Banks are closing branches across the UK. Post offices are disappearing. HMRC no longer offers local tax offices. Local authorities increasingly expect everything to be done online. Face-to-face support is becoming increasingly hard to find.
We are facing the disappearance of functioning communities, the loss of public services, and the growing assumption that efficiency matters more than people.
In this video, I ask why so many institutions are retreating from local life. Why is it becoming so difficult to get help with banking, tax, benefits, council services, or basic advice?
A friend said to me, “It’s sad that WHSmiths is shutting down.”
I said, “It’s because people use the internet to read the news.”
He said, “I do that.”
I do feel sorry for them but not so much that I want to buy the telegraph at Smiths – as opposed to on line.
I worked at WH Smith over a decade ago, and they were barely making a bean from high street stores then. It’s why they became a bit of a bazaar of cheap crap. Stuff that people would just pick up, not books, music, movies. I forget the exact ratio, but I think over 90% of the profit came from airports and railway stations.
A very long time ago my brother gave me a WH Smith gift card as a birthday present. I spent ages in there looking for something to buy with it. I can’t remember now what I actually bought, just something that I didn’t really want. I don’t think that I’ve been inside one since.
Which is why the holding company kept all the transport outlets and sold off all the high street outlets.
Because despite having the biggest tax take since Oliver Cromwell and owing £3 trillion there isn’t any money to pay people to do these things in the real world because cunts like you have demanded that we piss money at the wall in lots of other exciting ways. If that helps.
Also cunts like him have made it so that useless public sector staff cannot be fired, and allowed them to be paid for “working from” [i.e. ‘sitting on their fat arses at’] home, so the standard of service has got even worse.
Give that man a Bell’s for hitting a nail on its head.
£3 trillion?
I think you can double that, once PFI, and then pubsec and normie retirement benefits are counted.
Treble, more like.
Rough estimates I think are £1.5tr for public sector workers’ pension schemes, and another £4.5tr for the general State pension.
The thing is, we’re actually much more of a caring society because of all this stuff and because it gives us a surplus.
If you fly with Easyjet and have a disabled passenger, they (and Gatwick) are brilliant. You get people who help you. Dyson worked with the RNIB to improve their website accessibility for blind users. Imagine no internet, and you go down to Thomas Cook and book your flights? That was 30% on top of the flight price. Uber are better with disabled customers than most taxi companies and part of that is that they have more surplus as it’s more efficient. They can have some specially trained drivers at no extra cost.
The thing is, that spending by Dyson was a waste of money in terms of making dosh. The millions never led to more millions in vacuum cleaner sales, directly. But that’s not how business people think. It’s serving customers. And yeah, you’ve got to make money, but it isn’t everything. Sir James wasn’t exactly down to his last penny because of it. And he’s also a human being. You also make everyone in the software team feel a bit happier about the things they do. It gets good PR. The disability legislation that we got around the early years of Blair is very Adam Smith to me. A man should be able to have a linen shirt. And well, we go rich enough to say that disabled people should be able to go to the movies. We’ve got richer and raised our basic standards of decency. Sure, old art deco cinemas are going to be a problem, but if you’re building a new one, spend the money on a ramp. It’s a burden on businesses, but not one that you hear anyone complaining about.
But you only get to that point of caring for the least fortunate when there’s plenty of money.
More performative caring and concern from Spud…*yawn*
Translation: I need help claiming bennies and the chat bots on the dot gov website won’t give me any money.
Yeah, it’s not clear how doing things online actually translates into a “loss of public services”, personal touch, umm, maybe, but the service is still there, elements delivered/accessed differently.
So he’s probably spunked too much cash up the wall on iPads.
Because they’re suitably unimpressed by his bluster of being an Important Person and a “well-known Political Economist” etc…
Website and algorythms don’t care about Elyan Solanums, and it seems he doesn’t have the cheat-codes other *actually* important people have…
And this I stress is a crisis of community as much as it is one of banking service or other services. Essential institutions are abandoning local places. The people most in need are often the worst affected. And social infrastructure is being dismantled at cost to those most in need of it. Convenience for organisations is trumping public need, and communities are paying the price for the denial of services we enjoyed when we were apparently much worse off than we are today, and that makes no sense at all.
So the answer to the state withdrawing from certain communities is to give them even more power? I question whether you have actually worked with the public sector at any point. Their very raison d’etre is the convenience of them and their employees – that is their sole concern. The customer can just go hang. Given your alleged predilection for ‘the economics of the real world’ you seem astonishingly ignorant of it.
So, what we need or what I might call ‘Public Finance Hubs’, and we need these in every sizable community. My guess is that we need a public finance hub for every 15,000 or so people. Every town, suburb, or large village should have one. They should be located on accessible high streets. They should be easy to reach by public transport. And full access should be guaranteed for all users, and they should be open at least six days a week.
Brilliant – another target for rampant vandalism and disorder. Happy days. I went to two banking hubs, one in the Bedfordshire town of Ampthill, the other in Mablethorpe, up on the Lincs coast. Neither appeared to have any customers at all and that’s in two very contrasting communities. The issue is the extreme level of taxation which is so high, for zero return. that most people don’t have any money to put into the bank. And its solved by huge cuts to all the army of non-productive public sector workers which have been in place since 1997, alongside franchise reform to halve their voting power vs. private sector workers who actually pay for them.
You went to Mablethorpe? Brave, VP. The thing about bank branches is that so many of the things we went there for were removed from the branch’s purview. You can’t get a loan there. You can’t put money into your own account. You can’t get your own money out over a fairly low amount. You can’t even change a fifty. There is claimed to be a pop-up banking hub near me in Sleaford, but I’ve never seen it nor do I believe it could do anything I might want.
Is this you, rhoda?
Alas, no. What a great project. Lincoln still has the memory of Tanks all over. The White Hart in the uphill district (guess what the other part is called) has a blue plaque commemorating a meeting of all the main players of the design of the tank.
That makes around 4,500 ‘finance hubs’ nationwide, doubling up the role of the 1,900 Citizens Advice locations around the country.
We’ve got two banks and four post offices, so clearly enough for the 15,000 folks in town and the 15,000 folks up the valley.
I would say clearly inadequate. Two plus four is six, times one HR and one DEI person per location and one to say sorry we can’t help you try online, is a meager eighteen. We should be aiming for eighteen hundred.
Commie dick Murphy and his ilk consider pity to be a weakness. A weakness they gleefully exploit.*
The commie dick is faking it. He doesn’t care about any of this. His (exploitative) appeal to pity is to get YOU to care, and allow his totalitarian ways in.
*When you start reading a BBC or Guardian report that trots out an appeal to pity, you are being had. They don’t care. You care. And they are using it against you.
The issue is never the issue. It is an appeal to pity.
You got that from Brutus didn’t you.
Negative. Don’t know who Brutus is. From Popeye?
And at the same time, there’s something else to say as well. The people who somebody sees in these hubs should be able to provide direct telephone lines if they cannot provide the support a person wants. Nobody who goes to see someone in a hub should then be fobbed off with being told to call a general helpline. No, that’s not good enough. They’ll end up in those endless queues again, having to deal with AI to try to get to the right person. The hub should give a direct telephone line for somebody who should be able to help. We need to get back to the idea that people who need help should get it.
This sounds almost like something you might here in the local boozer – its a shame he’s been banned from most of them. Genuinely does sound almost unhinged. Again public sector bureaucrats specialize in obfuscation and misinformation. They have no interest in resolution of problems. Has he been living under a rock?
And vitally, inside all of this, we must respect people’s dignity and privacy. So these places must be big enough that every meeting that requires to be held in private should be. Sensitive issues should be handled confidentially, and nobody should be forced to discuss personal matters in public. Services should be designed around people, then, and they should be accessible and respectful.
Compulsory purchase orders for housing in already crowded areas? Maybe the IND could come in and we could have a Turkish barber in the back, or a vape shop?
“The hub should give a direct telephone line” – so much can go wrong here. I expect that 10% of benefit claimants account for 90% of enquiries as is true of so much in life. And so these special ones will be the ones most likely to get to see that special direct telephone number and before long it gets shared about and everyone knows it.
So you have to have secure systems where the client is on the ‘phone to a technician whose direct number they cannot see. I haven’t read this OpEd by Spud, but I’m guessing he also wants the interpreters on hand 6 days a week also and no cost to the claimant too.
Why is it becoming so difficult to get help with banking, tax, benefits, council services, or basic advice?
It has never been easier to find out the answer to the vast majority of these services or standard inquiries. No longer do you need to get up, wait for a bus in the pissing rain and queue up. Most things can be solved at home sitting in your pants with a cup of tea.
How lucky we are that technology has granted us such savings in time and hassle leaving us free to enjoy sitting in our pants.
Sure some people may struggle with computers etc but according to the politics of I don’t give a shit: I don’t give a shit.
And I doubt the fat professor has waddled along to a bank or post office for a long time.
I’m a member of the CoOp and when my Mum died they sent me a comprehensive “so you’ve had a berevement” pack, step by step of everything that needs doing. Five days to get the death certificate, Do this first! Everything else, measured step by step, etc.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of similar “friendly societies” people can join and get all of this sort of info – and CoOp membership is free! If I hadn’t then Mum’s membership of her union would have done exactly the same. There are legions of Little Troops already doing all the stuff Lord Spud demands the state do.
Co-op member? Bunch of inept Fabian paternalistic cunts. Get the vouchers, find you can’t spend ’em on booze. Fuck ’em.
My order of preference is online, phone and at a long margin behind, personal visit.
I don’t like the phone much either. The first five minutes is an announcement telling to that you can do it online, then you get to hold for 30 minutes till you speak to a person that probably could help but for the fact they are working from home and can’t compare two screens at once.
I recently had to register a death, which had to be done in person. Called the number to make an appointment, got an apology for coming delay, then a stern warning about shouting at the staff, then another apology for the inevitable delay. Gave up and took 2 mins to book online for the next day.
I renewed my driver’s license recently, and had to go in person for the vision test and likely get a new photo since I’m wearing glasses now.
The system here in Ulster County is “appointment-only” in that you go online, book a time, and get a booking number. When you get to the office, you enter your booking number to get a ticket like the sort you get at the deli counter.
My appointment was for 3:15 PM, and I didn’t get in to the actual DMV flunkie until about 3:50. If the government can’t even do that right, what’s the fvcking point?
Some of them deliberately give you an appointment earlier than they intend to see you, to make sure you’re there and ready on time. Because their time is so much more valuable than yours.
Being over 70, I have to renew my drivers licence every three years, and I recently renewed mine. The DVLA website was very easy to use, and I received my new licence within five working days. My wife had a similarly efficient experience with the Passport Agency.
On the other hand…trying to get a new trade waste collection rota for a holiday let I own in East Suffolk has been a tedious trail of calls and emails…and a visit to my local NHS hospital for a routine lung function test revealed several physiotherapists chatting idly for 15+ minutes…
So not all British state service provision is broken…just most of it.
Oh, down here you just put your postcode into the council website and it produces your personal binday calendar for the whole year.
Mind you, that is about the only thing they manage to do efficiently.
Maybe I’m smug because I was involved in kicking our registry department into restructuring themselves 20 years ago, but my experience last month was prefectly smooth. Other than the physical certificate confirmation and collection – which has to be done in person as a legal action – everything was done smoothly on the phone, and I could have done it online.
One recent complication is the Shipman Regulations that came in last year that a family member has to be eyeballed by the registrar to confirm the details are not unexpected before they are allowed to register the death and release the body. Some town halls will do the typical; British Bureaucrat thing of gold-plating the obstructionism.
The trouble is they can dodge responsibility when things go wrong. I’ve been to the bank branch before and told them I’m not leaving until they fix things. It’s closed down now.
The last time I went into a bank in my local town a little over ten years ago. I paid in a US dollar cheque from the Royal Bank of Canada. The counter staff rightly accepted it as USD. A week later I was being investigated for fraud.
The cheque processing folks decided that as it was from a Canadian bank it must be in the less valuable Canadian dollars and processed it as such. This triggered a fraud investigation on both me and the counter staff. It led to an interesting chat on the phone with their investigator where I pointed out that it was indeed a USD cheque and was printed so on both the front and back of the the cheque, and that by them treating it a Canadian dollars, they were defrauding me.
That branch is now closed too, which didn’t matter as I had already closed my account with them.
Seems a rather extreme way of getting you to leave.
So which unfortunate organisation has Murphy been ranting to on the ‘phone this week? I do feel sorry for their employees, almost as much as the staff in his local coffeeshops.
I have some sympathy for those unable to use modern technology to access services. Did a tiny amount of care for an old lady for 7 years, and she was in no way capable of using a ‘puter’ (her words) or a smart phone – she struggled with the TV remote control and a regular telephone. I don’t know what the answer is but it seems as if some people are going to be left behind…………..
My guvnor now struggles to tap a card on a payment machine. It is horrible to see such decline. But I do not see why everyone else has to be ordered to revolve around it and I doubt he would endorse such a thing if asked and able to answer.
“My guvnor now struggles to tap a card on a payment machine”
That’s sad; I saw that with my mother-in-law, and the family struggled to come to terms with it.
But at that point you need help wiping your own arse, or at least cooking your dinner, so you won’t be having to do things on your own.
But he at least has the option to pay in cash if he wants. The issue with the increasing use of online and smartphone services by the State is that they provide no alternative. Tesco still take cash, and have some checkouts open, so the oldies can still go and buy their weekly shop in the old fashion if they so chose.
I thought we on the Right were about freedom of choice, not ‘Everything has to be the way that suits me and f*ck you if thats no good for you’?
IMO all public bodies (and I include large corporations in that, such as banks and utilities) ought to be forced by law to have a manned service office in every town they operate in, so that if you want to you can go and talk to an actual person to deal with your issues. There will always be people for whom IT is out of their intellectual capacity, this is an IQ thing, not an age thing. It is not right that public (and quasi-public) bodies should be allowed to enact a sort of digital apartheid and leave a significant proportion of the population unable to access basic services.
TOJ, I doubt my example is a cash vs card thing.
If the old buzzard i call Pater struggles to tap a piece of plastic on another piece of plastic, then pulling coins and notes out then placing them with a buxom wench behind a till is a no-hoper.
I was in Wells yesterday. council’s long-term car park only accepts payment by phone app. Fortunately there is a private car park adjacent to the council one, it takes payment by card and is cheaper.
Tragic.
Terry Pratchett: “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
At a rough calculation, and assuming they have opening times to be actually useful (because not everyone makes their living ranting online and waddling down to the local coffeeshop), that means every man, woman and child will be needing this hub every ten months on average.
How many cock-ups does the public sector have to make – just in its financial dealings with the public, not starting on all its other cockups – that you’re having to go in more than once a year to get things sorted out?
OK, they probably are that crap.
But this is for the things you can’t sort out by ‘phone or online, and/or the people who can’t cope with a telephone or website. A small fraction of the total.
So he seems to be assuming – and is happy with – a public sector that is making a cock-up with each citizen’s finances about every month.
So does that mean I can comment on his website and not get banned? Let’s get that sense of community going.
The man really thinks government offices and banks are ‘third places’ where people meet, socialize, and form community bonds?
Really?
Conversely, in this morning’s news, HMRC have been calculating the state pension wrongly for years (not allowing for the fact that the annual increase comes in week 2 of the tax year). So every pensioner has been overcharged a few quid every year for the last ‘unknown period’. The suggestion was that they all phone HMRC to ask for a refund. Good luck with that!
When I fill in my tax return I have to give details of my state pension, including the arcane calculation to adjust for that. But why? The government knows what my pension is, they take that into account when setting the tax code for PAYE on my private pension, So why do I have to calculate it for them?
Because when HMRC calculate it, they get it wrong. 🙂
I do my own self assessment and my wife’s and our pensions are automatically included when I open up the web page to fill out the assessment.
My occupational pensions are automatically (and correctly) filled in, but not my state pension.
Funnily enough, you’ll find the equivalent of ‘banking hubs’ everwhere in the US, offering most banking services (except for large sums of cash) and open far-longer and later than ‘traditional’ banker’s hours. They are the micro-branches that are found in many major chain- and department stores, specifically, in WalMarts, but widely found everywhere. Alongside the also-ubiquitous eyecare and hearing-aid providers and beauty-salons, they form a mutually-profitable arrangement with the retailer. But, of course, since they are the result of a beneficial arrangement between private businesses, Murphy would, of course, reject the idea out of hand.
llater,
llamas
In what sense is a queue at the Post Office counter a functioning community?