It may be really unpopular, but here’s why PFI won’t be banned

by Jonn Elledge    
August 22, 2011 at 4:54 pm

The private finance initiative (PFI) fits into that awkward bit of public policy where you’ll also find vast authoritarian databases and government by Whitehall diktat. Governments will always love PFI, oppositions will always hate it, and matters of party and ideology are almost irrelevant to this fact.

I spent two years writing about PFI, for which I can only apologise, and so read Rizwan Syed’s comment with interest. With respect, though, I think he got a few things wrong – largely because the whole mess is far more complex business than it’s sometimes made to appear by both its fans and its detractors.
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The ONS gets criticised: is it trying too hard to defend Osborne?

by Paul Cotterill    
August 22, 2011 at 2:10 pm

Amidst all the dramatic events of the last week or so, this letter of 16th August, from the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the regulator) to the Director General of the Office for National Statistics, does not appear to have been picked up on in the blogosphere.

The letter concerns the media controversy over the way in which the ONS reported on the Q2 GDP Statistical Bulletin, referring to several ‘special factors’ as reasons why the growth figures was only 0.2%.
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Government’s Work Programme at risk of collapse, say experts

by Don Paskini    
August 22, 2011 at 11:49 am

The Social Market Foundation, a think tank which helped develop the ideas behind the government’s Work Programme, have just published a report claiming that it is at risk of collapse. Their analysis suggests that:

• The Work Programme will get around one in four adult Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) clients into work,
significantly below the rate needed to meet the DWP’s expectations for minimum performance;
• Providers will fail to meet the minimum performance expected of them by the DWP by around 30,000
jobs over three years;
• Providers will also undershoot what the Government anticipates would have happened if no welfare
to work scheme existed at all, suggesting that the Government’s analysis of this ‘policy-off’ scenario is over-optimistic;
• Based on FND performance levels, over 90% of Work Programme providers will be at risk of having
their contracts terminated by DWP even by year three of the scheme;
• This under-performance means that funding per jobseeker will be significantly less than anticipated,
threatening the financial viability of providers.

In order for the government to save their flagship jobs programme, Social Market Foundation recommend that the government increases the payments to providers, publishes the data about how they are performing, revises the assumptions about how many people will be able to get jobs now that the economy is weaker, and investigates the impact on sub-contractors to make sure that they aren’t forced out of business.

*

It is no great surprise that a department led by Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud managed to introduce a multi billion pound jobs programme funded on the basis of wishful thinking and over optimistic predictions. It is still pretty extraordinary that the Social Market Foundation is predicting that fewer people will get jobs as a result of the Work Programme than government believes would have done if no welfare to work scheme existed at all, and that within three years the programme will bankrupt more than 90% of all specialist organisations which support people to get jobs, unless the government gives them more money and lets them reduce their targets.

A copy of the full report is available here.

BBC gets Barclay’s Bob Diamond to lecture us

by Sunny Hundal    
August 22, 2011 at 10:00 am

Another example of the BBC’s right-wing corporate bias was on show late last week, after the Today programme launched an annual lecture on issues facing the business world.

And the first person to deliver the ‘BBC Today Business Lecture’? The highly controversial chief executive of Barclays, Bob Diamond – who recently awarded himself a £27m pay deal.

Diamond will be addressing an invited audience and the Today presenter John Humphrys will also interview him for the following day’s Today programme.

Earlier this year Bob Diamond admitted to MPs that Barclays paid just £113 million in corporation tax during 2009 – around 1% of the £11.6 billion in profit it made that year.

In 2009 the Sunday Times revealed that Barclays was alleged to be making about £1 billion a year from an international web of financial schemes designed to avoid paying tax in the UK and abroad.

I wonder if John Humphrys will quiz Diamond about tax avoidance and on whether Barclays could have survived the financial crash of 2008 if other banks around it hadn’t been bailed out.

Does Gaddafi’s end in Libya strengthen the interventionists?

by Sunny Hundal    
August 22, 2011 at 8:50 am

I think it is safe to say, after the events of last night – that Col. Gaddafi is no longer in control of Libya. Three of his sons have been arrested and the International Criminal Court is preparing to indict one of them – Saif Al-Islam.

There’s little doubt that David Cameron will try and extract political capital out of this, though in fairness it is not undeserved: without France and the UK leading Nato into Libya, the liberation of Libya wouldn’t have come so quick.

One argument will almost certainly flare-up again.
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Riot suspect who had flat burnt was innocent

by Sunny Hundal    
August 21, 2011 at 2:34 pm

Last week I reported that GM Police had released the name of an individual simply suspected of taking part in the riots (and starting the fire at Ms Selfridge, Manchester) – who had then faced vigilante action.

Dana Williamson was arrested by Greater Manchester Police and charged with criminal damage.

GMP first released (and then deleted) his home address – subsequently burnt down by an arsonist in what was very likely a retaliatory action.

When interviewed, Williamson admitted he had been in the vicinity earlier that day but said it was a case of mistaken identity.

It turns out he was right. He was innocent.

In an interview with Manchester Evening News he revealed how he:

- has lost his home and all his possessions after being arrested;
- was labelled a firebug by prison officers and told he would be jailed for life;
- was locked up for 23 hours a day as a category A and then category B prisoner;
- suffered panic attacks because of the stress;
- had five alibis to prove it was not him.

Readers pointed out last time that names of suspects are routinely released after they are charged.

But my point was that in the current environment that was clearly dangerous and exceptions should have been made. GMP must have realised this too, because they soon deleted the press release they had issued with his name.

The process that Williamson describes that got him arrested should worry anyone who cares for fairness in justice.

He told MEN:

He revealed how he was arrested by officers after a friend showed him footage of the fire.

Dane added: “One of my mates had said ‘Are you sure you were not involved in the riots’. The photo of the arsonist looks a bit like you.

“We had a laugh and a joke about it. Two police officers were stood in front of Phones 4 You, and I said ‘I’ll prove it’s not me’ and walked in front of the coppers. When I came out of the shop they grabbed me and then three more approached and asked if I had been involved in the riots. I said ‘no’.

“The next thing I was arrested in the middle of the street on suspicion of arson. I couldn’t believe it. It was surreal. I was taken into police custody and it was all very distressing. I was interviewed at Pendleton Police station and gave an account of where I was that day. Then I was interviewed again and they were trying to pin the offence on me and get me to admit it. I wasn’t having any of it because it was not me.

“Later that night I was charged and the estimated damage to the shop was £495,000. I was taken to Manchester Magistrates court the next day and was really worried. I told my solicitor I was innocent. But when we got into court the judge didn’t give anyone a chance.”

GM Police now have serious questions to answer regarding this case.

And how many other innocents have been locked up thanks to over-zealous policing?

Update: Both Tim Hardy at Beyond Clicktivism and Luke Reeshus at The Third Estate ask more questions of police action too.

Where are the modern-day Suffragettes against the cuts?

by Guest    
August 21, 2011 at 2:00 pm

contribution by Aisha Mirza & Nikandre Kopcke

Funny how some numbers get preferential treatment. Tucked away on the business pages of newspapers this week was a big one: the number of unemployed women in the UK is now the highest since 1988. This is business alright. This should be EVERYONE’S business, and ought to inspire shame, outrage, and a serious fight.

Last weekend at the UK Feminista Summer School people from across the country discussed the ways in which women, particularly single mothers and black and minority ethnic women, will be forced to the edge of survival by the spending cuts.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of organizations like the Fawcett Society, the statistics couldn’t be clearer – or more devastating. So what do we do about it?
continue reading… »

What difference did the Fukushima disaster make to attitudes towards nuclear energy?

by Guest    
August 21, 2011 at 9:28 am

contribution by Climate Sock

With an event as prominent as the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the media tend to assume that the public have been paying attention, and that public opinion must have undergone a dramatic shift.

Sometimes this is fair. The MPs’ expenses scandal did capture public attention and brought attitudes towards politicians even lower than they had been before. But other high-profile media stories, like the UEA email release (aka ‘climategate’), came and went without having all that much impact on public opinion. In the UK and US at least, Fukushima is looking like the latter kind of story.
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A new report by MPs shows why PFI should be scrapped

by Rizwan Syed    
August 20, 2011 at 10:43 am

The PFI was a Conservative initiative. Introduced in 1992 under John Major’s government, it is a form of project finance which aims ‘to increase the scope for private financing of capital projects.” This translates into the privatisation of publicly owned assets. Labour criticised the plan from the outset as a form of privatisation (and rightly so).

The House of Commons Select Committee published its report on the PFI this week which criticises the PFI as being ‘extremely inefficient’. We can thank the report for subtracting the ‘efficiency’ argument from the Tory arsenal of pro-privatisation polemic.
continue reading… »

Fact-checking the Spectator’s front-page article on the riots

by Guest    
August 19, 2011 at 4:00 pm

contribution by Clive Power

Harriet Sergeant’s Spectator front-cover article this week “These rioters are Tony Blair’s children” is riven with inaccurate statistics and ill-founded claims.

Adding little but more tinder to the bonfire of ill considered comment about recent events, Sergeant (a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies [CPS]) uses her article to gives her opinion that the riots were “not about poverty or race” and also to state that “unless we understand the causes of this anarchy and the role that government has played, how can we put it right?”

I am of the opinion that dubious ‘facts’ throughout her article mean anyone trying to read it for an understanding of the riots will be able to do not much more than chase phantoms, never mind be equipped by it to ‘put anything right’.
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