We own land! Give us money!

From the BBC:

Some £500m of public money is being made available to private developers in England to help them get housing and commercial projects off the ground. Ministers say projects have stalled due to problems with road access, contaminated land and flood risks. They say local enterprise partnerships will now be able to apply for money to overcome those sorts of hurdles.

But Labour said the move was an admission that scrapping regional development authorities was a mistake...

And why are Labour complaining..?

Labour's shadow communities and local government secretary Hilary Benn said: "This announcement is a huge admission from the Tory-led government that abolishing the regional development agencies and the £1.4 billion of funding they received each year was a mistake. If this funding is simply to help the new local enterprise partnerships do some of the work that was previously done by the RDAs unlocking and co-ordinating investment projects, but with much less funding, then people will feel short-changed."

Ah right. He's not complaining that the government is giving property developers (i.e. land owners) too much taxpayers' money, he's complaining that the government is not giving them enough taxpayers' money.

H/t Rant And Rave at HPC.

Spot the missing ............... round

Just when you thought they couldn't come with something more insane than their last bright idea, comes this, from Dash 24:

Food waste could be banned from landfill under proposals being put out for consultation by the Government today. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn is launching a consultation into preventing an array of different types of rubbish which could be recycled or reused from going into the ground.

The Environment Department (Defra) and the Welsh Assembly are looking at the case for landfill restrictions on paper and card, food, textiles, metals, wood, garden waste, glass, plastics, and electrical and electronic equipment...

I struggle to think of much that isn't on that list, apart from disposable nappies. Any ideas?

How about this for a "radical re-think"?

Hurrah for New Labour!

Continuing my occasional series of them f***ing something up completely and then dreaming up more state intervention to f*** things up even more, here's Veggie Benn at his best:

A "radical rethink" of how the UK produces and consumes its food is needed, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has warned.

He was speaking at the launch of the government's assessment of the threats to the security of what we eat. The food supply was currently secure but population growth and climate change could have an impact, he warned. Producers, supermarkets and consumers have been invited to suggest how a secure food system should look in 2030. Some of the findings from the consultation are expected to be published in the autumn.

As well as launching the consultation process, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has published a scorecard-style assessment of the current state of the UK's food supply. "It is to stimulate a debate within the UK on what a food policy should be, and how do we define and look at food security more broadly," said Defra's chief scientific adviser Professor Robert Watson.

How about scrapping all the lunatic regulations on farming, whether EU imposed or self-inflicted - I'm not expert on these, but the tagging system for lambs, the rule that you can't farm on land where the water supply is more than 50 mg/litre (about half of farmland in the South East of England, I am reliably informed) and the restrictions on GM crops spring to mind - and, er, otherwise leaving it to "the markets"?

Invisible packaging

Over at OC.

"Benn confirms TB cull rejection"

Madness indeed:

In a Commons statement, the environment secretary said that while a large-scale cull could improve the situation, it could also make the problem worse... About 4,000 herds were affected by the disease last year, mainly in the south-west of England. The government based its decision on advice from the Independent Scientific Group, established to commission and review research on the issue. The ISG concluded that culling would not be an economic solution to the problem, although a subsequent analysis led by the government's former chief scientific advisor Sir David King came down in favour of culling.

Yes, of course it "could" make things worse, but the gummint had no problems in ordering a cull of four million animals in response to the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak. And who's to say whether the badger cull would be "economic"; some quangocrats or the farmers - the people who have to balance the cost of the loss of business with the cost of the cull?