Plain packaging fun

Over at Nannying Tyrants.

Comments on this thread disabled, leave comments over at his.

Law of Unintended Consequences

From The Daily Mail:

A national crackdown on prescription drug abuse has led to new wave of heroin users in America.

It used to be easier to forge a prescription than meet with a dealer on a street corner. But since stricter rules on prescription drugs were imposed youngsters are choosing heroin as a drug of choice.

The deadly drug is now being found in areas where previously, it hadn't presented a problem. New York, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina, Illinois and Missouri have all been affected by the surge in abuse according to 2011 Justice Department statistics.

And so on. Worth reading in full.

Meet the new boss etc.

From CityAM:

THE GOVERNMENT will hand £1bn to private firms in a bid to tackle rising youth unemployment, Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, will announce today. Under the “Youth Contract”, firms will be eligible for a subsidy of £2,275 for each employee aged 18 to 24 years old they take on. There will be 160,000 such subsidies – equivalent to half the minimum wage for six months – available over the next three years...

The decision to use wage subsidies to boost employment is something of a U-turn for the coalition, which quickly scrapped £1.3bn of similar payments, instigated by the Labour party, when it came to power.

In a bid to ensure the cash helps those who need it most, the vast majority of subsidies will only be available to employers who take on a young person who has been on jobseeker’s allowance for at least nine months. The government is keen to avoid the mistakes of Labour’s Future Jobs Fund, which was widely criticised for helping employers cut the cost of taking on university graduates they would have hired regardless.

Labour's plan didn't work, this one won't work.

I'm sure employers will, for example, be able to find plenty of graduates who have been on JSA for at least nine months whom "they would have hired regardless". I suppose the significance of 'nine months' is that governments seem to worry more about long-term unemployed than short-term unemployed, so this is a good way of reducing the number of long-term unemployed, albeit at the expense of increasing the number of short-term unemployed.

Splendid loopholes in the Alcohol Scotland Act

From The Metro:

Customers are expected to take advantage of the recent Alcohol Scotland Act, which stops two-for-one deals and discounts on wine bought in bulk. It means chains like Majestic, which only sells in bulk, must now sell individual bottles of wine at the lower multiple-buy price available in England.

The chain has three outlets in Edinburgh – just 64km (40 miles) from Berwick-on-Tweed in Northumberland. While a single bottle of Rioja Reserva 2001 costs £13.99 south of the border, in Scotland it sells for just £9.99. Tattinger champagne is £5 a bottle cheaper while Argentinian chardonnay is £2 less at £9.99.

That doesn't really make sense. People will happily drive a few miles to buy cheap booze/fags in bulk (see: Northern France, Belgium) but why bother driving 64 miles each way to buy dozens halves of dozens of bottles of Rioja Reserve for £9.99 if, presumably, Majestic sells them for £119.99 £59.99 for a case of twelve six in England?

But clearly, wine lovers in Scotland will be getting a slightly better deal (unless Majestic otherwise fudges its pricing strategy), so that's a good start.

Members of the Scottish parliament warned of the loophole before the law came into force this month but the government said the measures were ‘another positive step forward in reducing harmful consumption of alcohol’.

You don't say. As ever, they saved the best bit 'til last:

The day before the law came into effect, Tesco told Scottish customers they could still benefit from online wine deals – as orders were sent from Daventry, England.

See also: Amazon delivering CDs to the UK via the Channel Islands.

Hysterical Over-reaction Of The Week

From The Metro:

Ecuador has temporarily banned alcohol as an emergency measure after 12 people died drinking contaminated bootleg liquor. (1)

Initially the ban was restricted to the coastal municipality of Urdaneta in Los Rios province, where over 100 people have been treated for intoxication (2) from drinking adulterated alcohol.

A 72-hour nationwide dry law prohibiting the sale or consumption (3) of alcohol was subsequently introduced yesterday, after alcohol poisoning cases were detected in at least four other areas across the country. (4)

1) High duties on spirits -> bootlegging, see Pub Curmudgeon for a lengthier exposé. As VFTS points out in the comments, ban on sale of alcohol -> increase in sale of bootleg alcohol.

2) Isn't that the whole point? To get intoxicated?

3) There's nothing to suggest that beer or wine is similarly contaminated, but they've banned the 'consumption' of all alcohol in people's houses? So I can't finish off the last few cans from a multi-pack or a bottle of wine which so far hasn't killed me? How are they going to enforce that, then?

4) Could they not just publish the brand names used by the bootleggers and leave it to people to decide for themselves?

Home-Owner-Ism achieves important milestones...

Milestone One:

The growth in demand for rented property was also seen last week in the findings of the English Housing Survey, published by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). It revealed that between 2005 and 2009-10 the number of people renting homes privately in England had risen by 1 million to 3.4 million - a rise of 40% in that time.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said: "Private renting had grown to account for 16% of households, while 17% rented from social landlords."

Yup.

The insane Home-Owner-ist belief that house prices can only go up - and that rising house prices makes us wealthier - runs counter to the claim that Home-Owner-Ism is about 'encouraging owner-occupation' (which I think we are broadly agreed is A Good Thing).

Home-Owner-Ism is really about increasing the amount of mortgage debt sloshing around (if you have a big mortgage, you don't really own it, you're just renting from the bank) and when all else fails, it's about increasing the number of tenants, i.e. reducing the number of owner-occupiers.

Milestone Two:

More than one in eight Yorkshire homeowners have not reported crimes since online crime maps were introduced for fear of putting off prospective buyers or tenants, a survey suggests today... Ministers have hailed the scheme as a way of holding police to account, but some residents fear it will sully their local area’s reputation and devalue their homes.

Thirteen per cent of Yorkshire residents surveyed by insurer Direct Line said they had witnessed a crime since February but had decided not to report it. The survey’s nationwide results indicate an even more worrying trend. Of those respondents who had not reported a crime, 11 per cent had either been the victim of, or witnessed, a violent assault. Three-quarters of respondents said they would use an online crime map to research a new home and would be deterred by a high number of offences.

I suppose the Lib-Cons' real reason for putting the crime map online was exactly this - to discourage people from reporting crimes, as a result of which reported crime goes down, which they can hail as a success of their law'n'order policies.

What sort of a f-ed up world do we live in, where people worry more about keeping housing as expensive as possible than they worry about crime?

Spotted by dill at HPC.

They've not thought this one through either.

Spotted by DNAse in The Grauniad:

... as of Friday, the state government of New South Wales will pay residents A$7,000 (£4,500) to leave [Sydney]. It's part of a new scheme to boost the population and economy of country areas.

"Regional NSW is a great place to live, work and raise a family – these $7,000 grants will provide extra assistance," said the NSW deputy premier, Andrew Stoner.

The one-off grants to move to country areas will be payable to individuals or families provided they sell their Sydney home and buy one in the country. The country home must be worth less than $600,000 (£390,000), something that won't be hard in most rural areas. It will cost the taxpayer up to $47m (£30m) a year.

As much as boosting regional areas, the scheme is also about making Sydney more liveable. The city's population is 4.5m and predicted to grow by 40% over the next 30 years, putting unprecedented pressure on infrastructure and housing.

The immediate point is that this is a subsidy to rural land values - the price of a country home will merely go up by $7,000 because yer ex-Sydney household has $7,000 more to spend. And of course, it's only Sydney homeowners who get the bribe if they move, not Sydney tenants, so indirectly it must be a subsidy to Sydney homeowners as well.

But why encourage people in Sydney to sell their houses? How does this get the population down - won't they sell their houses to, er, somebody who wants to move to Sydney?

Slapping Sydney homeowners with Land Value Tax would be a much more sensible way of going about things - such a tax tends to increase the population, of course (because small households will be replaced with larger households who are more able to share the cost), but they expect the population to increase anyway, so why not cash in?

This gives the government the money to pay for infrastructure improvements in Sydney, if appropriate, or they can spend the money on making the countryside a more attractive place to live, or paying for resettlement grants or a Rural Citizen's Basic Income or something.

Westminster Council adopts an idea from UKIP's Welfare Manifesto

From our Welfare Manifesto (2010 version, pdf)

6.5 UKIP therefore recommends that social rents be set at a single inclusive figure (rent plus Council Tax, net of notional Council Tax and Housing Benefit) calculated at around 20 per cent of each household’s gross income: This would ease the poverty trap for the most needy; social tenants on very low incomes would keep 49p for every £1 earned (assuming a flat tax rate of 31%) rather than 4.5p as at present.

It would also encourage households on higher incomes to move into the private rented sector or owner-occupation, as above a certain level of income, the social rent they are paying would be higher than a comparable rent in the private sector or the cost of a repayment mortgage. This may seem unfair, but it is exactly these households who will benefit most from UKIP’s proposal to double the tax-free personal allowance, so taking the two measures together, very few households will lose out.

The preceding paragraphs 6.1 to 6.4 are worth a read if you want to see the workings. I explained how the extra 'about 20%' could be collected with the minimum of administrative hassle by using K-codes for PAYE on my 'blog here (scroll down a bit to the section beginning "Here's my crash course in the existing PAYE system").

Lo and behold, from yesterday's Daily Mail*:

Conservative-led Westminster Council has asked Government for new powers to introduce a sliding scale which would link social housing rents to incomes. The move comes after the council found it had 2,200 social housing tenants earning more than £50,000-a-year, and more than 200 on over £100,000...

Many of those on £100,000 or more were paying rents of £97-a-week for a one bedroom flat, or £110-a-week for a two bedroom place, said Mrs Roe. She said a new formula should be applied which would see tenants paying 35 to 40 per cent of their net income on accomodation, the national average.

They say 35 to 40 per cent of their net income, we said 20 per cent of their gross income, which comes to the same thing in £-s-d, only 20 per cent of gross income is far easier to calculate.

From the point of view of the council, there must be a revenue maximising point; i.e. if they set the rate too low then they won't get much rental income and much longer waiting lists; if they set it set it too high then they'll discourage out of work and low earning tenants from earning more and you'll lose all your better earning tenants.

Sure, there may be some middle to higher earners who would end up paying above market rents on the place they're in in the short term, but - even if they don't move out - the advantages to them are:

a) The council will be more inclined to upgrade them if a nicer council house or flat becomes available, and

b) It's like unemployment protection insurance with a mortgage; you overpay while you are still working, but if you lose your job, take a pay cut or retire and draw your pension, then you get your money back.

c) It's got to be better than being turfed out entirely, as the Tory government has vaguely suggested, a strategy with pretty obvious unintended consequences...

d) The local council will then give preference to people on the waiting lists who have jobs, so you'll probably end up with nicer neighbours.

* Spotter's Badge, MBK.

"Council Tax pays for local services"

This is one of the cleverest myths ever dreamed up the Home-Owner-Ists. A lot of local councils e.g. Stafford Borough Council actually use that very wording on their website** even though on page 14 of their Annual Report they cheerfully admit that "Around a third of our income is collected through the Council Tax... The rest of our income is from other sources, including a significant proportion from Central Government."

The notion comes up time and again in any discussion of the taxation of residential land and buildings, but it is one of the many Big Fat Lies underpinning the UK's tax system* and until we dispel it there is little chance of having a proper debate (and that's before we discuss what the government should be doing in the first place, how much waste and overspend there is in the system etc etc.)

1. As a simple matter of observation and logic, most 'services' are local services (just about anything apart from the armed forces, foreign embassies, interest payments on the national debt and direct payments to foreign countries such as EU subscriptions and aid payments), in other words about eighty per cent of government spending.

2. And as another observation of fact, Council Tax revenues are less than 5% of total government tax and other revenues (see Tab C2, Public Sector Finances Databank).

3. Even if we hypothecate a chunk of other taxes to non-local services, we therefore conclude that "Council Tax pays for one-sixteenth of the cost of local services".

4. "Hang about here!" the crowd shouts, "Didn't you just link to something that said that Council Tax covers a third of the cost of local services?"

5. Again, this is because that borough defines 'local services' as an arbitrary sub-set of things which are under their direct control and excludes e.g. schools and hospitals, which are also managed locally and are clearly 'local services' (i.e. they primarily benefit people living in the area) but which are funded directly by Whitehall departments (the cost of the NHS and the education system alone are about eight times as much as total Council Tax revenues).

6. And further, is there any fundamental reason why welfare and pensions are not considered to be 'local services' but things like free public libraries, meals-on-wheels, subsidised swimming pools are? The former are non-earmarked cash payments paid to people in any area; the latter are cash subsidies paid to people in any area, there is no fundamental difference in real life.

7. For example, the government could decide that libraries/meals-on-wheels etc fail any sort of cost-benefit analysis, that these will all be shut down and instead they'll give everybody £10 in book tokens/give every pensioner £500 in Luncheon Vouchers every year out of a central pot. Why are libraries/meals-on-wheels considered to be 'local services' but not book tokens/Luncheon Vouchers?

8. So as a thought experiment: what if the accounting trickery were simply reversed and taxes on land and buildings (like Council Tax and Business Rates) were hypothecated for non-local stuff (see list in para 1. above), and local councils collected all the income tax, National Insurance and VAT etc to pay for everything else? (Sure, there'd have to be some equalisation between councils but that is a separate issue).

9. For a start, this would throw an interesting light on The Morbidly Obese One's faux democratic plan to allow people to veto Council Tax increases in their area. Wouldn't it be much better for that very modest tax to be set nationally and to allow people to be able to vote on how much income tax, VAT etc (the other 95% of government revenues) they are willing to pay?
--------------------------------------------
* The others being "Council Tax is unfair because it does not relate to 'ability to pay'", "Income tax is fair because it relates to 'ability to pay'", "My National Insurance goes toward my pension/welfare/the cost of the NHS", "VAT is borne by consumers", "VAT helps our balance of trade by discouraging imports", "Alcohol and tobacco duty discourage drinking and smoking", "Means testing of benefits reduces the cost to the taxpayer" and so on and so forth.

** Interestingly, that council's summary of how Business Rates work is very good:

Business Rates (also known as National Non-Domestic Rates) are collected by the Council and then paid into a national 'central pool', the contents of which are redistributed to all councils in proportion to the number of Council Tax payers in that area. This, together with the Council's income from Council Tax and the Central Government Revenue Support Grant, is the main way that the Council finances the services it provides.

This system has the unintended consequence that local councils would far rather zone land for residential than for commercial use, of course!

No, that's not "astronomical".

From The Daily Mail:

England's litter problem has not improved in the past year and may get worse as public spending cuts bite, a report has suggested. A survey by Keep Britain Tidy found sweet wrappers, drinks, fast food and smoking-related rubbish had all increased in the last 12 months.

It found eight out of 10 places are blighted with cigarette butts - an increase of 5 per cent...

A spokesman added: "We know that for a lot of people, local environment quality is very important to them and £858 million was what it cost last year to clean England's streets. We are spending an astronomical amount of money on it and if that was to reduce considerably, it could lead to worsening litter."

Sweeping the streets is a perfectly legitimate core function of the state, but divide that £858 million by a population of 52 million (assuming he really means 'England', even though his organisation calls itself 'Keep Britain Tidy') and that works out at £17 per person per year (money well spent IMHO).

The net cash transfer from smokers to each non-smoker is in the order of £150 a year, so even if the entire cost of litter collection were down to cigarette butts (which it quite clearly isn't), yer average non-smoker is still better off to the tune of £133 per year.

And the fact that a large proportion of the extra cigarette stubs in the street is down to the smoking ban probably escapes them.

Unintended Consequences

From yesterday's FT:

Pension funds will be prevented from investing in risky assets, including stocks, (1) by the Pensions Regulator under plans to stop weaker companies with large pension shortfalls from making huge bets.

David Norgrove, chairman of the regulator, will outline his concerns that some schemes are taking risks that could leave a bigger hole in the industry funded Pension Protection Fund in a speech to funds on Tuesday.

"We have to ensure that they are not putting all their money on the 2:30 at Newmarket and if it doesn’t work out, they will fall back on the PPF," he said. "To some extent, we have seen some behaviour like that." (2)

1) Stocks and shares are now 'risky assets', are they? This is basically code for "The UK government would like to strong arm pension funds into either UK government bonds or UK land and building to try and keep the deficit binge, credit bubble and land price bubble going."

2) Anybody in their right mind has been predicting this from the word go. Why on earth should sensibly run and well-funded schemes pay a penny towards underwriting badly run and under-funded schemes? Moral hazard, and all that.

(Non) Graduate Tax

I am not Mark Wadsworth

If Wince wants a tax on the incomes of graduates in perpetuity to 'pay for their ed-yew-kay-shun' a few choices will present themselves (as eny fule no):

1. Will any of my children who don't have a degree get a tax cut in perpetuity?
2. If they take and pass a degree I will recommend that they emigrate
3. I might decided to take them out of the state funded sector after 'A' Levels and do my own finance package to pay for a degree at a competing university elsewhere in the World.
4. ...and since I have a business I might be able to claim that as a business expense as I think you can for 'staff training'. Anyway I'd hide it somehow.
5. I might think that as it's now taxed, education is clearly a Bad Thing and get them to work (cleaning chimneys?) from age 16.
6. ...any more ideas?

(Personally I think all this is Just Wince politicking, the silly old fool. Move along. Nothing to see here)

Lola

Bank Bonus Fun

I've not taken much interest in this whole bank-bonus-bashing frenzy or the ham-fisted EU regulations which will not doubt make matters worse (to be honest, it's one of those fights where I want both sides to lose), but the 'senior Britpolitician' quoted in CityAM seems to have nailed it:

BANKS will easily sidestep the European Union's crackdown on bonuses by raising base salaries and restructuring performance-related awards, consultants and senior politicians believe... A senior British politician, who asked not to be named, said banks could maintain high cash payouts simply by increasing the overall size of a bonus and linking the deferred element to impossible targets. "They'll easily get around it," he said.

"Actually, where do we end up with this?"

Our Heath Secretary gives us some examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences, as reported by the BBC:

"If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve," said the health secretary...

He said the TV chef's approach to school food had not had the desired effect - the number of children eating school meals had gone down instead of up. "Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down. So then the schools said 'It's OK to bring packed lunches but we've got to determine what's in the packed lunches, we've got to decide what's in the packed lunches.'

"To which the parents' response was that they gave children money and children are actually spending more money outside school, buying snacks in local shops, instead of on school lunches." He said then people had said shops near schools must be banned, adding: "Actually, where do we end up with this?"

Spot the loophole

From the BBC:

Universities Minister David Willetts confirmed on the BBC's Politics Show there would be measures to boost firms outside the South East of England. This is expected to take the form of a three-year scheme to exempt start-up firms elsewhere in the UK from paying NI for the first 10 people employed.

Oh dear oh dear.

1. We're in a recession right now (or in the lull before the next one). As a matter of day-to-day practicality, it's easier and cheaper to ensure that as few people as possible lose their jobs than it is to dream up cunning plans whereby new jobs will be created. Any fule kno that not losing a customer is usually much cheaper than winning a new one, and the same sort of logic applies here.

2. What does 'start-up firm' mean? I'd advise any existing business employing ten or fewer people to shut up shop, start up a phoenix company the next day and take on the same people, hey presto, tax breaks!

3. Must it not be obvious to a blind man (no offence meant to any blind people reading this) that this is a barrier to job creation as much as an incentive? There may be 'start-up firms' employing ten or fewer people who were thinking about taking on another two or three, but for whom losing the tax break on the first ten wipes out the commercial benefit of taking them on.

4. Most small businesses employ family members to use up their tax-free personal allowances. So most small businesses can reduce their nominal headcount by two or three to suddenly slip below the magic figure of ten and hence qualify.

5. Does it make the slightest bit of difference to somebody looking for a job whether he or she gets taken on by somebody who already employees nine people, nineteen or nineteen thousand? A job's a job.

6. Isn't this a barrier to growth, however subtle? If your business employs fifteen or twenty people, you might have been worried about the 'start-up' competitor up the road who has rapidly grown to ten employees. At least now you know that your competitor will be encouraged to halt further expansion (see 3. above).

Continued page 94.

Before we invent new rules, can't we just apply the existing ones?

From the BBC:

Conservative leader David Cameron has announced plans for a new tax on banks - even if other countries decide not to do so... The Tories, who have not yet provided any details of how their scheme would operate, hope that by adopting a more limited measure if the UK acts alone they will avoid driving banks into exile...

Mr Cameron said: "We had the biggest bank bail-out in the world. We can't just carry on as if nothing happened. In America, President Obama has said he will get taxpayers back every cent they put in. Why should it be any different here?" He said a Conservative government would introduce a new bank levy to pay back taxpayers for the support they gave and to protect them in the future.

So, no details as ever, but it's worse than that. Let's first look at how we got here:

1. The government used taxpayers' money to subscribe for more shares in RBS and Lloyds. Those shares were standing at a £34 billion loss at the moment. The share values might or might not rise to reduce this loss (fat chance).

2. The Bank of England lent the banks another £185 billion under the Special Liquidity Scheme in April 2008, which is due to be repaid in April 2011 (fat chance).

3. The Bank of England lent the Northern Rock £26 billion, which has been largely repaid. I'm not sure if it's the Good Bank or the Bad Bank half that will have to repay the rest. The overall net loss will probably be quite modest.

4. Then there is a £250 billion credit guarantee scheme, whereby cash only changes hands as and when loans go bad. The banks do pay a modest fee for this.

5. The above list is not exhaustive, and there may even be double counting. But the short answer is, UK banks owe the taxpayer "a heck of a lot", let's just add together 1. and 2. and call it £225 billion for sake of this discussion.

6. To be fair about all this, the Bank of England in turn owes the commercial banks about £144 billion as at December 2009, Table B1.1.1. This is what happened to the 'cash' that the banks got from selling back gilts to the government under the Quantitative Easing scheme.

So that's a net liability from commercial banks to the taxpayer of about £225 billion minus £144 billion = £81 billion (ignoring the money they wasted on repaying depositors in Icelandic banks, I think we can whistle for that). Can't we just collect this £81 billion* first and then busk it from there? Why should we invent a new tax to claw it back?
--------------------------------
Liberal Democrat economics spokesman Vince Cable said: "The other parties seem to be moving on to ground the Liberal Democrats have occupied for some time: banks must pay for the protection they enjoy from the taxpayer." Mr Cable said his party had been "very specific about how this crucial issue should be tackled, after extensive discussion with the City and others". He said it was "seriously worrying that both the Conservatives and the government still do not seem to have worked out a specific proposal".

7. Uncle Vince is going off at a bit of a tangent here; I think he's talking about the fee that the banks have to pay for the £250 billion guarantee scheme (bullet 4 above). Historically, the UK has guaranteed deposits, it currently guarantees the first £50,000 that a depositor has with each bank, which seems fair enough to me.

8. Whether that £50,000 is "too high" or "too low" is a moot point, and the insurance premium that the banks pay is probably "too low", but never mind.

9. Like most people, Uncle Vince doesn't seem to realise that no UK bank, however badly run, is in such a mess that its assets wouldn't be enough to repay ordinary, everyday deposits. Even Northern Rock back in 2007 would have had enough to repay depositors three or four times over. Sure, the banks have made losses, and that loss has to be borne by somebody, but why invent new rules?

10. Why not just make it clear that if a bank loses the faith of its depositors and has to turn to the government, that it will immediately be split into a Good Bank and a Bad Bank (which is what they did with Northern Rock after two years of messing about). The good loans, branches, assets, employees and deposits (up to £50,000, let's say) are moved to the Good Bank and the bad loans are transferred to the Bad Bank, which is owned by the shareholders and bondholders of the original bank in the same terms and conditions?**

This completely obviates the need for any sort of insurance scheme at taxpayers' risk (and hence Moral Hazard). The depositors' 'insurance' would be that they will always be given priority in repayment.

* Sure, some banks like Barclays and HSBC may be net creditors of the government, so the true figure must be higher than £81 billion, but I am trying to illustrate the principle.

** The Good Bank would also be set up with proper share capital (as a balancing figure) and these shares would of course belong to the Bad Bank, to be auctioned off to Bad Bank's shareholders and bondholders under a Dutch Auction system, thus breaking the link between the two new banks.

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?

White line fever (2)

As suggested in the comments to my previous rant, I contacted the police about the cars parked on the single white line in front of my drive (the traffic warden having told me he only had the authority to ticket cars that are parked in a marked bay without a permit, but not those parked outside a marked bay, whether with or without a permit). They slapped a £30 fine on the first car that did it, and the local bobb-ette popped round a couple of days later and was very sympathetic.

The next time it happened, the police told me, disappointingly, that they can only ticket cars that are parked on yellows and that white lines are local council jurisdiction (who are the ones in charge of the traffic wardens, who turn a blind eye to parking-on-white-lines, natch) . As a tax adviser, I appreciate a loophole as much as the next man, but the whole thing strikes me as a bit counter-productive to say the least.

So, until I have a better idea*, I have to wiggle out of this (bearing in mind it's a narrow one-way street and there are usually two builders' vans parked on the other side). Note the complete absence of a car in the marked bay to the left of my drive:
* I'm old fashioned so I prefer reversing into my drive rather than having to reverse out again.

Law of unintended consequences

From The Metro:

Police are shining 'magic torches' into clubbers' faces to check for tiny traces of cocaine – and now employers and parents are being encouraged to follow suit. Forces across the country are buying the £40 torches which can make any microscopic particles of cocaine or amphetamine that are invisible to the naked eye appear bright green...

The torches are produced by Wrexham-based JNE Marketing, intending them to be used to show markings on stolen property. It only realised they could be used to spot drugs when police officers starting asking about them. They will detect cocaine that is at least 87 per cent pure and 78 per cent pure amphetamine of, including some, but not all, Ecstasy pills.

Right. So they'll just start cutting the cocaine a bit more so that it is no more than three-quarters pure.

That's that fixed. Next.

I bet nobody saw this one coming ...

From The Metro:

'Bored' community officers turning to crime

Police community support officers in Britain's largest force keep getting into trouble because they are bored and unmotivated, a report said. Senior officers at Scotland Yard agreed to review the civilian role after they found a disproportionate number of staff were being disciplined.

They discovered police community support officers (PCSOs) accounted for more than half of all police staff gross misconduct cases during the last financial year despite only making up about one-fifth of the workforce.

In more than half of cases, employees were sacked or reprimanded for criminal offences, including drinking and driving and other motoring crimes. Other PCSOs were disciplined after they were caught misusing police computers, behaving inappropriately and in one case, making a false allegation...