AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN CORNWALL

I have already looked at Labour’s failure on child poverty. Now another important and dismal failure: housing waiting lists. On 1 April 1997 there were 8 124 households on the public housing waiting lists for housing in Cornwall. In 2008 there were 17 728. The figures are here and the explanatory notes should be read, especially note 1.

This increase is not unique to Cornwall; there are increases across England. It isn’t down to second homes, or empty houses, or the increase in household formation, or any of the litany of excuses: it is at bottom a failure to build enough houses for rent and purchase that local people can afford, a failure by a government in effect indifferent to such housing and lacking the resolve to push for it, and councils timid about nimby ire. Public housing has been neglected by the Labour government. The numbers being built are pitiful. There has been a lack of will, a failure of determination, much talk and few houses. Is housing and child poverty the “failure that topples all our success”?

Finance for affordable housing is difficult and there has been a notable lack of imagination in realising new schemes for making land acquisition and building and rent and purchase feasible. There has been insufficient will. The government should think of letting councils keep the housing receipts to finance the building of new houses.

Why does it matter?

People need houses to rent and to buy at a price they can afford. Put aside for the moment notions of fair play and social justice and even interdependency, it’s in our own interests to ensure people have a roof over their heads. People more easily believe they have a stake in their community and are less alienated from society and more socially minded if they have decent place to live. It pays us to ensure people are housed well. Children, the people who will work tomorrow and create the wealth and pay the taxes for our pensions and health service and roads, deserve better than third rate, insecure accommodation. They have the best chance of flourishing and growing up straight in a loving and stable home with a sense of being important to their family and their society. A decent, permanent house is part of that. It pays us to ensure children have a decent house to grow up in.

A decent place to live is also necessary ground for an autonomous life, a resource and right of positive freedom. People do not become independent, rational, self-realisers without the means to education and health and housing. For most of us society makes possible the circumstances wherein we might live with independence and dignity.

Affordable houses and child and adult poverty: key matters where Labour has let us down and where Conservatives are unlikely to seriously try to succeed.

We mustn’t give up in Cornwall or anywhere on building much more affordable housing. In Cornwall we should explore whether the new council should seek to build and own some housing; who provides isn’t a question of dogmatism but of what mix delivers best for people in need of a home. We mustn’t abandon those local people struggling to get a house. There has to be more determination and imaginative intelligence and I hope that the government even at this late time and the new unitary council will have those in spades, though the latter has set a cautious and unchallenging target.
_________________________________________________________

“a failure that topples all our success”: John Steinbeck The grapes of wrath

_________________________________________________________

CORNWALL ELECTION RESULTS 2009

I have merged the posts on the EU and unitary election results for Cornwall

EU PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN CORNWALL 4 June 2009

The EU electorate in Cornwall was about 409 000 and the turnout in these elections was about 41 percent. There were six seats to be filled from the southwest.

These are the number of EU seats won in the southwest region, the number of candidates in the southwest region, the proportion of the total votes cast in Cornwall (including rejected votes), and votes cast in Cornwall (not votes in the southwest region as a whole):

Conservatives 3 southwest UK seats, 27.6 percent of the Cornwall EU vote, 6 candidates in the southwest, 46 589 votes in Cornwall

UKIP 2 southwest UK seats, 23.6 percent, 6 candidates, 39 954 votes in Cornwall

Liberal Democrats 1 southwest UK seat, 17.4 percent, 6 candidates, 29 436 votes in Cornwall

Greens 7.9 percent, six candidates, 13 361 votes in Cornwall

Mebyon Kernow 6.8 percent, 6 candidates, 11 534 votes in Cornwall

Labour 5.0 percent, 6 candidates, 8483 votes in Cornwall

BNP 3.0 percent, 6 candidates, 5118 votes in Cornwall in Cornwall

English Democrats 1.1 percent, 6 candidates, 1781 votes

Others (eight groups plus one independent) 6.5 percent, 11 071 votes in Cornwall

In the thirty three seats MK contested in the unitary elections it got a mean average of 16 percent of the votes cast in the ward; on the Isles of Scilly MK got 39 votes, 4 percent of the total EU vote.

The EU candidates who stood are listed in this post of 21 May 2009 which also links to a list of the unitary candidates.

CORNWALL UNITARY COUNCIL ELECTION RESULTS 4 June 2009

For the 4 June 2009 unitary council election the full results for each seat are here.

The Cornwall unitary electorate is about 412 000 and the turnout was 41 percent. There are 123 seats on the new council which replaces the county council and six district councils. The unitary Cornwall Council results are:

Conservatives 50 seats won on the unitary council, 34 percent of the total unitary vote, 123 candidates stood, 57 115 votes in total

Liberal Democrats 38 seats, 29 percent, 119 candidates, 48 187 votes

Independents* 32 seats, 24 percent, 112 candidates, 39 807 votes

Mebyon Kernow (MK) 3 seats, 4 percent, 33 candidates, 7290 votes

These parties did not win any seats:

UKIP 4 percent, 28 candidates, 6350 votes

Labour 3 percent, 60 candidates, 5698 votes

Greens 2 percent, 16 candidates, 3139 votes

Liberals 0.6 percent, 9 candidates, 945 votes

BNP 0.2 percent, 4 candidates, 363 votes

English Democrats 0.05 percent, 1 candidate, 81 votes

* I have included in the Independents both candidates who described themselves as Independent on the ballot paper and the candidates who did not put any political description on the ballot paper.

The number of seats a party contests influences it share of the total vote and thus if a party contests only a few seats its share of the total vote of all seats is perhaps misleading. However, I think parties by and large contest seats which they think are most favourable to them and for which they have candidates; this is an indication of the strength and health of the party in Cornwall. The proportion of votes a smaller party wins in the seats it chooses to contest cannot be extrapolated to uncontested seats; such an extrapolation is arithmetically invalid and politically not sensible, and in any case would be an average of proportions that much vary among those seats.

Labour sinks

For Labour the Cornwall unitary elections were a catastrophe. It won less than a fifth of the votes it got in the last county elections and its mean average vote per seat was ninety five compared with 693 in the last county elections. It contested sixty unitary seats and in seven-tenths of those it polled fewer than a hundred votes. These figures suggest it spread itself far too thinly for its present intrinsic strength and it would have fared better if it had focussed hard on its few possibly winnable seats. Labour will not recover easily in Cornwall from this disastrous result.

Mebyon Kernow stands still

In the Cornwall unitary elections Mebyon Kernow (MK) has not advanced on the immediate past though the number of MK candidates has increased absolutely and proportionately.

MK had no county councillors and seven elected district councillors out of a grand total of 331 before these elections: it now has a pro rata three on the unitary council. It won 7290 votes in these unitary elections; in the last county council elections it won 9421 votes and in the last district council elections 8919 votes (not all district seats were up for election in Cornwall as in one of the districts, Penwith, only a third were so the MK district votes can be reasonably likened to the county votes). The mean average votes in each seat MK contested are: county 523, district 372, unitary 221: these figures suggest that MK has, like Labour, overstretched itself this year.

The MK leader, Dick Cole, polled 927 votes, 78 percent of the total vote, in his unitary ward, a very impressive result.

_____________________________________________
Also see the post How has MK done in the 2009 elections?

____________________________________________

VORSPRUNG CORNWALL 5

I shall post here continuing good news for Cornwall, developments which will positively help the people of Cornwall and the local economy and everyday lives. Everyone who wants the people of Cornwall to succeed in the modern world will welcome them. This post covers the first half of 2009. Vorsprung Cornwall 1 and 2 cover 2007 and Vorsprung Cornwall 3 and 4 cover 2008.

* The claimant count figures for 14 May 2009 show a fall in Cornwall to 8847. This is the number claiming jobseekers allowance and is the usual quoted measure of unemployment (there are other figures for unemployment). The drop is welcome, especially as unemployment is rising in Britain, though perhaps in Cornwall we are now in the weeks of seasonal work. (17 June 2009)

* The Southwest regional development agency (SWRDA), established in 1999, has announced its budget plans for the next two years, 2009-2011, after having its money cut by the recession. Cornwall is doing very well indeed from the new SWRDA plans. About £52.2 million is available for capital projects in the county, much the largest share of any of the SWRDA areas. Of course, Cornwall also has around £415 million EU Convergence Program money available for viable projects 2007-2013.

A list of the Cornwall projects supported by the SWRDA is given here. A briefing by the SWRDA is here. (9 June 2009)

* Way back in 1997 the Labour government promised to end mixed-sex wards and facilities in hospitals. It has been very slow progress. This January the government acted decisively to settle its promise throughout the country this year; and in April the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust (RCHT) was granted £750 000 from the Department of Health’s privacy and dignity program for its plans to end any mixed wards and facilities in its three hospitals at Treliske, Hayle, and Penzance. For patients in Cornwall that is excellent news.

* At the urging of the government, doctors (GPs) have been extending the opening hours of their practices. This is a progressive move which makes consultation easier for people who work in the day and cannot easily get time off, and for their employers and work colleagues too. The Department of Health has released the figures for the incidence of extended hours in primary care trusts, including the Cornwall and Isle of Scilly (CIOSPCT) one: in March sixty eight of the seventy GP practices in CIOSPCT were operating extended hours, that is 97.1 percent of the practices. This is much above the England average, 73.5 percent. The details are here. (April 2009)

* Since February 2007 the Vorsprung Cornwall posts here have been crying up the positive concrete things happening in Cornwall. Now a new project, Confident Cornwall, has been set up by others, supported by the local newspapers and business groups. It is to “showcase the good news” about Cornwall. This is excellent news. There is much to celebrate in Cornwall. (March 2009)

* There are plans to turn the site of Glasney College, a medieval Christian monastery at Penryn, into a garden, thus preserving the monastic ruins which are below the surface. The monastery was demolished during the religious reforms of Henry VIII. A range of facilities, such as arts and crafts, is possible at the garden. (12 March 2009)

* Small businesses in construction Cornwall, plumbers and electricians for example, have been helped by the government’s decision to bring forward £6.889 million of spending in schools from 2010/11 to this year, 2009/10. This is part of a total of £919 million spending brought forward for schools in England to help defeat the effects of the recession.

It’s good news for Cornwall businesses and for schools, though the money will be deducted from 2010/11 school allocations. It is spending brought forward not additional spending.

The education department explains it here and there is a list of which education authorities get what here. (4 March 2009)

* St Michael’s hospital at Hayle, part of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust (RCHT), is to undergo a £6 million renewal. As part of that there will be two new operating theatres for breast surgery and orthopedics and these will be the largest and most up-to-date in the RCHT. This is excellent news for the NHS in Cornwall and for patients. See here for more details. (17 January 2009). The two new operating theatres are funded by the national Department of Health through the exceptional public dividend capital scheme. (Hansard 23 March 2009 column 162W).

* Let me begin the new year with a hopeful and positive report in today’s Western Morning News. The Peninsular Medical School is looking to establish a major research institute on the environment and health at Treliske, Truro. EU funds are being sought and jobs for locals and work for local businesses will follow. (1 January 2009)

KICKING PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE DOWN

Andrew George, the Libdem MP for St Ives, has signed Early Day Motion (EDM) 1576 of 2 June 2009 in support of the report Hung up — the cost of calling government from a mobile phone from Leeds Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB).

I congratulate Leeds CAB on their report, direct and concrete, detailing the problems, showing solutions. I warmly commend Andrew George for signing the supportive EDM. This is an issue which also affects people in Cornwall.

The report is a sorry tale of government ineptitude and failure to adapt to changed circumstances rather than government raw callousness. It is a problem that can be readily solved.

The costs of ringing government help lines from a mobile phone are high; at present free and cheap government department numbers are not available for mobiles. Yet mobiles are the only phones that many vulnerable and poor people have.

The only way of contacting many government services is by phone.

This results in some people with mobiles not claiming benefits they are entitled to. The folly of the present arrangements is best seen in that it costs desperate people dearly to ring the government’s crisis loan help number. This is kicking people when they are down. This is making life more difficult for people in difficulties.

There is a solution through the government negotiating with the mobile phone companies to make 0800 numbers for selected government services, such as the crisis loans service, free on mobiles, if necessary through the Telephone Helpline Association scheme (0800 numbers are free on landlines but not usually on mobile phones).

Here is a problem. Here are vulnerable people needing help. Here is a solution. Here is a government…Ah, how will that sentence end?

______________________________________________________
EDM 1576 is here.

There is an article about this in the Observer for 14 June 2009.

_______________________________________________________

HOW HAS MK DONE IN THE 2009 ELECTIONS?

This is a summary of MK’s record in recent local and EU elections:

2004 COUNTY: 9421 votes, no seats, 3 percent of the vote
2007 DISTRICT: 8919 votes, 7 seats, 4 percent of the vote
2009 UNITARY: 7290 votes, 3 seats, 4 percent of the vote

2009 EU 11 534 votes, no seats, 7 percent of the vote

The % number is the percentage of the total vote; for the EU election this is the total vote in Cornwall.

Unitary election
In local elections MK has made no progress. Its 2009 unitary council vote is less though it put up more candidates than in the earlier years. In terms of votes per MK candidate the figures are county 523, district 372, unitary 221 which suggest that it overstretched itself this year. MK had seven elected councillors out of 331 county and district ones before the 4 June election and after the election it has three elected out of 123 unitary councillors; pro rata it has stood still. MK is primarily a party which seeks a devolved Cornwall, which focuses on the local rather than the transnational. Cornwall and its government is MK’s speciality and here it has not advanced. Even in its most propitious seats, the seats it contested, voters in Cornwall largely rejected MK as their choice for governing the county and MK got an absolute majority of the votes in only two of the 123 seats. It is reasonable to assume that in rejecting MK the people of Cornwall are rejecting its version of concern for Cornwall, its nationalism, and choosing other versions of concern. MK does not speak for Cornwall.

EU election
The turnout in Cornwall was similar in both the unitary and the EU elections. What we are looking at is a shift, a reassignment, from Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Independent unitary voters to different parties in the EU election. In the EU elections MK received more votes than in the unitary election; so did the BNP, English Democrat, Green, Labour, and UKIP parties. UKIP polled six times as many EU votes in Cornwall as it did unitary votes, presumably because its focus is on the EU rather than local government. Arithmetically, MK received fewer ‘extra’ EU votes than either UKIP, or the Greens, or the BNP.

MK also received EU votes outside Cornwall — 63 in Tewkesbury and four hundred in Wiltshire, for example. I think most of these were general protest votes rather than outposts of Cornish nationalism.

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

I think we can be clear about the unitary vote: people chose the candidate or the party they preferred to see running Cornwall and that was overwhelmingly not MK.

The EU vote is more problematic. The increased UKIP and decreased Libdem EU votes seem clear as those two parties are seen to have distinctive views on the European Union. The rise in the EU votes of the other parties cannot be easily separated from the fact that votes were available for reassignment as it were and perhaps the extra EU votes are best seen as representing secondary not core support.

In short, Cornwall rejected MK very clearly and MK did not advance on its previous position. It will be interesting to see how MK does in next year’s parliamentary election when they contest all six seats in Cornwall. Historically, it does very poorly in these elections.

________________________________________________________

Now here, you see…Lewis CARROLL Through the looking glass, chapter 2 (the Red Queen to Alice)

See also the post Cornwall election results 2009

THE C-WORD

Original post 15 May 2008

Julia Goldsworthy, the Libdem MP for Falmouth and Camborne, recently presented a petition to parliament looking for Facebook to recognise Cornwall as a networking region (Hansard 14 May 2008, column 1510). I have no interest in the ins and outs of this and I cannot even fret about the silliness of a petition which urges a government minister to “put pressure on the owners” of a private company to reorganise its geography.

What does interest me is that in introducing the petition to the Commons Julia Goldsworthy used the c-word and called Cornwall a “county.”

Can you hear the Cornish nationalist howls? It is de rigueur among many nationalists not to refer to Cornwall as a county; they earnestly say duchy or region. It is a matter of cpc, cornat political correctness, to avoid the c-word. I am agreeably amused to hear republican nationalists deliberately call Cornwall a duchy.

Incidentally, the topic in the Commons straight after Goldsworthy’s Cornwall Facebook petition was to do with the sufferers from muscular dystrophy.

May I suggest a slight amusement? Look at the things Cornwall MPs say and see how they deal with the c-word. Do they say county or use some other word or circumlocution? Is there a pattern? Who never says county?

Addition 10 June 2009

In a recent interesting debate, which he initiated and aspects of which I shall discuss in another post, on the relationship of central, regional, and local government, Andrew George, Libdem MP for St Ives, sensibly used the word “county” five times to describe the territory of Cornwall. (Hansard 3 June 2009 columns 355-356.)

__________________________________________________________

ELECTION SNIPPETS

Original post 31 May 2009
Some candidates have been accidentally missed off the 4 June ballots sent out to postal voters for the unitary council. A handful of candidates missed off apparently — the exact number seems unclear but is probably in single figures — and it is those with names that put them at the bottom alphabetically that have been lost. No one seems to know for sure how many postal ballot papers are affected though it looks like only a few and it isn’t every postal ballot paper in the affected wards. New ballot papers have been sent out to those known to be affected but I don’t know what happens if some people have already used the defective ones. In future every candidate should change his name to Aaron Aardvark.

A more positive story is that the West Briton and the Cornishman, weekly papers for central and west Cornwall, have published summaries of the manifestos from the main parties for the unitary council election; and I expect their sister paper in east Cornwall has too. Yes, Mebyon Kernow’s there and has rightly been on local radio and television so no more whingeing about lack of media publicity.

First addition
What will be another memorable incident of the elections is a leaflet which describes a candidate offensively as a “greasy haired twat.” The leaflet apparently came from the Liberal Democrats whose candidate says she never saw or approved it and whose agent has said the leaflet was not authorised by him and has apologised to the other candidate and the recipient voters and is investigating the circumstances of the leaflet’s birth. We shall perhaps know eventually exactly who wrote it and printed it and the attendant circumstances. The BBC has the story here. It will be interesting to see if there is any discernible effect upon the votes of the two candidates.

So will these be the lost candidates election or the swearing election?

Second addition
Oh dear, more chaos, hiccups, cock-ups. Since I began this post a few days ago electoral life here has worsened. The BBC reports that some voters in Cornwall haven’t yet received their postal ballots — it’s now Tuesday 2 June and the election is on the 4th. Apparently the council will send ballot papers to people by courier if necessary. A couple holidaying in Norfolk will get theirs by courier because they didn’t receive them in Cornwall time.

So now it’s the lost candidates or swearing or lost ballot papers election.

DON’T MENTION THE FORMULA

Among the silenda and tacenda of Cornish nationalism is the redistribution of UK taxes to public expenditure among the four countries of Britain. The allocation of public expenditure per capita benefits the three devolved countries more than England.

Barnett Formula

The vehicle for the redistribution of collected taxes is known as the Barnett Formula, which I have discussed before. This formula now seems to be on the ropes.

A House of Lords committee has been examining the formula since last December and a House of Commons committee has commented on it as part of a completed examination of the working of devolution: Lords, Barnett Formula Select Committee ; Commons, Justice Select Committee . The Commons committee have looked at asymmetric devolution and suggestions for territorial powers for England.

Most people giving evidence seem unhappy with Barnett, mainly because it is largely based on the population numbers of the countries of Britain rather than on people’s needs for public services, though there are also challenges to the degree that tax collection and, more specially, spending are centralised in Britain. The consistently larger share to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as against England (though not as against London), as measured by per head spending, is also increasingly challenged as unfair. The Commons committee has declared that “the Barnett Formula is no longer fit for purpose” and is “overdue for reform”.

The latest per head annual public spending figures (2007/08) due to the formula are: Northern Ireland £9789, Scotland £9179, Wales £8577, England £7535. (Source: Public expenditure statistical analyses (PESA) HM Treasury Table 9.2 in chapter 9).

Those higher figures are the primary cause of what is seen as the better provision of public services in Britain outside England. The Taxpayers Alliance (TPA) has estimated the money total of the “excess” spending in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1985/86 to 2007/08 is about £202 billion: see ( Unequal shares: the Barnett Formula (2008) . Incidentally, in the same document the TPA has also said that the North Sea oil revenues do not balance out the higher Scotland allocation: only in five of the last twenty three years has the revenue exceeded the excess allocation.

The Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) makes the reasonable point in its evidence to the Lords committee that per head comparisons, while important, do not take into account the effect of differing prices and earnings in different places and their consequent effect on the differing costs of providing the same level of services in different places.

CEBR also draws attention to another and damaging aspect: the share of public expenditure as a share of an area’s GDP. Those figures also show that Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have a much higher share of their GDP on public spending than England. The large share taken up by public spending probably discourages enterprise by creating a world in which the ready assumption is to look to the public rather than the private to provide services. Additionally, in areas with higher GDP, with in general higher incomes (that is, areas in southern England), public services tend to be poorly funded. In such areas the poorest, dependent on public services, are seriously adversely affected.

All in all, the Barnett Formula is discredited, irrationally based on population numbers not need, and consistently discriminating financially against people in England outside London. However, London is a nett contributor to the UK: CEBR estimates its subsidy to the rest of Britain in 2007 was about £30 billion, though falling significantly as the recession bites.

However discredited the present formula is, there are political difficulties in changing it. Labour in the UK is increasingly dependent on votes in Scotland and Wales; the Conservatives wish to prosper in Scotland and Wales and are reallied to the unionists in Northern Ireland; they (and the Liberal Democrats) are reluctant to do anything that could be presented as reducing help or subsidies to those places and thus losing votes in them. Of course, this assumes that a rejigged allocation based on need, for example, would reduce the flow; it might increase it as some have argued. However, allocations over large areas, even if based on need, will always contain unfairness because need very much varies within countries and regions as well as between them.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is another part of the silenda. Richard Murphy’s Tax Research UK blog has been arguing that the Isle of Man is subsidised by taxpayers in the UK. The post of 18 May 2009 is headed “Isle of Man costs UK at least £1.5 billion a year” and says Britain provides a “heavy subsidy” to Man. The post from Murphy of 21 May at 1113 hours gives a short and straightforward account of his argument. I think the Isle of Man and the British government have a case to answer.

Cornwall

Of course, there is wailing, essentially unjustified, about the share that public services in Cornwall get relative to other parts of England, but the wailers never seem to ask about the larger redistribution among the four countries of Britain. Why is that? It is time that Cornish nationalism faced the formula.

SHAMEFUL FAILURE

The Labour government has failed on child poverty. It will not meet its target of halving it by next year and the target to abolish it by 2020 will sink. The numbers of children in poverty actually went up in 2007/08, the last year for which figures are available.

Some good work has been done, especially before 2005, as Labour half-heartedly tackled the leftover misery of an uncivilised version of Toryism which doubled the number of children in poverty after 1979. Labour had to balance on one hand the need to encourage enterprise and justly enable the reward of achievement and on the other hand the need to redistribute wealth to help those with life’s short straw. That takes skill and resolve and the disagreeable truth is that the Labour government lacked them. It also lacked the courage to challenge the self-absorbed to see beyond themselves and see a society; and it did not understand, for all the chatter of a moral compass and religion, the difference between rewarding success and indulging greed.

It didn’t have to be like this. There has been enough money since 1997 to achieve the noble ambition. Yes, it might well be impossible to persuade most of the wealthy that the children of the poor deserve a break. It takes political and moral skill and determination to persuade middling workers, who are the vast majority and who often struggle themselves, that children in poverty should be a major priority, that there is a bill that must be paid. It takes courage to make them a priority. A supine Labour government wasn’t up to the task.

At the same time we learn that income inequality, different from but related to poverty, is at its highest since the 1960s; yes, higher than when the Thatcher Tory government deregulated and encouraged me-now greed and set Britain on the course to the present financial miasma. The Gini coefficient is at its highest since records began. Three terms of Labour are ending like this with only the minimum wage and perhaps Sure Start as lights in the dark, though the latest increase in the wage is derisory.

This government was supposed to be about the many not the few, about opening up the possibilities of life for everyone, about helping the vulnerable. However, overshadowing the good and hard work of the party and its councillors and candidates in Cornwall and locally elsewhere, Labour 1997-2009/10 will be remembered for timidity, failures, and a bathplug. I am vastly disappointed.

Note on the mandatory minimum wage

From October the mandatory national minimum wage will be £5.80 an hour for people aged twenty two and over, an increase of 7p an hour over the October 2008 rate. This is the smallest money increase since the wage began in 1999 and is a 1.2 percent increase. For people aged 18-22 it will be £4.83, an increase of 6p an hour, and for people aged 16-17 it will be £3.57, an increase of 4p an hour. The recommendation of the Low Pay Commission that people over twenty one (rather than twenty two) should be entitled to the full wage will be implemented from October 2010, after the next general election. See Hansard 12 May 2009 column 40WS.

Related post: Work for peanuts in Cornwall . The second reading of the Tory bill is due 12 June 2009.
____________________________________________

WHO WOULD PAY FOR DEVOLVED CORNISH WATER?

Water bills in the southwest were debated in the House of Commons the other day. The well-known problems were once more aired: people in the southwest are paying larger bills than comparable others across England because we pay for the costs of cleaning the bathing waters here. The favoured local answer was once more aired: the beaches and bathing waters are national assets and their cost should be shared across England not met only by people in the southwest. The minister, responding, set out the government’s view: “fair, affordable, and cost-reflective water charging that incentivises environmentally responsible behaviour while protecting vulnerable groups” (Hansard 19 May 2009 column 1479). We can all agree with that aim. How we achieve that aim is challenging, as he went on to point out. There is an inquiry under way into charging by Anna Walker which reports soon and might produce answers. I think we should now await the Walker review and I do not understand the point of this Commons debate at this stage.

However, my reason for posting this is not the subject, which I have discussed before. As I have said, let’s wait for the Walker report on it.

No, this post is to point out that advocates of Cornish devolution/independence have questions to answer:

How do they see an independent or semi-independent or devolved Cornwall meeting ever-higher EU water standards and paying the costs?

Will the costs in Cornwall be met only by people in Cornwall?

Or will the historic and sacred borders of Cornwall dissolve and costly water and sewerage make us part of England again with people who either live in the rest of the southwest or live even farther away and who never come here paying towards cleaning Cornwall bathing waters?

It would surely be unacceptable if Cornish devolution/independence meant decision-making in Cornwall but not meeting the costs from within Cornwall, calling the tune but not paying the piper.