The true cost of public sector pensions

From the BBC:

At the end of an article which contains the usual whining that "the likely scale of job cuts required would 'inevitably have an impact on levels of public service provision' is this:

Meanwhile the CBI has said that businesses are being deterred from bidding for public service contracts by the need to match what it says are "costly" pensions when staff transfer to private firms. The business group said firms had to pay between 25% and 50% of salary to fund the pensions of ex-public sector staff.

Taking the mid-cost as 37% and assuming that the average (rather than median) salary for eight million taxpayer-funded jobs as £30,000 a year, suggests that the true cost of public sector pension promises is as much as £90 billion per annum, nearly as much as the entire cost of the (bloated) NHS and considerably more than the entire welfare state (excluding old age pensions).

Just sayin', is all.

1984(18): Chocolate rations

I'm often reminded of the following paragraphs when the government uses statistics to try and prove, well, anything at all, really:

"... The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.

"As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April...

"But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

"For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.

"Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain."

From 1984 by George Orwell, available online here. I wish I'd known about that site earlier, I've typed in all the previous excerpts straight from the paperback.

Wouldn't the risk be zero?

Headline from the BBC:

Flu risk 'still low' after death

Meaningless/Misleading Statistic Of The Day (2)

From the BBC, 12 December 2006:

More than £100m of public money is spent on translation services in the UK, the BBC has learned. Local authorities spend £25m, NHS trusts £55m and the courts £31m on interpreting languages.

From The Torygraph*, 13 June 2009:

Town halls and Whitehall spend £50 million a year on translation and interpretation for the benefit of people who cannot speak English.

D'you see what they did there? They just dropped NHS costs (which includes shit like translating 'England goes smoke-free' leaflets into 22 languages) out of the equation, and hey presto, they've halved the total cost!

* Via Obo.

Meaningless/Misleading Statistic Of The Day

From the BBC:

More than 60,000 orders for cars under the UK's scrappage subsidy scheme have been placed since the initiative was announced, new government figures show... Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said the scheme had given the carmaking industry the boost it needed. The scrappage scheme was announced at the end of April and the latest figures cover orders from then until 7 June.

OK, my magic fag packet says there are twenty million cars on the road, and that the average age at which they totally conk out is 15 years. So assuming all drivers 'need' a car, rather than just owning one (e.g. me, I find having a car bloody handy, but since Her Indoors bought herself one as well, she only having a licence to drive an automatic, I wouldn't say I 'needed' mine any more. Sniff.) we'd expect people to buy about 1.3 million new cars every year, or 150,000 in a six-week period (the scrappage scheme has been running for six weeks). So on that basis, orders are still down by sixty per cent.

Basically, there are far too many unknowns to say whether the car scrappage scheme will have any overall effect (or even what the net cost/benefit to the taxpayer is), in particular, we don't know how many people have merely accelerated a purchase from next year to this.

Further, as the bulk of cars on UK roads are built abroad, it might have helped "the carmaking industry" but not necessarily "the UK carmaking industry".

OK. Who's lying to whom? And why?

The Bank of England said last week that "around 7%-11% of UK owner-occupiers with mortgages were in negative equity in the spring of 2009." There are 11.7 million outstanding mortgages in the UK, so that would give us between 800,000 and 1,300,000 in negative equity.

Lloyds/HBOS said back in February that about 16% of its borrowers were in negative equity. Lloyds/HBOS has 28% of the market, so whether you pro rate it up at 540,000 ÷ 8% or assume 11.7 million mortgages x 16%, it gives up a figure of about 1,900,000 in nequity.

Right. Lloyds/HBOS may have been hamming it up a bit in the hope of more bail-out money, and the Bank of England may have been playing it down a bit in order to boost confidence (which is part of their remit), but that's still one heck of a discrepancy.

Puppet dictator of the week

White courtesy line fever

As I was forced to take two days holiday last week, thanks to Brother Crowe and the absence of any moral courage from Boris Johnson, I popped in to the local Parish Council (open 10 to 4, weekdays only) to ask about the white line that extends across my and my neighbour's driveways - some people park exactly between the two driveways which can make it really tricky for me to get out (photo to illustrate what I mean accompanies this post).

I explained that the traffic wardens won't do anything, because they only patrol the marked parking bays (if you're in a marked bay without a permit, you get a fine - but if you're parked on a white line without a permit, they ignore you). Similarly, the local police told me that they can only do anything about cars parked on yellow lines. The ladies thought this was very puzzling and rang the chap in the county council who's in charge of that sort of thing.

He explained that the white lines are "courtesy lines", which means effectively that people can park their cars on them in exactly the same way as if there were no markings at all, which renders the whole exercise pretty pointless.

So that's that little mystery solved.

Rihanna: unlikely winner of presidential election in Iran

Totally pointless gearchange from the dawn of pop music

Although the Rolling Stones' 1963 debut single cover-version is vastly superior to Chuck Berry's original, they spoiled it somewhat by introducing one of the most pointless, unmemorable and earliest truck driver's gear changes of all time, a semi-tone up at 1 minute 6 seconds:


As far as I am aware, that is the first and last gear change that the Rolling Stones ever committed to vinyl*.

* Or 'CD' or 'download' or whatever it's called nowadays.