Your Tax Money At Work

Disabled people are being blocked from travelling abroad by NHS care boards and local councils that refuse to let them use their care funding outside the UK, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners warn of a “postcode lottery” in England where the right of a disabled person to travel overseas depends on where they live or the whim of local officials – even when there is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Disabled care users report having to abandon travel plans at the last minute, or go for years without a break, when authorities refuse to pay for their care abroad, even though they have agreed to meet all the travel expenses.

News to me that we do pay for people to go on their hols.

Lucy Robinson, 38, told the Guardian she had been prevented from attending international work events and going on a holiday because health officials in Oxfordshire had refused to allow her to use her care package abroad.

Robinson, who is quadriplegic and has a team of 24-hour personal assistants,

The claim is, apparently, that the NHS should pay for the complete team to go on such trips.

Campaigners have emphasised this is not about “holidays on the NHS”. There is no extra cost for the health service or local authorities, which are already paying for the care. In almost all cases, the care recipient is expected to pay for their assistant’s expenses and arrange their insurance.

Hmm. Dunno to be honest – seems like quite a big ask.

I’ve never accepted that. Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world. We’ve built the NHS, developed life-saving vaccines and invented the world wide web. But it’s somehow beyond us to get our own people off the streets? I don’t believe it for a minute. We did it during the pandemic. We got people out of the cold because, as a country, we decided it had to be done. We can do it again.

That’s why the first thing I announced when I became prime minister was a commitment to end rough sleeping. Not to manage it, not to reduce it – but to end it. And today, we’re taking the first step in getting it done.

Absolutely none of the proposed soultions are about addiction services, mental health, asylums or even commitals.

Which are the things necessary for a certain subset of long term rough sleepers. So it’s not, not wholly, going to work, is it?

I’m sure I’ve seen a reference to Arday’s house in South London – Battersea – being described as a council house. Cannot find that reference now, it’s swamped by results noting that he grew up in one. Which is annoying. Because the idea that a full professor at Cambridge still gets a council house in London is a damn good example of what’s wrong with council housing allocation, no?

Ah, so: https://crystalroof.co.uk/report/postcode/SW83DB/overview

Seems that it’s highly likely to be social rented housing.

The US embassy in London is also offering grants of up to $500,000 for “public education” programmes that foster a “national conversation” about “shared civilizational values” between the UK and US.

Right up my street. Magna Carta, free markets, jury trial, right on stuff.

Sadly, you’ve also got to actually do something. Sigh.

In today’s London, as in other cities where space is sought-after and expensive, many Lime riders are young professionals, who in the past would have owned or rented homes close to the best public transport. Nowadays, that’s unaffordable for most of them, as is property ownership of any kind – as shown by the fact that the age of the average London first-time buyer has recently overtaken that of the average Lime rider, at 35.

If, say, we stopped housing poor foreigners in hte most expensive neighbourhoods in the country could the native bourgeois not have to cycle everywhere?

Dunno, but an experiment worth trying maybe?

Trains across parts of north-west England have ground to a halt after a power failure hit the signalling centre controlling the railway in the region.

Passengers awaiting Northern and TransPennine trains have been advised not to travel, with widespread cancellations and other services delayed by more than an hour already.

Freight drivers are allowed to take free passenger journeys, using a so-called Freight Travel Duty Pass, if they are on their way to collect a goods train. They must also carry documentary evidence proving this is the purpose of their trip. Other journeys for work purposes must be paid for, with NTS covering reasonable travel expenses.
Fake duty rosters used
However, some of the 160 drivers – who work for a subsidiary of NTS, Direct Rail Services (DRS) – were supplied with fake duty rosters suggesting they were travelling to pick up a train even when they were not, allowing them to make free journeys illegally.
Whistleblowers have told The Telegraph that the practice was widespread, endorsed by some managers, and went on for decades – potentially cheating taxpayers out of millions of pounds.

You know, dues, traditional, like. It’s not the worst ever Spanish Practice. Probably has a net cost of zero – the marginal cost of the one extra train journey is in fact zero – but still…..

Here, too, though, it is more than just a railway. The officials I talked to while travelling around China on its stunning network were clear about this. Many of the early lines were built between the largest cities but now the system, which they hope to increase by at least 10,000 miles by 2040, is being expanded to smaller towns and cities to create a genuinely national network. This remarkable project is seen as a way of uniting the country in the same way the railways in Germany and Italy created nations out of these fragmented countries in the 19th century.

That was the original concept in the UK when HS2 was first conceived and its progenitor, Andrew Adonis, registered HS3, HS4 and HS5 as companies. We can but dream that this will ever be realised. For the story of high-speed rail I found was of go-ahead nations embracing the future, while others, including alas Britain, are being left behind.

High Speed rail makes no economic sense in Britain at all. So, appeal to summat else instead.

And so, appeal to uniting the coiuntry. Just as central government is working to divide the place up into local satrapies.

Well done that man, vry well done.

A quarter of young Africans believe aid cuts by the US could have a positive impact, saying that losing foreign money will force leaders to confront and solve their own challenges, according to a new survey.

Very Peter Bauer in fact.

Outlining plans to axe the digital ID scheme, a spokesman for Mr Burnham said: “One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives.
“That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living.
“This government is determined to bring power back to communities, instead of hoarding it in Whitehall. We will work every day to lift this country back up to where it belongs, with growth in every postcode, and hope in every heart.”

Will anyone using Companies House still have to have one? If so then it’s not really axed, is it?

The options. Burnham could revisit the idea of tightening eligibility requirements, or he could reduce the value of some benefits. But this seems unlikely given his political instincts and pledge to avoid “crude cuts”. Instead he will probably focus on reducing demand.
Clues. Burnham has already given indications he intends to pursue this path. He has promised a massive programme of council house building and described the growing number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) as “deeply concerning”.

He’ll destroy a vast amount of wealth – council houses are worth very much less than it costs to build them – and not kill any part of the benefits bill.

Well done, Andy.

Andy Burnham admits he is considering raising taxes
Jobs and growth under threat from Britain’s record tax burden, economists warn

What’s the point of a decades long struggle to the top if there’s no new money to spend?

A government minister and a senior official have been accused of misleading MPs over their plans to strip coastguard officers of their hourly pay.

Keir Mather, the maritime minister, was said to have made false claims on Wednesday, while Virginia McVea, the chief executive of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), was accused of having done so during a meeting with MPs a week earlier.

The claims come as a row over government plans to stop paying coastguards intensifies. On Wednesday, coastguard officers gathered in Westminster and said they were “deeply saddened” and called for a pause to allow negotiations, while MPs questioned Mather in a Westminster Hall debate.

Officials came up with the scheme after the court of appeal confirmed in January that people who had been serving as coastguard rescue officers (CROs) have been doing so as workers, not volunteers. Lord Justice Bean said this was, in part, because they were paid for their time when on callouts.

OK. So, what’s the problem here?

Well, they’re banning zero hours contracts, aren’t they? Therefore if they’re workers then they cannot just be called out when needed. It requires guaranteed hours.

Petard, meet retards.

Discounts and shopping vouchers will be given to people who walk 20 minutes a day, under an NHS-backed plan to get Britain moving.

What if the shops are less than 10 minutes away?

The government announced in January its commitment and funding for the NPR project to connect cities across the north, consisting of new or upgraded lines between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, York and Sheffield.

However, a report from the public accounts committee (PAC) said it was not confident that the Department for Transport had “learned all the lessons from its past failures in its management of other rail projects” and said there were “clear risks that the full programme and benefits cannot be delivered within its £45bn funding cap”.

You don’t say, eh? Here’s the Simple Shopper with a blank checque. What could go wrong?

He said the problem did not lie with private equity in and of itself, but with the way in which these firms often had a disproportionately large amount of debt that made them more vulnerable to shocks.

“The core risk is not just ‘private equity’. It is for-profit provision, plus high leverage, in an essential service where the state has little room to walk away, and probably low competence in writing contracts and negotiating prices,” he said.

So government is just incompetent at anything commercial. Therefore we must not use private equity but instead must use the government to do things commercial – incompetently.

Mr Burnham, who is expected to become prime minister next month, has been accused of “capitulating to union demands” over the deal.
The pay settlement for Manchester bus drivers, worth up to 56 per cent over three years, is one of the highest in modern times.

Now that the trains are all nationalised again…..

Senior government officials are planning to lobby Andy Burnham during access talks to revive the idea of “war bonds” to pay for higher defence spending when he becomes prime minister, the Guardian understands.

They really do seem to think that if they just have more of what is currently produced to spend then everything will be great. Which, you know, ain’t true. They’re already spending 45% of everything.

Two things would/could help. One is spending less on some things to spend more upon others. The other is to grow the everything so that 45% is more. Neither of those appeal to politicians so here we are, eh?

For it really is true that if we Hang the Lanyards then we can have 4 and 5% real GDP growth for a decade or two and so pay for more than anyone dreams of currently.

We must be alive to the dangers of a UK social media ban – and the way to really help young people
Rosie Parkyn
A ban alone will have limited impact and could make things worse. A good strategy needs more educational content – and more money

A Lanyard writes – give me more money.

Ho Hum.

Healey’s decision appeared to have taken No 10 by surprise despite a protracted row over defence spending, during which he had called on ministers to consider “creative funding” mechanisms like those adopted by other European countries, based on more borrowing.

Or why not just print the money? After all, as Spud says, most of it comes back in tax anyway, right?