I was given was to Zig whenever everyone else Zagged. At the moment she's in lockstep with farage
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
I've got a better idea: temporarily abolish the Scottish parliament and move Westminster to Edinburgh.
We have enough losers without importing that bunch as refugees
There are dead towns like Horden across the country. It’s easy for those of us in leafier places to look at the broken economy and say “Brexit”. But too many of these places were dead before Brexit and are dead after Brexit. Brexit has failed, but isn’t the reason that towns like Horden are broken.
Reform - with a pile of cash, wall to wall Twitter support and an influx of angry and motivated activists - can do a serious amount of business in places like this. It is hopium and denialism to insist that Farage is too x or y for that to happen.
This also shows that Dominic Cummings was right about levelling up (and also he was right, albeit cynical, about selling Brexit as a panacea to dying towns).
I know it’s bad to say it, but Cummings was right about a lot of problems facing the country, and he was the first to take a modern data-driven approach to looking at issues.
It was invaluable during the pandemic, especially in the early days. “Yes of course the Cabinet Office and No.10 need massive f***ing screens full of data”.
Other governments could learn a lot from that approach.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting gift
100% right on the problems 100% wrong on the solutions
I don't think there are any plausible solutions to the problems (beyond getting people on their bikes to where work still exists) so Cummings went for the approach of abusing those people to get the result he wanted...
There are potential solutions just are politicians tend to be so london centric that they aren't that bothered finding them because they don't see deprived areas as that important apart from every five years
Go on then - how would you generate employment in say Loftus or Redcar?
Mentioned some the other day however if I was in charge I would do the following
1) First categorise each area in five ratings from 1) doing fine...to 5) severely deprived 2) Target transport improvements from 5 to 1 3) Reduce employer ni for employees depending on zone catergory...cat 1 = 12%..cat2 10% all the way to cat 5 full 2% 4) Give tax breaks for training based on zone, zone 1 they can offset training cost against tax, zone 2 training costs+10% to zone 5 training costs+50% 5) Make the rule that training is not allowable just for current job but for a higher paid position in the company....for example training an it support person in coding 6) Encourage setting up teams in small subsidiary offices in deprived area using business rate relief 7) Reassess zone categorisation every 5 years
I think a lot of that might encourage employers to consider more deprived areas
That falls apart on 4 and 5. Apprenticeship levy means training already costs nothing and yet an awful lot of it isn't used...
6 fails because who wants to manage a regional office which limits your future career options..
Ah perfection being the enemy of good I see, so your solution is just do nothing. As to 6) frankly that objection is bollocks....you have a team of 5 and a team leader. Why is him team leading the same team limiting his options whether he does it in scunthorpe or central london? He doesn't even necessarily be need to be based there himself.
as to 4 and 5 you seem to have misunderstood, training would supply higher tax relief so 1000 pounds of training in a zone 5 would give an offset of 1500 against tax. The reason few firms make use of the apprenticeship levy is it isnt suitable for most on the job training....for example it is useless for training a warehouse person to drive an hgv
“The Industrial Degree Bill”
In it, the government sets up and funds departments in universities.
1) Said departments train in various skills - plumbing, bricklaying, CNC operation etc etc 2) The courses are modules towards a degree. So your CORGI becomes a degree module. 3) mixing between practical and intellectual skills gets you more points towards your degree. So doing Welding & Elizabethan poetry gets you a degree faster (and with slightly less effort) than either just welding or poetry. 4) the training levy is used to part fund the “practical” departments.
This would massively break down the current class barrier between the degree’d and non-degree’d
In favour of 1,2 and 4 not so much 3. To me that actually keeps the snobbery of intellectual skills being superior if you make the degree quicker because of it. I would much rather have a plumber that knows how to safely fix my plumbing than one that can sort of fix it while quoting sonnets
None if this is happening, of course.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities … The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
If they are getting free houses then they shouold not be complaining , they can always say no and pay their own way. Should be a mandatory item for benefits after a short period.
You’re missing the point, malc. This is the richer cities exporting their social problems to poorer areas.
Levelling down, not up.
Is Brum rich?
Doesn't it merely reflect how little social housing and how little funding these councils have?
How much social housing in London is occupied by people who weren't born here?
On topic. Badenoch needs to do something unexpected. The Blair playbook is still the best. I remember early on him being asked what he thought about people making obscene amounts of money and he said he had no problem with David Beckham making a million.
Chasing the farmers and rich pensioners isn't the way to go for a Tory. Just too predictable. The best advice I was given was to Zig whenever everyone else Zagged. At the moment she's in lockstep with farage
She could utterly reinvent herself - and her party - as the champion of civic renewal. Only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only the Tories could imagine that we need to put pride back into our communities by funding services, building houses, creating secure and viable jobs and - radical idea - give people hope.
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this point.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
I've got a better idea: temporarily abolish the Scottish parliament and move Westminster to Edinburgh.
A simpler approach would be to put Parliament into recess until the job is done.
Let's see if we miss them.
Did they not basically run the whole thing over Skype during lockdown 1 like most everyone else in the country, or am I mis-remembering.
Comments
Doing what people used to win the VC for - going into no-man’s-land and bringing back the wounded.
Originally developed under a U.K. military contract, IIRC
Everyone knows that top politicians and civil servants get honours just because of their positions (and that donors are in with a good shout of getting something too), rather than doing something extra, so even political failures are going to get them. I don't know or even care if Khan is a good mayor of London as I don't live there, but it's clearly not a ridiculous award on the basis of the system we have, it's frankly more surprising that Livingstone and Johnson don't have knighthoods after being elected mayor twice.
And since everyone knows politicians get honours even if they are some failure any attempt by one side to criticise the other for it is such a load of hypocritical shite it cannot be accepted.
Happy 2025.
In my scheme, the universities become the organisers of the learning component of the apprenticeship, with placements at participating companies.
When I was 64, I was averaging around 7k a day, so I've doubled that in 4 years. (Motivation was ill health in my early 60s, so not entirely pointless. And, of course, it's easier when one's retired).
Same with the military lasers, which may or may not be in Ukraine.
There’s a whole load of cheap military tech being developed at the moment. War does this.
It may only be when a loss is sufficiently massive that a party cannot ignore that they messed up that they take actual action (as opposed to token comments about learning lessons etc, or that the only problem was competence). But even then it is not a guarantee.
The hope, for 1st term opposition, is that the new government does such a lousy job you can get back in without having to address any faultlines in your voting coalition or major policy reconsiderations. It still just kicks the can down the road, but it's better, on an individual leader level, to have that happen when you have some power.
Damn you that new job with an hour’s commute either way.
If you want to manufacture labour intensive products - you need to do it where labour is cheap - it's why most clothing is made in India / Bangladesh unless it's prestige and expensive or fast fashion where the shop trades some markup for faster supply. As I've posted in the past the companies that still sell UK manufactured clothing aren't doing it at prices the general public are willing to pay - my quick google doesn't show me a UK manufactured shirt for less than £100 and few people (this site excepted) are willing to pay that for a single shirt..
If you want to manufacturer other things you will discover that automation has continually removed jobs from the process to the extent that for plastic box manufacturing it's 1 man and a forklift putting pellets in at one end and transporting stacks of boxes into the lorry at the other end..
Bad taste? Moi?
cost £400 for those who were paying their own way and £1800 for those using apprenticeship funding...
Nor will any claims be met when Kemi Khasi goes down the tom tit.
Instead, we have stuff with exactly the opposite effect.
English councils pay millions to move homeless families out of big cities
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/31/english-councils-pay-millions-to-move-homeless-families-out-of-big-cities
… The companies find cheap homes in areas where rents and local housing allowance (LHA), the amount those claiming housing benefit can claim towards rent, align. Rents in much of the country have not kept pace with LHA, meaning these properties are often located in smaller, deprived towns in the Midlands and north of England.
People relocated using these firms are discharged into the private rented sector and are deemed permanently rehoused. Usually, any connection with the original council ends, making it near impossible for them to return home.
In London, families living in costly temporary accommodation, which is paid for by councils, are sometimes given only 24 hours by councils to accept the offer of a new home in another part of the country and are told they will be kicked out of emergency housing if they refuse.
Experts raised concerns about what they called “social cleansing” and “racialised, coercive displacement”, where people of colour are moved to largely white areas where they know nobody. MPs in the north-east said people were being relocated to already very deprived communities with no additional support provided...
https://conservativehome.com/2024/12/31/how-long-does-badenoch-have
US Twitter is waking up today to the concept of a “Pharmacy Benefit Manager”, most of which they knew nothing about before a couple of hours ago, but represents a complex system of billing and rebates that makes a lot of profit for no work in the US healthcare system.
I haven't quite finished for the day (though I won't be doing a run in the dark in this wind...), but I am at 5,930,125
steps for the year, an average of 16,292 daily.
I've run a paltry 1,474 km, swum 176 km, and cycled 2,766 km.
To give an idea of how low that is, I ran every day in 2021, and clocked up 4,240 km and about 8.5 million steps. But I've been concentrating on sprint triathlons, shorter distances and more speed this year. And there's been a great deal going on in my life...
I've also eaten 306 bananas and 184 packs of blueberries.
Yes, I like metrics!
It's an eye opener how many of their comparative statistics have one or other side in a Covid year.
Your bigger problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. One issue of the past 30 years is that companies prefer to employ someone trained elsewhere to actually training their own staff up.
Especially if they haven't 'done' WWII in history at school!
(I have one apple each day, which makes counting easy).
Like how people who continue to bang on about Thatcher, on left and right, with the kind of passion as if they had been there at the time. You don't seen it quite as much now. (not that people cannot care about political history, but the intensity was so overblown for a long time).
Yeah, I can go a bit insane with metrics. I had 91 apples - I have a gap between my teeth at the back, and I hate the feeling apple skin has when it gets trapped in the gap. I managed 107 satsumas, though.
Even TSE only gets through one Apple a year.
"Heavy lift" drones (Malloy 400 - payload 180kg ie 400lbs for the name?) were supplied in September 2023, and UK has been looking at the casualty evacuation possibility.
BAe bought the (British) company.
https://thedefensepost.com/2023/09/12/uk-delivers-cargo-drone-for-ukraine-frontline-weapon-supplies/
I was a director of a company which ran a small group of pharmacies and we usually had someone on day release from one shop for some appropriate course. The staff seemed to enjoy them and they all picked up useful qualifications and. probably more importantly, the idea that 'education' didn't finish at school.
Perhaps the best news of today was nearly 200 Ukranian PoWs being exchanged, some of whom had been captured in the early days of the war. Because of course they were, the Russians aren’t capturing anyone alive at the moment.
Ukraine has allegedly taken dozens of NorKs today though, which will be rather amusing to see how it plays out.
There's no legal requirement to have a letterbox. You'll make it easier for your postie if you have a recycling bin next to the front door with a 'Mail' sign on it
But if it had actually been used in the battlefield in Ukraine, they’d have been a video of it somewhere.
A couple of years later, he got a phone call from the boss of the transport company. They had been making a new entrance into their yard, and had found a postbox in a wall no-one had known about. Except, perhaps, a relief postman who had delivered a load of mail into it one November. Including the cheque from my dad...
They had a good laugh about it, and my dad said it was good of the man to phone him up to tell him.
I quite like New Year's Day and the concert though.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/31/uk-parliament-could-be-next-notre-dame-inferno-unless-restoration-is-expedited
'"Parliament could become the next “Notre Dame inferno”, a former Commons leader has warned, as it was confirmed proposals for a multibillion-pound restoration will not be published until the end of 2025.
Peter Hain, the Labour peer and former Commons leader who was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, said the restoration of the Paris cathedral showed how fast work could be done when politicians acted decisively.”.
[...] The committee overseeing the project had said the decision should be put off until after the general election, with new cost estimates and timescales due this year.'
Boris as Mayor was an effective cheerleader.
If they are saying 'end of 2025' for proposals that means we are not getting that until at least mid-2026, it will probably need a couple of years of discussion around options (which have already been considered), and by then it's 2027 and too close to the next election, so time to delay it.
Makes my blood boil. A fire may be the only realistic way to have then be decisive.
If it is no man’s land it would only work for ambulatory casualties who are in a position to self load but not self evacuate, so the use case would be quite limited
The latter is defined as the 30th percentile of the local market rate for the property to which the household is entitled.
That is if you are in a larger property you only get the rate for what you are "entitled" to, and it is not related to the property, So if you are entitled to 2 bedrooms (eg couple with 2 kids under 10, or 2 kids of the same under 18 *), you only get the 2 bedroom rate in a 3 bedroom house.
That is, the bedroom tax never went away in this calculation.
Then it is minus several years of rent increases in the area since it is only updated with market rents every X years when the Government feels a political need.
According to the HoC Library, increases since 2010 have been in Apr 2013, Apr 2014, Apr 2019, Apr 2023, and Apr 2024. So 5 years out of 14, all in the run up to Elections. I'm not quite sure about that that 2023 increase.
One possible wrinkle is if the sending Council send some money, but I am not sure how these schemes work.
There is one angle on this, that rent increases are here (I am told by agents) up rather more than house values this year. I don't know about elsewhere. It won't affect by decisions on rent level for my Ts, since I don't do "swallow the market rent level or get out"; I have my own policy.
Here, the market rent on an OK 2 bed mid-terrace is around £700-750 pcm this year, where it would have been £475-500 pcm in 2017. The price since then for such a house is up from approx £75-80k to somewhere around £100-110k. CPI Inflation since 2017 is up 31%.
Part of the extra recent market rent increase has been regulatory cost push, then mortgage cost push, but this year more supply shortage vs demand as people have been pulling out.
Here, LHA for 2 bedrooms is £546 pcm, after a biggish catch up to help the Tories at the Election.
* This may be 16, but I would need to go rabbit-holing to check.
Just agree to move out to the QEII centre for a few years, past the next election.
The longer they leave it the more the price rises, and the project is inevitable.
Not that I have done any research - but it is the sort of thing that might be an issue. Skilled craftspeople, too, more generally. The sort of workmanship on Big House Developer sites won't be good enough for the HoP.
Have a good one 👍
and that's the problem - there isn't going to be a time when spending £xbn repairing Parliament is acceptable to the general public...
I want to see how quickly Northern Power Rail and HS2 is built in full...
Let's see if we miss them.
"...Trump is going into a second term with a bold new policy agenda...we're talking about:
- levels of protectionism unprecedented in modern America
- an effort to downsize America's presence on the global scene to a level that hasn't been seen since before the
- Cold War
- an ambitious and somewhat experimental economic agenda
- a planned restructuring of the federal government on a level which hasn't really been seen since maybe the '70s or even earlier the New Deal era
- not to mention a slew of other policies
Trump's agenda this time around is bold and experimental...essentially a new ideology, something...very much against the grain of neoliberalism and neoconservatism which has been dominant in America since around the '80s if not earlierBut change can come with unexpected consequence. Change can be scary in general...what if everything goes wrong for Trump? What if we see the absolute worst case scenario for the second Trump Administration? Not just things not going quite according to plan but things facing the worst possible outcome..."
Since 2022 Labour has also controlled the council, increasing taxes, cutting services and sending me letters asking for voluntary contributions
Reform of the system needs to keep the incentives to develop new drugs - but it’s still largely the pharma who get the blames for nosebleed drug costs.
https://www.murdermap.co.uk/maps/london-murder-map-2024-victims/
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/architecture/palacestructure/the-stonework/
"Gash" may be a bit cruel; perhaps more likely the designers / builders made false assumptions about the industrial environment and were cost-engineering by reducing spec for an inappropriate product. And stone was laid incorrectly (eg not "respecting the bedding plane" ie the natural structure - imagine slate on end).
PoW stone came from Yorkshire (Anson), North Notts (Mansfield Woodhouse), or North Derbys (Bolsover). Replacement in the 1920s came from Rutland. The Rutland Quarry is still open.
TBF, much of London is built out of cheap stuff - why do you think they covered much of it up with Stucco; it's so they can sell it to the people with more money than sense (times don't change - gullibles are still wetting themselves for thrown-up Georgian houses).
I'd have thought Victorian and later would be better. I suspect a lot of it is, but Parliament wanted a monument to themselves.
It's also about not maintaining things *now* and leaving it for the next lot to do the non-sexy spend. One reason we have had never ending appeals for restoration of Victorian churches since the 70s/80s is that thousand were built or heavily restored in 1870-1900 as grandiose self-monuments to the funders, and then left alone for a century.
That's how my parents got themselves a Derbyshire Hall with 5000 sqft and 10 acres - no maintenance done since the Victorians, and empty for 2 years, plus fashion. So it was the same price as a good Edwardian 4 bed detached - £25k in 1976, but took 25 years to restore. Now listing still keeps the prices down.
This is the richer cities exporting their social problems to poorer areas.
Levelling down, not up.
Absolutely nobody wants to own it.
Our son came round with his 3 children this morning and said he had taken them to the nearby park to play on the swings first
Later this afternoon we received the news that a male had hung himself on those swings earlier in the day, and before my son had been there, and had chosen the park as he didn't want his mother to see his suicide
Terrible story and let us pray that many with the same thoughts contact the Samaritans or get help before they commit suicide
Doesn't it merely reflect how little social housing and how little funding these councils have?
Chasing the farmers and rich pensioners isn't the way to go for a Tory. Just too predictable. The best advice I was given was to Zig whenever everyone else Zagged. At the moment she's in lockstep with farage