Category: Blog

I am glad there is to be a Parliamentary investigation into the state of our water supply and flood defences.

Some say we need it to deal with the consequences of global warming. The predictions of climate change theorists tell us that we will need to store more water for drinking and other uses during the wet periods to cater with the drier periods. They also warn us about more floods, anticipating too much water in too short a time period.

I agree with those who say we need to manage the consequences of global warming, as the UK on her own will be unable to curb the worlds carbon output. The case for tackling our twin water problems is so much greater, because water shortage and too much flooding is directly linked to another contemporary phenomenon ?? high levels of inward migration allied to massive development.

I will be submitting evidence to the Parliamentary enquiry, and have submitted evidence to the governments review. My own constituency has given us plenty of warning of what is going wrong, thanks to the pattern of intense development. It reflects the position in much of southern and eastern England.

In recent summers we have been told to go easy on our water use, and in some places hosepipe bans have been imposed. We have experienced regular bouts of flooding, especially in places where there has been recent building on flood plain.

The solutions are relatively straightforward. To secure our water supply we need to take account of rising population, and rising water use per head. There is no need to demand restrictions on individual water use ?? water is the ultimate renewable resource, with the water cycle bringing water to us and taking it back to the sea on a regular basis.

By all means let the water companies mends their pipes, to get more water to market. We should remember, however, that mending pipes in urban areas is very disruptive to traffic and daily life, and might be ridiculously expensive. We should also expect the water industry to put in more capacity, increasing its reservoir space, and tapping new and rising water tables through boreholes. Introducing competition into the industry would doubtless bring in the new capital needed whilst lowering prices. It would also allow experimentation and innovation. Do we really need drinking quality water pumped to our homes to clean the loo and wash the car? Would house collection systems be better for some purposes? Would two different supplies make sense in some densely populated areas, with a cheaper grey water for many purposes? The market would answer these questions if allowed to function.

To keep us drier we need government to insist on proper flood control measures if they will persist in requiring development on flood plains. Every large scheme should not only tackle its own fast run off water but should make a contribution to the backlog of capital works needed to contain and route the run off water away from the developments. The Environment Agency needs to do a better job cleaning and maintaining the flood defences it already has, and putting in place the many schemes needed to bring relief from flooding to all those badly affected this summer.

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Visiting local Post Offices before Christmas reminded me just what a mess this government has made of one of the few remaining nationalised industries. If anyone still thinks nationalisation is the answer, they would be well advised to study the Post office as an object lesson in how not to run a business. It is bad for the staff, for the customers and for taxpayers.

At a time when government worries about human carbon output, they switched the Post office from sending many of its letters and parcels by train to sending them by road. They were,apparently, unable to negotiate a contract that made sense for such a large users of the railways, with the railways where the track has recently been taken back into a form of public ownership!

Claiming to understand the importance of the large inherited network of small post offices, the government took away their main source of livelihood, the substantial counter business they used to transact for various government departments. Apparently, it is more efficient to transact these items through the for profit private banking sector, than through the nationalised postal counter network.

Their management style and the government business loss combined to create huge losses for the Post office. These were then reduced by a triple whammy for taxpayers customers and staff ?? a subsidy, big increases in the monopoly charges to carry a letter, and staff cuts with closures.

The atmosphere in the business is not good. Many of the staff resent the way they are expected to find the cost reductions the management say are necessary. The lower paid staff have to deal with customers, explaining to them the big increase in charges and the decline in service.

Customers resent the surging price of posting a letter, the move to single deliveries each day, and the likelihood that your delivery does not arrive before you leave for work. Middle ranking managers lack authority and responsibility to drive the business. They do not control their property and other assets, and they have little ability to try to increase the volume of business or try out new services.

If you take the case of my local main Post Office in Wokingham, you see a typical example of how local people are prevented from transforming the business. The Wokingham Crown Office and the sorting office are combined on the same premises in Broad Street, one of the principal streets in the town. The sorting accommodation is cramped and out of date, with some employees having to work in sheds beyond the main complex. The sorting office site is a very valuable site which could probably be redeveloped for office accommodation, freeing Post office capital to acquire a better located sorting site where vehicle access could be much easier and where there was enough decent accommodation for all staff.

The front of the building is a good looking early twentieth century structure, with room to add more counters which are much needed to deal with the growing numbers forced to use the main Post Office by the closure of smaller offices elsewhere. 2 more are scheduled in the latest cull which the Post office is currently consulting about. The users of these offices are very unhappy about the proposals. It is difficult to see how the main Office can deal with them at peak times without a major overhaul and expansion.

Unfortunately local management is not empowered to sort out the property mess and release the property potential. Capital spending permission comes from the centre, and that means it rarely if ever comes. Local management are not encouraged to try out new services that might work well in Post Offices in their area, and are not rewarded generously for increasing the revenue of the business.

If you think the only ways to raise profits are closures, higher prices, and cuts in staff numbers you end up with a very demotivated business. If you tell the staff that if they are more efficient getting around their delivery area they have to come back to base to do some other work, you do not motivate your postal workers readily or well.

You have a very old fashioned nationalised business. The irony is that it is government which is knocking the stuffing out of it. The double blow of the loss of government business and the introduction of competition means the Post Office is no longer capable of sustaining its traditional volume and range of services. The New Year will bring more closures, more price hikes, and more staff cuts.

We are witnessing one of those retail binges that characterise modern living.

The retailers play games with the public, deciding when to lower prices and offer knock out deals to attract people to the stores. The people play games with the retailers, playing hard to get until the deals on offer spawn exciting headlines.

More people now seem to leave buying what they really really want until after Christmas, reckoning they can buy it more cheaply.
Families that have lost the knack of self entertainment, bored by the vanilla viewing scheules for the holiday and by the endless repeats on TV, are inclined to venture out for some retail therapy, walking a little of the excess off around the shops.

It produces retail sales figures that become ever more difficult to interpret. Stores sales space has been expanded. The internet now takes a lot more shopping traffic. Individual sales days can see huge turnover and big footfall. Other weeks can seem poor. A few shops groups trade very wlel, others do badly.

The likelihood is that the retail sales will slow after the Christmas and January sales have seen a last consumer fling. People’s incomes are under pressure, as higher mortgage costs kick in for some, and higher taxes and higher petrol, heating and food bills for all. It is going to be more difficult arranging the personal loan or the bigger mortgage than it has been for decade.

The credit crunch has not gone away. The banks should be at their least helpful to customers wanting to borrow ahead of their year ends. When they relax a little it will still be at lower levels of advances that peolpe have been used to. Valuers will become much more cautious about the values of properties when assessing their worth to support loans.

This Christmas and New Year sees more people than ever taking a long break from the office. The economy may weaken over the turn of 2008, and we may find the going gets tougher in the new year.

It is traditional at this time of year for commentators to misrepseresent the Christmas story, urging more social housing to deal with the problem of homelessness.

If they read the bible story more carefully, they would see it was not a housing shortage but a hotel bedroom shortage that caused the trouble. This shortage had been brought on by a nasty government, forcing people to travel away from their homes to the large towns and cities to register and to pay a tax. It was some kind of combination of an an early forerunner of ID cards with a poll tax.

As far as we know Joseph had a home,and turned to a home in Nazareth after the stay in Egypt, where they successfully evaded the massacre of the innocents ordered by Herod.

The New testament story is interwoven with interesting questions of how Jesus should relate to the kings on earth. His advice of render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s was wise indeed. It recognised the brutal reality of Roman power, whilst reassuring people there were other values that the temporal power could not overcome in the free minds of men.

Happy Christmas to all my readers.
Politics and comment has been left aside for the day.

The message of Christmas, that love can conquer hatred and vengeance, is a powerful and attractive one to people of all creeds and of none. Fear comes of hatred and begets more hatred.

This UK government seems to be rooted in fear – fear of the reactions of people, fear of England, fear of the people they call middle Englanders, fear of terrorism, fear of being blamed, fear of the truth coming out when they make mistakes. It lashes out in a less brutal way than Herod, ordering more and more controls over the rest of us, and centralising more and more information about us in the hope they can use it to exert their will and protect themselves. It tries to terrify the rest of us into thinking we do need to surrender our freedoms because of some threat or other.

Fear leads to authoritarian responses. It leads to the wish to micromanage and control everyone and everything. The government pursues secrecy, coming to regard public information as it own bank account, to be spent only when it sees fit in ways it wishes to. Otherwise it is a miser with public information, hoarding it in case it falls into the "wrong hands". Paradoxically, its incompetence at times means the legitimately private part of this information does spill into the wrong hands on a regular but unpredictable basis.

Better government trusts people more. It lets them make more decisions for themselves. It does not constantly challenge their lifestyles and hector them to change the way they eat, look, live or think. It tries to do a sensible number of things well, sets out what it is doing, and is honest and apologetic when it makes a mistake. It leads by example and incentive, more than by additional regulation and penal tax.

It is difficult to govern well if you do not like many of the people you are governing, or think them wrong about many of the issues that matter. This government is learning the hard way, that if you take on the Briths people and try to make them something they do not want to be, you just antagonise them. Try liking them, warts and all, and you might find there is less to fear.

Today we learn that various NHS trusts have lost data concerning their patients.

We seem to be living in a surreal world, where the government spins out the stories about data loss, to try to drive the stories about house price collapses, mortgage shortages, the credit crunch, the black hole of Northern Rock, overborrowing and the balance of payments off the front pages.

Or maybe, for once, they have just lost control of the media. Harriet Harman’s attempt to get a debate going over cash for sex may have been their last counter spin ploy, to change the media weather. It is unusual – but not suprising with this government – to see a very senior member debating an issue in a "personal capacity" to avoid committing the government she is meant to represent and defend.

It is not surpising that the NHS like much of the rest of the public sector under Labour has been casual with our data. The whole government is casual or mismanaged from the top.

When we are allowed to cross examine them, Ministers are on the whole poorly briefed, and lack detailed control over their policies and their departments.

This is a government which never prepared itself to run anything properly. It was born of spin and will die from spin. In opposition they honed their skills at generating stories . They were an effective, hard hitting opposition, always willing to blame the government for anything that went wrong, and always able to put the worst construction on events.

In government they have carried on in a similar way, seeing their role as being to expose and destroy Conservative policy, ideas and party management as if they were still the opposition. They spend too much time on this, and too little time discharging the responsibilities of high office.

When I was sent by mistake a copy of a Cabinet Minister’s diary I could not help but notice when I was trying to find out whose it was and where to send it back to how little there was in it. There were the usual political and constituency meetings you would expect, but there was no morning to night bookings for meetings with officials to review and improve administration of the departments policies, and no rash of meetings with users of their services and those affected by their regulation to see if it was working properly. I remember as a Minister these dominated in my diary.

Too many of these ministers define their jobs in relation to media interviews and the opposition. They should start defining their jobs in relation to the public. It is not easy providing a good service with the large empires they have built up. All of them should spend more time with their departments getting things right. They should start by sending a clear message from the top,that the public matters and their data is important. They then have to have endless meetings to ensure that message is taken to every part of their empires, and reflected in operating procedures that will keep the data safe and lead to the public being better served.

Until they do so, the public will conclude that we do not matter to this government. We are necessary as a source of money to pay for the poor performance. We are the people they intend to regulate out of freedom. We are not valued customers of the state, so keeping our data secure is not a high priority.