"Bull on loose in the grounds of hospital"

Spotted by Pavlov's Cat. I can only assume it was a quiet news day in Canterbury yesterday. Or perhaps the BBC are playing up to our atavistic fear of cattle:

An escaped bull has been caught after running loose in the grounds of a Kent hospital. Police were drafted in to help catch the animal, named Charlie, at Kent and Canterbury Hospital in Canterbury. At one point, staff formed a human chain to direct the bull away from the outpatients area. The prize bull, which escaped from a nearby farm and is said to be in a "distressed state", has now been taken away by its owner..."

The accompanying photographs are excellent and really add to the merriment. One is of the bull looking in through a window (in case you find it difficult to visualise that event) and the much vaunted human chain could be more accurately described as "four people walking at a safe distance* behind the retreating bull".

* Having watched a TV programme about cows recently, and thus being pretty much world expert on cows, I could point out that the four people are at the edge of the bull's 'flight zone'.

Friday night gear change

From a list that RJ emailed me a year ago, "Invisible Touch" by Genesis has a truck driver's gear change at 2 minutes 42 seconds, up a full tone. Rubbish song, rubbish gear change.

Lib-Cons nick another UKIP policy

The Sun explains the welfare system properly*, for once:

Thousands [hundreds of thousands, actually] are currently losing 90p or more out of every £1 they earn through tax and lost benefits. A single mum of two earning £150 for a 16-hour week ends up with just 4p for every extra pound she earns.

She pays 20p in income tax and 11p in National Insurance. Then she loses 39p working tax credit, 20p housing benefit and 6p council tax benefit - a total loss of 96p in every pound. Treasury figures show 1.7million claimants keep less than 30p out of every pound they earn - including 130,000 who pocket 10p or less.

It appears that IDS has finally been bludgeoned into seeing commonsense:

RADICAL plans to make work pay and end Britain's crippling benefits culture are being drawn up by ministers. Claimants will be promised they can keep 40p in every extra £1 they earn if they start work. It will smash the hurdle for many on the dole who end up WORSE off if they take a job.

The 40p guarantee is at the heart of a revolutionary blueprint being drawn up by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith and welfare minister Lord Freud. They are also looking to overhaul the benefits system to make it simpler.

I know for a fact that political parties read each other's manifestos and nick the bits they like, but this sounds a lot like UKIP's welfare policies at the last General Election, and to be fair, we based them in part on the Citizen's Income Trust's workings.

And don't forget that the Laffer Curve applies to welfare claimants as much as anybody else - it is quite possible/probable that if we reduce the total marginal withdrawal rate, the 'cost' of welfare would fall.

* Via UKIP Daily Briefings.

"Government by international treaty"

Denis Cooper coined this phrase a few years ago, and he emailed me a good example today, (which he also posted on the relevant thread at Con Home). From Hansard:

Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con): The European investigation order would allow police and prosecutors throughout Europe to order British police to collect and hand over evidence... Britain has until 28 July to decide whether to opt in or, like Denmark, to opt out. Will the Leader of the House indicate when the Government's decision will be made, and will the House have an opportunity to debate the measure in advance?

Sir George Young: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He says that the Government must decide by 28 July what action to take. I will certainly ascertain from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or the Home Office, whichever Department is the appropriate one, what action they propose to take in response to my hon. Friend's question.

As D says, "That the Leader of the House is unclear which department of the British government now has responsibility for the activities of the British police speaks volumes about the constitutional confusion created by EU membership.... We seem to have entered a new phase where the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is in part a kind of Colonial Office in reverse, with the instructions coming in rather than going out."

(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

G-d Bless Channel 4 News

As we well know, the purpose of the Electoral Commission is to create huge administrative barriers to entry, and, should a smaller party threaten to become a bigger party, to hound them mercilessly through the courts for minor technical breaches of the rules.

It appears that El Comm didn't bother looking through all the expense returns submitted for the last General Election, but to be fair, they published them online so that interested parties - such as Channel 4 News - could have a look.

"Police shot cow 12 times"

From The Metro:

A constable and an acting sergeant blasted the beast eight times with a rifle and four times with a shotgun in what police called a 'humane destruction' on a school playing field. They said it was hard to hit the target because of 'a combination of wind speed, distance and type of gun used'.

Animal behaviour expert Dr Roger Mugford said their attempts appeared to be 'pretty incompetent'. He added: 'I've regrettably had to despatch cows and sheep before. A shotgun blast from close range to the forehead reliably kills with one shot.'

The cow shooting was one of 180 occasions that police firearms have been used to destroy wounded or dangerous animals in the past three years, figures released under the Freedom of Information Act have shown. Officers have also accidentally discharged their weapons 110 times since January 2007 – almost four times as often as when confronted with actual threats.

The cow had to be put down after it charged a police officer and a woman with a baby in Stockton-on-Tees in August last year. Chief Insp Ted Allen, from Cleveland Police, said: 'It was contained on the school field, but could still have got out. Our biggest concern was for the safety of the public from the animal and from our bullets.'

I don't think I mentioned the story at the time (which was given full coverage by The Soaraway Sun, for example), but what stands out, apart from the glorious Keystone Copness of it all is that '180 occasions... in the past three years', which averages out at more than one a week. Is the Thin Blue Line the only think protecting us from rampaging cattle? The public has a right to know!

And what on earth does 'put down' mean in this context? I'd describe it more as 'used for target practice'.

... Of The Day

Euphemism Of The Day: "variable graduate contributions tied to earnings". Vince Cable announcing plans for a 'graduate tax'.

Special Pleading Of The Day: “Why should the next generation of young people pay for the crunch?” Nick Starr, executive director of the National Theatre, on why subsidies for [whatever it is that he does] should keep rolling in.

Libertarian Idea Of The Day: "Wife beaters could face random police visit to discourage reoffending" says Theresa May.

More notional costing fun

adamcollyer finally answers the questions on Exam candidate now scoring negative marks:

What should Mr A do? Obviously build the conversion.

At last!

But then ruins it by introducing yet more unrealistic assumptions. He picks up on my statement that "The planning permission, and hence the land for new housing (which is what we are trying to discuss here), costs the council nothing" and says...

... sorry, but what a silly thing to say. If the council can give itself planning permission for the land it owns, then it could equally well sell that land with planning permission for a lot of money. So if it housed the tenants in private housing it could use the profit from doing that to offset the cost.

Yeah right. The council can obviously make a profit of £50,000 by granting itself planning permission for a house and selling off that bit of land (to use the same figures as before). And it could put that money in the bank (yeah, right, it will piss it up the wall, hand it to an Icelandic bank etc) and earn £1,500 a year interest (sticking with my 3%).

This £1,500 income would cover a quarter of the cost of renting back an ex-council house (using Adam's figures), or indeed a fifth of the cost of renting back one of the new houses that might be built (assuming they are a bit nicer than council houses, as Adam contends, and assuming that the private landlord bumps up the rent a bit, as is observedly the case).

Generating income of £1,500 in order to incur an expense of at least £6,000 looks a bit twattish to me, but this is what selling off council housing boils down to - which was a core Home-Owner-Ist policy pursued by successive UK governments.

You may well be right that it is cheaper to build council houses than to use private landlords. But I never said it wasn't cheaper. I just said it wasn't FREE. And it's not. And that is my last word on the subject...(you will no doubt be pleased to hear).

Of course I am right. As a taxpayer, I would vastly prefer more council housing to be built than for the DWP to pay Housing Benefit to private landlords. It is vastly cheaper in cash terms. That is the only decision we have to make.

(Whether the social housing generates a small overall cost or a small overall loss to the taxpayer is an unknown and irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. I have every reason to that assume the figure is so small that we might as well ignore it. I have never, ever said it was "free" or even disputed that it was "not free" as that word is fairly meaningless.).

Exam candidate now scoring negative marks

adamcollyer at As your teachers used to say, "Just answer the question:

Your maths is quite right of course. But your underlying assumptions are wrong.

Yes it is. And no they aren't.

Let's extend the example a little. Imagine that Mr A's brother, Mr C, has an exactly similar house to Mr A's. Now, if Mr C builds the extension he can charge Mr A £90 a week for letting Son A stay in his extension. So Mr C makes a huge profit.

Aha! So our candidate now claims that Mr C can make a "huge profit" while simultaneously claiming that Mr A would make a loss by building an identical loft conversion (and I never said "extension", so that's another two marks deducted). So this supports my original conclusion that Mr A is far better off having the loft conversion done than paying rent for his son to live elsewhere.

But the reason for that profit is that the rent in your example is ridiculously high compared with the cost of providing the accommodation.

No it's not. That's a fairly typical rent for a single furnished room and a fairly typical cost for building out the loft to provide one extra room.

In practice, with council housing, the rent available at market rates is NOT enormously higher than the (interest) cost of building the house. To take a concrete example, ex-council houses in my town go for around £100,000. Interest at 5 percent = £5,000 per annum. To rent a similar house costs about £500 per month = £6,000 per annum. Which, surprise surprise, equals the interest cost plus maintenance etc plus a small landlord's profit.

What the candidate has done here is first correctly refer to the "interest cost of building a house" and then compare this with "the interest cost of buying an existing building" (which of necessity is inflated by the value of the planning permission). When using notional costing as a decision making tool, you have to try and compare like-with-like.

As the planning permission, and hence the land for new housing (which is what we are trying to discuss here), costs the council nothing, and our candidate submitted on his own blog that it costs a council £50,000 to build a council home (as a rule of thumb, half the cost of a house is the planning permission, so that looks 'about right'), the interest cost on the bricks and mortar of a new build is about £50,000 x 3% (local councils can borrow very cheaply, especially if secured on buildings) = £1,500 per annum.

This works out at about £30 a week, which is roughly equal to the average rent paid by social tenants (net of Housing Benefit) of £30 to £40 per week. I rest my case.

Further marks deducted for referring to "small landlord's profit". The council probably originally sold off that council house for £25,000 (?), so if it now has to pay £100,000 to buy it back, the Tories' policy of selling off council housing is indeed a huge great loss to the taxpayer, with a corresponding huge great profit to the owner(s) of that council house in the interim.

And further marks are deducted for refusing to answer the question: what should Mr A do? Rent a room elsewhere or do the loft conversion?

So the candidate is now into "negative marks" territory.