John Hemming's Web Log

I have linked to an article in the New Stateman in which Mark Serwotka says the following: "Lots of political decisions are inefficient and wasteful, but none of those things is on anyone's radar. When people talk about reform, what they mean is cuts and job losses. We believe there should not be any reduction in public spending at all." The problem with this approach is it basically does not engage with the debate. Labour accepted that £50,000,000,000 of cuts were necessary. If the union position is that there should be no reduction in public spending at all then they are unable to engage with the debate. PCS used their veto to stop the Labour Government's plan to (rightly) remove the scheme that gives 6 years pay to some Civil Servants who are made redundant. It is simply not possible to run the government and pay such massive redundancy payments. Hence the coalition has legislated to remove that Veto. I wonder if the democratic accountability of Mark Serwotka wil...

The House voted on the issue of Afghanistan on Thursday. This was the first time there has been a substantive vote on the issue. What it demonstrates is the merit of having a mechanism for the back benches to identify substantive issues to debate. (I speak as a member of the committee that does this). There are some real difficulties for the government in dealing with this issue. Apart from the fact that it arises as a legacy from the previous government it is also something that has to be resolved through NATO. Although some governments have unilaterally withdrawn I would expect the UK and the US to work jointly on this. Hence it is not surprising that the government whipped in support of the underlying resolution: "That this House supports the continued deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan." I was a teller against this resolution. My concerns fit quite closely with those of Conservative MP and ex-soldier John Baron. Conservative Home have looked at some of th...

I think people have been missing the point when looking at the Phone Hacking issue. There is quite an important constitutional issue about MPs being bugged by someone privately and information collected. In a sense this has been swallowed up by the fact that the senior manager of the newspaper who was a) In place when this happened, but b) Who resigned because he took responsiblity for it happening on his watch is now working for the government. He has accepted a sanction for what happened and his "fingerprints" have not been found on the details. Hence, unless more evidence is found he has no further questions to answer. I think Teresa May is right to leave the operational questions to the police. They are, however, subject both to judicial review and to any actions that parliament may wish to take. Much that I don't think this is an issue for the government. I do think it is an issue both for the police and parliament. I have supported the calls for there to be a r...

I spent some time looking at the IFS analysis published about a week and a half ago about the budget. Their analysis is now on their website via the news release which is here . The report itself is available via this page . I wrote an article for the Guardian's Comment is free section which is here I think a lot of the coverage of the IFS report was additionally misleading. I think the IFS could have been a lot clearer about their analysis when interviewed. For example there was this today interview. I transcribed part of this interview which follows: Presenter: "If you had to focus on one measure that was if you like impacting the poor more than the rich I think your analysis shows it is the rather subtle one that sounds very innocuous that we are going to update benefits by the CPI rather than the RPI. IFS: "yes that's the largest welfare cut that's coming in over the next few years. That's forecast to save the government about 5.8 bn pounds by 2014 But it...

The link is to the BBC story which includes the text: The UK should have addressed its public deficit back in 2005, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the BBC. Speaking to Andrew Marr, Mr Blair said: "We should probably have taken a tougher fiscal position than we did." He said that this was also about the time when disagreement between himself and Gordon Brown "started to spill over into macro-economic policy". This is the key point that I have been making which is that we would not have had as big a problem as we do now had we not over spent from 2005. I am slightly surprised that Tony Blair has actually agreed with this because it is the defining issue of this parliament where he accepts that the coalition are right and the Labour leadership candidates (except perhaps David Milliband) are wrong.

The link is to an English Translation in the german newspaper Der Spiegel. They are talking about Peak Oil being around nowish. (Although on a geological scale even a thousand years from now would be around nowish).

Dear Colleague, I expect that you will have read or seen the media coverage over the Bank holiday weekend about NHS Direct. I wanted to write promptly to you to correct any misleading impression that this may have created that NHS Direct as an organisation is being closed down. This is not what the Government has said, nor is it their intention. The Government has confirmed that the 0845 46 47 telephone service we are commissioned to provide will be phased out as the new NHS 111 service is developed and rolled out nationally. This is no surprise as it was included in the White Paper in June. We are fully supportive of the new 111 telephone number, and the plan for the 111 service to be thoroughly integrated into local health communities with a more integrated urgent and out of hours response. We have been working with the Department of Health on the 111 programme since 2009, and we are working with the Department and local health communities involved in all three of the “Pathfinder...

So the government under Labour piloted a new scheme This was a scheme to replace NHS Direct with a new 111 non-emergency number. Quoting from this: In the future, it could become the single number for non-emergency services, including NHS Direct. Ministers did know about it: Health Minister Mike O'Brien said: "Patients have told us that they need clear, easy advice on how to find healthcare quickly when it's less urgent than 999 and I am delighted that Ofcom has allocated 111 for these purposes. "This will be particularly useful outside of GP surgery hours and for people who are away from home." Now Labour seem to be against it . The plan has provoked an angry reaction from Labour, with shadow health secretary Andy Burnham using it as evidence of what he claims is the government's intention to "dismantle" the NHS. He said: "The health secretary's statement will stun people across the NHS. "It is yet more evidence that Andrew Lansley...

The link is to that dreadful case in Manchester. It does appear that it would have been possible absent adoption targets to have kept the elder child with her birth mother.

The "new" IFS report repeats substantially what they said at the time of the Emergency Budget. Firstly from a tax perspective the budget is progressive. It in fact is more progressive than Labour because of the CGT increases. Where the debate exists is on the treatment of benefits. The biggest factor is whether the change from RPI to CPI should be considered to be regressive or not. The above chart shows that recently CPI inflation has often been higher than RPI inflation. The biggest distinction currently arises from using a geometric mean rather than an artithmetic mean for averaging price increases. Then come various housing issues some of which are encountered by some claimant households. My view is that we should have a measure to monitor inflation for claimant households. I raised this in the house and the government have agreed to look at this. Some things such as energy costs hit claimant households harder than other households. That is why this needs to be looke...

The William Ward case was an exceptional case in a number of ways. However, Panorama have really missed the key points. Most mothers facing a case like this one would not only have lost their son to adoption, but also lost subsequent children. Firstly, they were allowed to have the grandparents supervising. That is rare. Secondly, they were allowed a second medical opinion. That also is rare. What would normally have happened would have been that baby William would have been put with foster carers and limited contact (perhaps three times a week if they were lucky) would have been the option. What needs to be looked at in respect of this case is, however, more complex than presented in the programme. Firstly, we should not attack experts who offer opinion merely because the judge does not agree with it. Experts have to offer their viewpoint. Where the real problem lies is in the interface between medical opinion and legal certainty. Medical opinion is often not that certain. There...

The Childrens Commissioner has published a good report looking at the experiences of the safeguarding system from a family perspective. There are some strong quotations in the report and it is surprising that it has not had any press. eg One parent described how a male social worker had been allocated to her daughter who had been sexually abused by her ex-partner and was terrified of men. This mother had specifically asked for a female social worker to be allocated. “They just don’t listen. They don’t want to hear what you say.” This issue puzzled the families, and they felt they never got a clear answer about it and so were left with the conclusion that: “It’s another way of controlling us.” “They can leave and never come back, and you might never know, but as soon as you say, this is not working, I want someone new, they don’t like it.”

The link is to a Panorama programme tonight about a family court case. This case was unusual because the Ward's were allowed to get a second opinion. Normally the parents are refused a second opinion and lose the case. It should also be noted that quite large expert fees are paid to those people who diagnose child abuse in children. Those fees are generally not available if people don't think that the children have been abused. This creates a major conflict of interest which I have raised with the GMC. If anyone thinks that is a fair and just system I am amazed.

This is another case of an adoption that reverses as soon as the children get old enough. There will be a lot more of these.

This sort of story reported in the Daily Mail makes one wonder about the reliability of the assessment processes used by local authorities. Whether there will be a serious case review or not is unclear. I think there should be some inquiry.

There is nothing really key about 100 days. It is a purely arbitrary point at which to assess a government. However, one key assessment is what the interest rate is on government debt. The figures from Bloomberg today are: UK (10 year) 3.037 Ireland (10 year) 5.236 Greece (10 year) 10.692 Germany (10 year) 2.353 That affects in the long term how much money is available for public services. Labour's strategy of don't cut so much in the short term leads to larger cuts in the Long term. In the mean time the Coalition government is working to make the UK a nicer place to live. The banning of demanding money with menaces (aka car clamping on private land) is a good example of that. Yes people may still have to pay penalty charges, but the behaviour of so many clamping operations has been totally unacceptable.

I must admit that when I looked in detail recently at one of the Audit Commission's inspection I saw an inspection where the conclusions had been identified before the inspection started. A good way of saving money, therefore, is to stop such ludicrous inspections from even starting.

PFI costs a lot as the BBC have found (hat tip Bob Piper ) - see link. The government claim it is value for money. The problem is that it is not. It is only calculated as being value for money by using an adjustment to the alternative public sector procurement cost. This is called optimism bias. I have explained this a number of times. The last time in the house was here We have a similar problem with the funding costs of private finance initiatives. The great difficulty is comparing all the figures involved in what is called optimism bias. I asked the Government what the optimism bias figures were for a number of different PFI projects, and they came back with a wide range of figures. Let me explain a bit about optimism bias, for those hon. Members who are not aware of it. When a PFI project is put together, there is an assumption that, if it could be done through the public sector, it would be done through the public sector, so it must therefore be done in the most cost-effective ...

There is a lot of wailing going on about the legal aid proposals. Some of it may be valid. However, given that most firms of solicitors merely roll over when facing care proceedings against their clients I see a lot of the money as being simply wasted. Furthermore given that legal aid is from time to time refused for parents who wish to contest proceedings I wonder what it is all about.

I understand that capital is now to be released to rebuild Sheldon Heath as the KE VI Sheldon Heath Academy. I hope that this is not as part of BSF. If it isn't then we should be able to get the school rebuilt a lot faster. BSF is dreadfully slow and inefficient as a process.