Another Tory council to charge kids to play
Another Conservative council admitted today it had plans to charge at least £1 for children to use a popular play park.
Belvedere Splash Park in Bexley is the largest free access wet play park in the country and has a lagoon where small children can paddle in the summer.
The plans, in a leaked council document, are at the review stage and there has been no public consultation yet.
This follows hot on the heels of plans by Tory-run Wandsworth council, revealed first on Liberal Conspiracy, to charge kids £2.50 to play in their park.
Bexley council told the Evening Standard today that the charge would not be introduced this year but could be brought in at “some point in the future”.
Ken Livingstone said:
Hundreds of thousands of families in London are being squeezed with higher fares and cuts. I share the growing concerns about the direction of Boris Johnson’s administration with so many of his key advisers behind these ‘pay to play’ proposals.
Will ministers finally accept these ‘tests’ drive people to suicide?
Today, the Chief Executives of the most prominent mental health charities in the country have published an open letter in the Guardian, begging the government to halt the deeply flawed scheme because it is costing lives. They are not advising or asking, they are begging.
They rightly point out that “invisible” illnesses are woefully let down in the current system and this includes not just those with mental health problems, but also those with long term variable illnesses such as MS, heart disease, cancer or bowel disease.
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Pickles accused of porkies about pensions
Eric Pickles said yesterday that the local government pension scheme costs every household more than £300 each every year.
The extraordinary claim followed a story by Waste Watch, a Sky News blog, that reported:
More than one pound in every five paid in council tax goes on local authority pensions according to the latest figures.
…
They reveal that 22.5% of income from council tax in 2009/10 went on pensions for council employees – up from 19 per cent in 2005/6.
This means that for every £5 raised in council tax, £1.13 goes into the retirement pots.
But today Unison the union says both Sky News and Eric Pickles got their sums wrong. It’s more scandalous that Eric Pickles, a government minister who is supposed to understand local authority funding, went along with the claim.
Unison point out that Council tax is not the only source of local government funding – 75% comes from other sources including business rates, fees, charges, and central government funding.
In reality they say, those pensions cost around 5p in every £1 paid in council tax.
Dave Parentis of Unison said:
Just five pence in every pound of council tax goes towards pensions for social workers, dinner ladies and teaching assistants. But it saves the taxpayer billions in the long run. Close the scheme down, or price people out of it, and you’ll force many council workers onto means tested benefits in their retirement, paid for by the taxpayer.
When council workers do retire, on average they will get just £4,000 a year, dropping to just £2,600 for women – hardly gold plated.
Their working out is here.
No wonder the country is going to the dogs – even the communities and local government secretary doesn’t grasp the basics of local government finance.
Update: Sophy Ridge of Sky News disagrees with Unison’s working out. She says on Twitter:
Actually the blog is right. If you read it properly, I have calculated the proportion of funding from council tax
…
and removed the other funding. The total if u include other sources of taxpayer income is obv much higher.
Why Greens benefit under our FPTP voting system
contribution by Climate Sock
Now UK electoral reform for the Commons has been defeated, First Past the Post (FPTP) is with us for the foreseeable future. I was never convinced that Alternative Vote (AV) would be a game changer for smaller parties like the Greens, but FPTP is particularly bad for them.
There’s no doubt that FPTP exaggerates results. Below a certain share of the national vote, parties get fewer seats than they would under a PR system. Above that level, they get more. Yet the UK Greens do have one MP, and they are in fact less hard done by under FPTP than the other UK-wide parties of similar size: UKIP and the BNP.
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Want more reasons why the financial sector is bad for us?
First, from Felix Salmon:
File under “things you never knew the Fed did during the financial crisis”: an $80 billion loan scheme known as ST OMO, which was so obscure that even Barney Frank had no idea it existed when he required the Fed to turn over its lending data in his Dodd-Frank bill.
These loans were insanely cheap — the interest rate on them was as low as 0.01%, even as the Fed’s main bank window was charging 0.5%. Ivry has looked at these charts very carefully, and by measuring how tall the bars are he’s worked out how much money each bank borrowed at any given time; Credit Suisse topped out at $45 billion, for instance.
So much for Walter Bagehot’s advice to lend freely at a penalty rate! Banks get into trouble and receive secret loans. Sods.
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UK recovery set to be slowest in 180 years
The UK economy is set to experience the slowest pick-up in consumer spending of any post-recession period since 1830, according to a Financial Times analysis of official forecasts.
Given that consumer spending powers the bulk of British economic growth, the impact will be massive.
The FT looked into forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which projects spending in 2015 to be just 5.4% above the 2008 peak.
But a survey of 18 major recessions since 1830 showed that consumer spending on average recovered to 12% above previous peak within seven years.
At the equivalent stage after recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, spending was 20 per cent and 15 per cent higher respectively
This will make the current economic recovery the slowest of any comparable post-recession period.
And these are the government’s own projections.
Put simply, they expect this period of relative stagnation to last for over a decade.
The Treasury says they hope stronger export growth and business investment could offset the fall in consumer and government spending.
Exports and business investment?! The chances of export-led growth are virtually nil and business investment has been falling for years.
Thanks to Osborne’s unwillingness to pump money into the economy, we’re screwed. They know it. We know it. Someone tell the media industry.
Update: Some have asked me what Labour (or even I) would have done instead. Answer here: I were the Shadow Chancellor…
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