FakeCharity and Quango Festival

If you'd like the opportunity to see the following speakers:

Martin Narey, Chief Executive, Barnardo's
Ivana La Valle, Director of Research, Evidence and Evaluation, National Children's Bureau
Yvonne Roberts, Senior Associate, the Young Foundation
Simon Antrobus, Chief Executive, Addaction
Debbie Scott, Chief Executive, Tomorrow's People
Kathy Evans, Director of Policy, Children England
Liz Railton CBE, Director of National Programmes, Serco Education and Children's Services
Cllr Brian Connell, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Family Policy, Westminister City Council
Hugh Thornbery, Strategic Director of Children's Services England North, Action for Children Lisa Harker, Co-Director, ippr (Chair)

... and to rub shoulders with these sorts of people:

Regeneration officers
Senior management: heads and directors of services
Social services: adult, children, education, family and mental health services
Voluntary sector organisations involved in the whole family agenda - children’s charities, homeless and substance misuse fields
Parenting and family support organisations
Youth Justice Board and Youth Offending Teams
Drug and alcohol support services
Probation and ex-offender officers and managers
Children’s centre practitioners
Civil servants and policymakers
Clinical psychologists
Connexions partnerships
Primary Care Trust / Mental Health Trust representatives
Regional Development Agencies
Trades unions
Education sector
Employment service providers
Academics and think tanks
Adult learning and skills providers
Media,

... then sign up to this shindig hosted by the Institute For Public Policy Research. Don't forget to take some plastic cutlery with you to prevent serious injury should you be overcome by the urge to stab someone (or indeed to stab yourself).

Yes, but how are they going to enforce it?

From the BBC:

Alcoholics face having their benefits docked if they do not get treatment, under government plans. Minister James [Photoshop] Purnell has announced a review into the idea to be carried out jointly by the Department of Health and Department for Work and Pensions.

That's a clever bit of Indian Bicycle Marketing, actually, what can the authoritarian Tory party do to out-bid the authoritarian Labour party? Hmm. As ever, I wonder, how are they going to enforce this? Will dole claimants be breathalysed at random intervals? Nope - this is actually all just an excuse to hand over more cash to a fakecharity:

A spokesman for drug and alcohol treatment charity Addaction said that, historically, help for people with alcohol problems was under-funded. "We support measures to get treatment to the people who need it, but that treatment needs proper funding to be effective," he said.

The Tories, wary of being outflanked in the authoritarian stakes, show that they can really get to grips with tricky abstract concepts like 'big numbers':

Theresa May said this latest review was "another smokescreen" to "deflect from Labour's failure to get to grips with our welfare system ... Under James Purnell the system has gone into meltdown with more than 100,000 people claiming benefits because they are drug addicts or alcoholics. That's more than doubled from 48,700 since 1997."

Right. Let's assume that one hundred thousand is correct, and that half of those are alcoholics, so there are fifty thousand people getting £3,000 dole a year plus a free council flat, a total cost to 'society' of £300 million. Part of the reason for having alcohol duties (and VAT on top of the duty!) is to cover the external costs, which I suppose includes alcoholics on benefits.

My magic fag packet says total alcohol duties plus VAT is in the order of £12 billion, i.e. if you have a pint in the pub, out of the 80 pence duty plus VAT, 2 pence is needed to fully cover the costs of the people we're talking about. That seems perfectly fair to me, plus if it comes to it, I'd rather give somebody £60 a week cash to drink himself to death (half of which goes straight back to the government as alcohol duties plus VAT, of course!) than pay some meddling busybody quangista £500 plus index linked final salary pension to shove his or her nose in.

UPDATE: in a rather bizarre twist to the tale, the BBC had Antonia Bance on the telly just now, speaking on behalf of Oxfam and not on behalf of the Labour party, saying that this was all a bit harsh.

View from Middle England has a slightly different take on this, also worth a read (via LFAT).

Quote of the day

The government listens to advice. And then ignores it.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said that, as their advice had been disregarded, ministers should disband the advisory council of experts and replace them with an advisory council of "tabloid newspaper editors".

It's good to see the BBC turn to the gummint-funded 'charities' Addaction and DrugScope* for comments.

I also like this, possibly the most f***witted comment of the day:

The committee ... also voiced concern about the prevalence of domestic cannabis farms supplying the market and the involvement of organised criminal networks.

If it were legal, we could:
a) import it from the Middle East or Jamaica, thus reducing our 'carbon footprint' (those domestic 'farms' use a scandalous amount of electricity) and possibly reducing the trade deficit as well (depending on what's cheaper, wholesale cannabis or oil),
b) make 'criminal networks' superfluous, obviously, and
c) collect a shed-load of tax (assuming cannabis were taxed at similar rates to tobacco and alcohol, we are talking several billion pounds a year)

* Whose funding will now no doubt be severely curtailed for daring to question whether tractor output really is increasing.

Cost of the war on drugs

I'm not sure if they calculated it the same way as I did, but the figure of £16 billion per annum in the UK matches my own guesstimate of £1.6 bn x 2 x 5.

Addaction describes itself as a charity, but its accounts show that nearly all its income comes from the state, via local councils, grants and the Big Lottery fund.

DrugScope also describes itself as a charity but gets nearly all its income from government grants as well, of course.