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?

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EDM 1576 is here.

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

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DARWIN DAY

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, has commendably signed a House of Commons early day motion supporting calls for 12 February, the anniversary of Charles Darwin birth, to be a public holiday, Darwin Day. The motion celebrates Darwin’s setting out the theory of evolution by natural selection and celebrates him as “one of Britain’s greatest, if not the greatest, scientific minds.”

I support the call for Darwin Day. The theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest discoveries of the human mind and enables us to make a just assessment of our place in the world and understand the common descent of all animals; and, with the work of the astronomers from Copernicus and Galileo onwards, our place in the universe.

The slogan of this blog is Eat the apple, look through the telescope. Very inadequately, here everyday struggles to be Darwin and Galileo day.

WARM FRONT IN CORNWALL

Parliamentary questions from Andrew George, the MP for St Ives, have exposed
the extra costs for people in Cornwall using the government’s national Warm Front scheme.

This provides help with paying for heating and insulation for vulnerable householders undertaken through selected installers. There’s a grant from the government but the householder has to pay towards the cost if it exceeds the grant. The scheme covers things like central heating, loft and wall insulation, and draughtproofing.

Here’s what the questions revealed.

Percentage of those helped under the scheme who had to pay something 1 June 2005-31 March 2008 (I have turned the numbers in Hansard into percentages):

St Ives 31 percent
Cornwall 29
England 20

Average contribution requested from householders helped under the Warm Front scheme in £:

St Ives constituency 1025.74
Cornwall 1018.99
England (all) 538.00

Hansard 3 July 2008 columns 1087W-1088W for percentages and 4 November 2008 columns 400W-401W for costs.

Andrew George, the MP for St Ives, raised this issue back in February. He has recently suggested that the scheme should “ make greater use of local contractors who can complete work at a cheaper rate than the centralised private management company currently in charge of the scheme.” That is a sensible proposal which would help local people and bring financial fairness to the scheme in Cornwall.

The parliamentary answers reveal unacceptable price differences. The government must look again at the working out of the scheme in Cornwall and ensure more equality.

Additamentum 15 June 2009

Matthew Taylor asked how many people over sixty had received a Warm Front grant in Cornwall: the answer is 10 681 households were helped in the eight years 2000/01-2007/08 and 1383 April 2008-January 2009 (Hansard 15 June 2009 column 128W)

TORY WATER BILLS

There was a debate in the House of Commons the other day about water usage and bills (Hansard 2 June 2008 column 614 onwards).

The main focus was on the high bills in the southwest and the especial difficulties that those on low income have in paying them. Linda Gilroy, a Labour MP from Plymouth who initiated the debate, put the context well: “too many people are struggling to pay bills that are unacceptably high. As things stand, the problem looks set to get worse.”

There was the usual nod to water meters which make people more aware of their water use and, according to Phil Woolas, the minister, reduce overall consumption by ten percent. However, I don’t see meters reducing prices as opposed to consumption in the long run as I explained in my previous water and sewerage post. Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, made the interesting point that metering benefited second-home owners by keeping their water usage bills low. Fairness is always complicated.

In the Commons there was a recital of small measures to help but no one seemed to have any effective major idea about getting to more affordable prices here (apart from the Libdem idea of a national equalisation scheme, in effect a subsidy of bills in Cornwall and the southwest by the rest of England, an idea which has its own problems as I outlined in my previous post). The (im)practicality of southwest customers breaking out of the geographic straitjacket into a genuine choice of supplier was not discussed.

I’m afraid it reminded me of HG Wells’s comment about the Fabians: piddling under the door and calling it the stream of progress. I think it’s obvious that customers in the southwest are stuffed: high bills and no choice in supplier. The problem of how to unstuff them is truly difficult. Phil Woolas said that “affordability continues to be a key concern of the government” which shows how desperately bereft of transformative ideas the government is.

Who’s to blame for our present position? Linda Gilroy put it crystal clearly when she spoke of “the botched privatisation by the Conservative government.” Indeed.

I repeat what I said before: it is time the Conservatives came up with some ideas for making better this situation that their party created. They keep very quiet about this problem and I think they aren’t going to volunteer a solution so let’s press them.

related posts

Can Cornwall’s water bills be cut? 6 June 2007

The water of affliction 2 October 2007

A SIMPLE PRINCIPLE IN CORNWALL

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, Cornwall says in the Western Morning News for 26 July 2007: “The simple principle should be established that decisions which affect one community and no other should be taken in that community and not by others outside it.” He was responding to the news that the government has accepted Cornwall county council’s proposals for a unitary council.

On the face of it, most people would agree with this localism. Local people should decide local issues not people far away who are do not know at first hand the issue and do not have to live daily with the decision. Even the European Union believes, it says, in subsidiarity, the idea that a decision should be taken at the lowest possible level of relevance and competence. There’s even a saw about the principle: The wearer knows best where the shoe pinches.

There are, however, serious difficulties with the simple principle. Let me look at a few.

(1) It is difficult to identify items which affect only “one community and no other.” Issues and decisions tend to leak all over the place. One of the arguments against English votes for English affairs is that of interdependence and consequential effect. As Cornwall, even a devolved Cornwall, would not be self-financing, all local decisions in Cornwall depend upon money from other communities, a point made by some exasperated people in England about the spending decisions of the Barnett-financed devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

Who pays the bills for local decisions? Not the locality, most cannot afford it. In a way all decisions affect everyone because everyone pays. (Actually not every adult pays; some people receive but do not give.)

I suppose we are talking about not absolute independence but the degree of independence and the degree to which that the decision impacts upon the daily life a particular community rather than others.

Whether and where to build a car park or lavatory and what fees to charge are suitable for local decision; their impact is overwhelmingly upon the local community (and its visitors) hardly at all on people many miles away. The cost is relatively modest.

However, building a school involves significant money in land and building costs and subsequent running costs and well-educated children matter to us all. Others will therefore have an interest.

(2) I think that by and large local people or local councils do not take as broad and long a view as people, like central government, who are immersed in complex interdependent decisions and who usually work on broadly benthamite principles. Local decisions are about the immediate practical issues and effects not universal principles, all trees and no wood.

Despite the chatter about community the localist emphasis is often on me rather than us. Local decisions are not likely to be so liberal as centralised decisions: read this depressing account of the response of the locality to the most deserving and respectable of people. Ask would any affordable housing for first-time buyers get built in Cornwall if people in the locality made the decision and there was no national insistence? What then are the prospects for any provision for the vulnerable and the socially difficult: how many rehabilative hostels would get permission if it depended solely upon locals and not national guidance? Where would one build the less desirable but wholly necessary facilities of life such as sewage works, incinerators, and factories if every local population everywhere had a veto?

(3) An aspect of (2) is what we have come to call the post code lottery: different quality of services in different areas, even some areas lacking the services provided in others, all on the irrational basis of human geography. Nothing about need, only the dictate of the most assertive and demanding of local opinions and local elbows. The sharp elbow model of redistribution, a model which in many places gives very little to a whole galaxy of people – single mothers, aspirant first time house buyers looking for affordable housing, and people living untidy lives.

If locals in Cornwall decided what priority of health money and treatment should be given to people, would not those with locally out-of-favour illnesses get little? In Cornwall with a larger than average proportion of pensioners how would HIV and alcoholism and drug addiction fare against arthritis and mobility problems? The national service sets national rules which try to ensure a reasonably fair shot for everyone.

(4) Of course by localism politicians often mean not the affected immediate locality and its inhabitants taking decisions but a broader community: the district or the county or even region rather than the hamlet. In Cornwall it might turn out to be people of Wadebridge and Bodmin deciding what happens in Penzance and Camborne, or vice versa, though this is an outcome Andrew George opposes.

(5) Localism also tends in practice to mean not decisions by the people but by their claimed representatives. And this in turn means a well-organised group can unduly influence council decisions; the ideal picture is of a community coming together to decide what it wants and in what order. In reality localism can be government by the noisy and those sharp elbows, the prejudices and preferences of local people who are assertive and articulate, rather than by the people though that applies to national government too.

A simple principle? No, it isn’t.

Additamentum 1 August 2007 Permission for the service forces accommodation at Ashtead was unanimously given by councillors today.

See also this later post: If you can’t do it right, make it shiny

NOW WE KNOW WHO’S RIGHT

Remember the post on the different takes between Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, and Ann James of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Primary Care Trust (CIOSPCT) on trusts’ intentions about the future of West Cornwall hospital at Penzance?

The CIOSPCT and the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust have now published their plans for West Cornwall hospital: they include an A and E department led by a doctor not a nurse, the continuation of a high dependency unit, a CT scanner in early 2008, more outpatient services, and new specialist sugeons. All of this is good news for people in west Cornwall.

Now we know who is right in the dispute. Game, set, and match to Ann James.

WHO IS RIGHT IN PENWITH DISPUTES?

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives and the Scillies, has been criticised recently for continuing to support a unitary council though 89 percent of people in Penwith (basically the mainland part of the constituency) opposed the proposals in a council poll. The latest salvo is a letter in this week’s Cornishman from a Penwith district councillor describing his view that a unitary council would (or is it could) be functionally equivalent to a devolved Cornish Assembly as “utter rubbish.” That is too harsh. As I have explained, the unitary Libdems believe a unitary council could gain extra powers; there is nothing that I would call evidence that backs their view, the government has not come out and said aloud that extra powers are on offer, and the Mebyon Kernow party has produced evidence that they are not; but the Libdem view – hope, plan – is not irrational. See this post from March.

The government will shortly accept or reject the unitary proposals. If it accepts them, we shall then see who is right about drawing down extra powers; if it rejects them, we shall presumably never know.

There is another dispute. George has challenged the optimism of hospital campaigners about the soon-to-be-published plans for West Cornwall hospital in Penzance and he fears that there are plans afoot for “the most significant single downgrading” of the hospital and that claims of victory in a campaign to protect the services of the hospital are premature. He details his concerns: see here. His concerns appear to be shared by a leader of West Cornwall Healthwatch, a local lobby.

A statement from the chief executive of Cornwall primary care trust, Ann James, criticises him very strongly indeed. She says, “Mr George’s suggestion that we will let down our local communities is completely unfounded. Once again, rather than speaking to us directly about his concerns, Mr George has chosen to go to the media about a meeting he did not actually attend and which he has reported on totally inaccurately. We believe this is at best irresponsible.”

“Totally inaccurately” and “irresponsible” are vigorous charges. When the trust puts out the details of its proposals for West Cornwall hospital next week we shall be better able to judge who is right.

So there are two local items awaiting imminent resolution and the MP has taken a decided and contested view on both.