Category: Uncategorized

There is discussion of a new law to limit the right to strike in key public services, just as armed  service personnel agree not to strike when they join up. If the government thinks such a law would be helpful they should have used some of the underused Parliamentary time this November and December to put one in. They  did not,  meaning such a law cannot now have an impact for current rounds of Christmas and New Year strikes.

My view is Ministers need to engage more with the Chief Executives and senior officials who are meant to manage these  matters. Ministers direct, managers manage. Ministers set policies. CEOs and senior officials implement them. Ministers have made clear they want to stop the flow of illegal migrants across the Channel. They have stated they want the health backlogs down. They want  faster turnaround of  asylum claims, of passport renewals, of probate filings and many more other admin processes connected to licences, taxes and benefits.

They have in many cases authorised large increases in spending and given approval to a major expansion of state employment since 2019. Now they must ask where is all the money going? Why isnt there more service from the extra people and cash?  When will their aims be met?

It looks as if the independent body and quango model lets us down badly. It also is clear Ministers are having to involve themselves  much more in running departments if they want  to get things done. I will write more about the role of public sector well paid CEOs and why we do not  get better results. All too often Ministers agree an aim only to discover a quango is doing the opposite and makes it difficult for a Minister to get through a desired change of policy.

Rt Hon Sir John Redwood MP (Wokingham) (Con): I entirely agree with that passionate defence of localism by Rachael Maskell. Local must mean local and we do not want people in the BBC in London imposing on us their views on how our local radio should be conducted and how big our locality should be. I see behind the centralised planning at the BBC a distorted version of what our constitution should look like within the United Kingdom, and a wish to impose that—against the clear majority wishes of people, whenever they have been asked about these subjects in referendums and elections.

It is not just that the BBC wishes to create phony regional groupings instead of truly local radio, but that it has a very distorted view of devolution. The BBC seems to be an enthusiast for devolution to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but it does not even know England exists. It always wants lopsided devolution. One of the four important constituent parts of the United Kingdom is scarcely ever mentioned; it is never suggested it should have any powers or right to self-government and there is no engagement with English issues on BBC radio in the way that there is a clear engagement with Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland issues. That causes enormous resentment.

In my own case, local radio is organised at the county level, at Radio Berkshire. That makes sense, because it is an area that we can recognise and there is some loyalty to our royal and ancient county. Many people now do not know that it had its borders artificially compressed in a local government reorganisation some 50 years ago, under a Conservative Government that I think made some mistakes. The county retains an enormous amount of goodwill and residual loyalty, and people are very happy for our local radio to be organised at that scale. If people had real choice, however, I think Wokingham would rather have a different radio from Reading, and I think we would probably rather have a different radio from Windsor, because we have a different set of issues. But we accept that there have to be some compromises because talented people need to be appointed and paid wages, and that cannot be done to a sensible budget at very local levels.

I urge the BBC to look in the mirror and understand why, in many respects, it is getting so out of touch with its audiences. It has a very narrow range of views and issues that it will allow people to discuss, and it has a particularly warped perspective on how we feel about our areas and what our loyalties belong to. I am allowed to express views from time to time on BBC Radio Berkshire. It does not put me through the ordeal of a pre-interview to find out whether my views are acceptable and fit its caricature of a Conservative in the way that nearly always happens if national radio is thinking of interviewing me. Then, I always have the double interview, and I quite often fail the first interview test because my views are clearly too interesting or unacceptable, or do not fit the caricature that the radio wishes to put into its particular drama. So people are spared my voice on radio and I have more free time, which is perhaps a wonderful outcome from those events.

I do not find that my local radio quite plots the drama as strongly as national BBC radio and television. I am very grateful for that because I think that good, independent broadcasting of the kind that the BBC says it believes in should allow people of decent views—not extremists who want to break the law, or racists—to conduct civilised conversations and debates through the medium of the BBC. But all too often, that is truncated or impossible because of the way in which the editors operate and their pre-conceived set of views, about which they wish to create some kind of drama.

Colleagues have made extremely good points, which I will emphasise, about the treatment of staff and the way these kinds of proposals are planned. If the BBC wishes to run truly local services, it must listen to us—the local people and the local people’s representatives—and treat its staff well, and be aware that they have given good service in the past and should be taken on a journey of change that makes sense for them as well as for the BBC. This all looks rather top-down, abrupt and unpleasant. Successful organisations understand that their own journeys, evolving as institutions, are best conducted if, at the same time, they allow good journeys for the staff who give them loyal service. That does not seem to be happening in this case.

I will spare you a bit of time, Madam Deputy Speaker—I have made the main points that I wished to make. The BBC needs to be more open to a wider range of views. If it wants to be local, it has to ask us what local means.

I have pursued the issue of compensation for Postal Managers who were wrongly accused when the new computer system failed to account properly for their businesses. The letter beneath gives us the latest update on compensation, where I have urged the government to be generous and get these matters settled:

 

Dear Colleague,

POST OFFICE: COMPENSATION FOR HORIZON SCANDAL

The Post Office Horizon scandal, which began over 20 years ago, has had a devastating impact on the lives of many postmasters. Starting in the late 1990s, the Post Office began installing Horizon accounting software, but faults in the software led to shortfalls in branches’ accounts. The Post Office demanded sub-postmasters cover the shortfalls, and in many cases wrongfully prosecuted them between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting or theft.

I am writing to update you on the latest steps that the Government is taking to ensure that swift and fair compensation is made available to postmasters.

Group Litigation Order scheme

The Government wants the postmasters who exposed this scandal through the High Court Group Litigation Order case to receive similar compensation to that available to their peers. In March 2022, the Chancellor announced that further funding would be made available to deliver this compensation. On 2 September my predecessor wrote to all postmasters in the Group Litigation Order group to ask for their views about whether BEIS or the Post Office should deliver the scheme, and whether it should be organised along the lines of the Historical Shortfall Scheme or based on Alternative Dispute Resolution. In short there was very strong support for an Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme, to be delivered by BEIS. This is the route that we will follow.

The informal consultation also requested views on other issues related to the scheme. Unsurprisingly, there was considerable concern among postmasters that the scheme should be subject to properly independent input. In the light of this, we have decided to create an independent advisory Board chaired by Professor Chris Hodges, an expert in alternative dispute resolution. The membership of that Board will include Lord Arbuthnot and Rt Hon Kevan Jones MP who are recognised by colleagues across Parliament for many years of outstanding campaigning for the wronged postmasters. The advisory Board will be supported by a BEIS secretariat.

Since the consultation closed, a great deal of work has been done to develop the details of scheme, drawing on the detailed comments made in response to the consultation. I am today writing to members of the Group Litigation Order with further information about how the scheme will work.

We are now asking claimants to prepare preliminary information about their claims. In parallel, we are working to engage Alternative Dispute Resolution specialists and lawyers to deliver it. Those experts should be on board in early Spring, and at that point full claims will be submitted. I hope that compensation will start to flow before the summer, and that most cases can be resolved before the end of 2023.

We have already announced that we will meet postmasters’ reasonable legal costs in claiming under the scheme. To enable lawyers to work on preparing claims, we are today announcing details of the costs tariff for the early phases of the scheme, which have been set by independent costs draftsmen. We will shortly be inviting claimants’ lawyers to make proposals for the expert evidence which they will need. I am also pleased to say that the compensation payments will be disregarded for benefits purposes (once secondary legislation is in place).

I have placed on https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/compensation-scheme-for-group-litigation-order-case-postmasters a copy of my letter to Group Litigation Order postmasters and a number of supporting documents.

Overturned Historical Convictions

I am also pleased to provide an update on Post Office’s progress in delivering compensation to those with overturned historical convictions.

Lord Dyson considered the awards available for non-pecuniary damages, which are personal damages such as mental distress and loss of liberty, in an Early Neutral Evaluation process earlier this year. Since then, the Government has supported Post Office’s approach to deliver compensation more swiftly by settling non-pecuniary claims first using the framework established by Lord Dyson. As of 1 December, 51 claims for non-pecuniary damages have been received and 37 offers made, worth £4.7m in addition to interim payments already paid.

Regarding pecuniary damages, which are financial damages such as loss of earnings, only 8 claims have been received to date, 2 of which have been settled in full and final settlement alongside their non-pecuniary damages. Government continues to encourage Post Office to process these claims as fast as possible.

As of 1 December, 82 claims for interim compensation have been received and 77 payments made, worth £7.7m. Post Office has also identified potential cases of hardship and offered and paid further hardship payments of £100,000 to 3 postmasters. Furthermore, following the recent statutory tax exemption and Early Neutral Evaluation, Post Office decided to increase the upper limit of interim payments for all future applicants to £163,000 (from the original level of £100,000). For those claimants who received the original interim payment amount of up to £100,000, the Post Office had focussed on progressing and settling their non-pecuniary claims. However, where claimants who had received the original interim payment amount of up to £100,000 and were not able to submit a non-pecuniary claim by early December and so it is unlikely that their non-pecuniary claim would be settled by the end of the year, Post Office has offered top-up payments of £63,000.

Historical Shortfall Scheme

I am also pleased to see the progress that Post Office has made in delivering compensation to postmasters through the Historical Shortfall Scheme. As of 30 November, 93% of eligible claimants have been issues offers of compensation, totalling £70.8m.

The cases that remain are some of the most complex and the Post Office is working to process these claims as soon as possible. However, the Government recognises the fact that those claimants who are yet to receive offers or payments may have been waiting for a considerable period of time for their cases to be settled. For these reasons, the Government is pleased that the Post Office will introduce interim payments for those who have yet to receive an offer or who have chosen to dispute their offer. This will be in addition to the existing hardship payments that the Post Office has already been providing to claimants in particularly difficult circumstances.

The Government announced in October that it is providing funding to the Post Office to enable eligible late applications to be accepted into the Historical Shortfall Scheme. The Post Office is beginning to process the late claims it has received to date, and I would encourage anyone else who thinks they might be eligible to get in touch with Post Office at the earliest opportunity to discuss their claim.

Benefit Disregard

The Government is aware of the impact of the Horizon scandal on affected postmasters, resulting in significant financial hardship, including bankruptcy for some.

Many postmasters have now received compensation payments which would take them over the £16,000 capital limit, rendering them ineligible to receive means-tested benefits and reducing pension credit entitlement. This risks prolonging the impacts of the Horizon scandal on these postmasters by affecting their eligibility to apply for benefits.

We are therefore introducing a benefits disregard for all Post Office and Horizon-related compensation. Once the secondary legislation for this disregard is in place, payments received by postmasters will no longer count towards the capital limit for means-tested benefits and pension credits and will therefore not affect their eligibility to claim for these.

The Government will legislate to put this disregard in place at the earliest possible opportunity.

 

Yours ever

RT HON GRANT SHAPPS MP
Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy

It was Gordon Brown who told us once devolution was granted to Scotland Scottish nationalism would melt away. As some of us feared, instead it gave the SNP a bigger platform and more resentments to work on. They proved masterful at governing badly whilst blaming the constitutional settlement and Whitehall for all their woes. Labour failed to put devolution in during the 1970s, used their big majority to do it after 1997, and later lost countless seats in Scotland as payment for their pains.

Gordon is back again setting Labour policy on this most vexatious of political  insider questions. He wants more devolved powers for Scotland. He wishes to ignore England and make the devolution within our Union all the more lopsided. Just as the EU wiped England of their maps and tried to balkanise England into a set of unloved regions, so Gordon Brown wishes to do the same. He accepts that Labour lost the crucial referendum to set up an elected regional government in the North East and did not try again. So this time he wants to build regions up from so called partnerships between local Councils aggregating to a new region.

There is no strong regional identity in most parts of England. Exeter does not want to be governed from Bristol, Liverpool does not want to be managed by Manchester. Wokingham is variously bundled into the South East, Rest of the South East (x London), Wessex, Thames Valley, Berks,Bucks and Oxon. None of these regional groupings command our loyalty or consent. We would not vote for any of them to have governments.

People in my area belong to Wokingham Borough or to West Berks. We belong to the county of Berkshire in the country of England. We identify with Berkshire and with England without either having a government. Lop sided devolution has gone too far. Ignoring England’s views and needs is wrong. Those who say they want power devolved should listen to people’s own perceptions of their identities. The  best devolution of power is not to  new layers of government but to individuals and businesses to make more of our own decisions.

The world currently relies on fossil fuels for 80% of its energy. All the time most UK people have a gas boiler, a diesel or petrol car, eat meat and rely on  products that need plastics, steel, ceramics, cement and other components  that need plenty of energy to produce we will help create CO 2. Our choice is do we use more of our own coal, oil and gas, or import more? If we import more that will entail more CO 2 being generated worldwide to fuel the transport of products. It will mean fewer well paid jobs in the UK and less tax revenue.

Importing more fossil fuel or fossil fuel using products  is a kind of self harm, not a policy which saves the planet. Transition to a carbon free future will occur at the pace the public dictates by all our choices on what to eat, how to heat and how to travel. It is a strange argument that we should not allow onshore gas in the UK yet it is fine to import it from the USA to keep us warm. It is odd some think we  can import coal to keep the lights on but should not produce specialist coal of our own.

I am concerned about the decline in self employment and have been an opponent of the IR 35 tax treatments as amended in 2017 and 2021. I have asked what impact there has been. The figures they refer to did not seem to enlighten the issue. I have seen other figures suggesting there has been a fall of 700,000 to 4.3m in the  number self employed since 2020. I accept covid lockdowns will have had an impact on numbers,  but this also includes a period of tightening of rules to discourage self employed status. It is worrying, yet the Treasury says some of these people are still doing the same jobs under different tax arrangements. It would be good to have more informed data and analysis  as expanding self employment is an important part of building a flexible and faster growing economy. 

 

Treasury has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (92045):

Question:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many people have ceased to be self-employed since the introduction of the 2021 IR 35 rules. (92045)

Tabled on: 21 November 2022

Answer:
Victoria Atkins:

It is an anticipated outcome of the 2021 off-payroll working (IR35) reform that organisations and contractors will consider the best way for contractors to provide their services, while being compliant with tax legislation.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publish data on trends in employment. Dataset A02 NSA provides quarterly estimates of the number of self-employed individuals over the age of 16 for the period sought. On 6 September ONS officials gave evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee on changes in the number of individuals self-reporting as self-employed during the relevant period as a part of the committee’s UK Labour Supply Inquiry. That evidence stated that some part of the change in individuals self-reporting as self-employed is due to changes in how people classify themselves, without having changed the way they work.

The answer was submitted on 29 Nov 2022 at 07:58.

In his speech to the CBI Annual Conference the Prime Minister called for more innovation and better productivity advances. He is right that innovation can accelerate growth, create more better paid jobs, and raise productivity. Waves of innovation in past decades have fuelled huge advances in living standards and pay.

The government needs to use its Brexit freedoms and its powers as an important buyer of goods and services in our economy to boost the ideas that will give us greater prosperity. A more productive economy is one with higher pay and with better service.

One of the ways to raise productivity is to concentrate more activity and people in the most productive areas. The suggestions below seek to tackle that:

1. Pharmaceuticals and medicine.  Allow access to generic anonymised data about treatments and success rates in the  NHS to companies seeking to research new life saving and life enhancing treatments and medicines.  Amend the rules on the conduct of tests on new drugs and products to make them competitive with US ones, whilst ensuring strong safety protections.
2. Energy. This is an area of high value added and well paid jobs. The government accepts that oil and gas are transition fuels which will continue  to provide the bulk of the UK’s energy this decade whilst the electrical revolution develops. It should therefore use its tax policies and licencing  powers to develop more of our domestic oil and gas. Home produced produces less CO2, sparing the CO 2 generated by long distance transport for imports. It also pays a lot more tax to the UK Exchequer instead of paying huge sums in tax away for foreign governments.
3. High energy using industries like special steels and ceramics, where there can be high value added from design and specification. Suspend emissions trading which imposes a heavy extra cost on our industry making it difficult to compete against imports.
4. Defence. Spend more of the growing and substantial defence budget on UK procurement. Encourage greater UK R and D in smart weaponry, communications and cyber.
5. Nuclear. Pump prime the production of small modular nuclear reactor to gain type approval and licences, ready to mass produce for home and export markets.

I will pursue these matters, as I am concerned about how much aid we give to multinational organisations to spend for us. Having a voice at the Board table in general discussion does not mean all the aid spent will be in ways and in places we would choose, and it does raise issues over accountability for such large sums of money. Given the need to control public spending better it makes little sense to trust international organisations to spend money for us. 

 

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (92049):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what unrestricted aid funding the Government provides to international organisations. (92049)

Tabled on: 21 November 2022

Answer:
Mr Andrew Mitchell:

In 2021 £4,277 million of UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) was delivered through core contributions to multilateral organisations. This was 37.4 per cent of the total UK ODA budget.

Multilateral organisations, including the United Nations, global health and education funds, the international financial institutions and the Commonwealth are essential partners in achieving the UK’s goals. The UK uses its voice on multilateral boards to ensure decisions align with UK priorities, including how and where their funds are spent.

The answer was submitted on 29 Nov 2022 at 16:00.

 

 

 

 

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (92050):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps the Government takes to assess the suitability and value for money of (a) projects organised by and (b) grants from international organisations. (92050)

Tabled on: 21 November 2022

Answer:
Mr Andrew Mitchell:

The suitability and value for money of international organisations receiving Official Development Assistance (ODA), including the projects they organise and grants they provide, is continually assessed through FCDO annual reviews and business cases, as set out in the Department’s Programme Operating Framework.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) independently scrutinises UK ODA to international organisations to assess value for money and impact, including recent ICAI reviews of tackling fraud in multilateral organisations and of the UK’s work with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). The UK is also a member of the Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN), which carries out regular assessments of multilateral organisations.

The answer was submitted on 29 Nov 2022 at 16:01.

I am always disappointed though not surprised by the very different approaches taken by Private sector company  Chief Executives and public sector ones when being interviewed about their organisations.

The company CEO s go on to explain how well their business is doing. They  explain their passion to serve their customers better, to keep prices down and to innovate. They can manage whatever circumstances  throws at them. If they are being interviewed because something has gone wrong, they apologise and tell us how it is now being put right and will not happen again. They  do not blame their shareholders for not supplying them  enough money or giving  them the wrong instructions.They do not say the Bank manager was to blame for being too mean.

In contrast public sector CEOs often come on to tell us their service cannot manage, to say the increases in the  cash they are sent are insufficient, to say they are unable to recruit the  people they have been asked to employ. They are rarely asked why they cannot run the service better or even what they are doing to try to improve it.

We need to encourage a can do approach amongst high paid public sector CEOs who need  to grab the quality and cost problems which bedevil too many public services.

The costs of running government have escalated whilst the crucial outputs of more and better service have  not risen as we would like. I will look at why in a number of  articles.

One of the reasons is the escalation of the overhead, with more and more management and administration being recruited. Two trends this century that have spurred this process are the moves to so called independent bodies to carry out what remain as government functions, and the overlay of an increasing  number of additional objectives to meeting service needs from net zero targets through diversity targets to behavioural requirements.  These may be desirable in themselves but can become a conflicting overload or impediment to service delivery if not well managed. Carbon reduction targets for example can conflict with the policy need to maintain national energy security and to have more contract gas and electricity at affordable prices from reliable domestic suppliers.  Wanting more legal migrants to fill jobs with a more diverse workforce can lead to greater pressures on social housing and NHS services as the population grows.

The danger of the new models of government are that you can end up with three different managements all running the same bit of service. If we take the  case of NHS England, the Ministers and officials in the Department of Health have a large paybill as if they were running the service, yet they are merely monitoring and supplying resource to the large management cadres of NHS England and the other  national Health quangos. These in turn seek to influence or control the management teams of the NHS Hospital and GP trusts that actually run the service day to day. So there are three public sector layers of senior management. The NHS then contracts in a lot of its needs from the private sector, so taxpayers also end up paying for the management of drug companies, staffing agencies, private care   and pharmacies who provide some of the service.

I have  no issue with sensible buying in and contracting out for drugs, catering services, cleaning and other matters that are well established under Labour and Conservative governments and where the result is better quality and value. I do have an issue with three or four layers of management within the public sector and the contractors, increasing the costs of dealing with each other and increasing the likelihood of blurred accountability.

The idea that a quango like NHS England is an independent body free of Ministerial involvement is not even accepted by its advocates. As soon as anything goes wrong the Minister is called in and is usually blamed. The Minister is rightly held to account in Parliament for the scale of resource , the aims of the service and the success or failure in using the resource well. Rarely does Parliament summon the CEO of the quango and hold her to blame for failure to use resources well, failure to manage staff well or failure to deliver sufficient quality and quantity of care. It is so much easier for all concerned to blame the Minister and blame a lack of money, which of course suits the Opposition in Parliament . As a result we do not get the alleged advantages of independent management, but we do get plenty of extra cost from pretending some of the time that we have this independence  and  that it is better than the people in the department doing the job.