Parking

From the BBC

Drivers in England will get 10 minutes' grace before being fined if they stay too long in council-owned car parking spaces, the government has announced.(1)

It is one of several changes, expected to take effect later this month, which include new restrictions on the use of CCTV cars issuing automatic fines.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said he wanted to end the "war on drivers". But councils said many already allowed 10 minutes' leeway and raised concerns about the safety of other changes.

The changes include:

• guidance for councils reminding them they are banned from "using parking to generate profit"(2)
• a right for residents and businesses to demand - by a petition - that a council "reviews parking in their area"(3)
• new powers for parking adjudicators so they can "hold councils to account"(4)
• protection to stop drivers being fined after parking at out-of-order meters(5)
• a ban on the use of CCTV "spy cars" except in no-parking areas such as bus lanes and near schools(6)
• Mr Pickles said: "We are ending the war on drivers who simply want to go about their daily business.(7)

1. Why? You've paid for parking for an hour, why should anyone expect to get another 10 minutes? You'll just end up with people stretching their time to 1:10 and then thinking they can have a few more minutes "I was only just over the time". The current view of a lot of councils, of an unofficial grace period seems more sensible.

2. Car parking charges are about allowing lots of people to park, and preferably, about penalising people over the normal time to encourage churn. But that's not related to how much it costs to build and run a car park. Take the money, give the residents a cut in their council tax. Simples.

3. So, NIMBYs can try and get car parks closed down to increase their house prices, presumably.

4. Currently known as contesting your fine in court.

5. I've never heard of this happening, but maybe it does elsewhere. Again, if you threatened to contest it in court, I doubt you'd lose.

6. Why? Someone's broken the law, you want to enforce it as efficiently as possible, don't you?

7. Including drivers who break the law.

I'll try it on with free parking, but if I get caught, it's a fair cop.

Tip top tokenist Tory tinkering.

From the BBC:

The Conservatives are considering limiting child benefit to three children, BBC Newsnight has learned… It would save an estimated £300m a year - but Tory MP Dominic Raab said it was not purely about cost but could "send a message about personal responsibility"…

Child benefit can be claimed by anyone responsible for a child under 16, or under 20 if the young person is in education or training - though since 2013 there have been restrictions for families where one parent earns more than £50,000 a year. It currently pays £20.50 a week for a first or only child, then £13.55 for other children.

Deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room as per usual.

Child Benefit is (or was) a splendid benefit, it was small amounts of money (nowhere near the average cost of bringing up a cd) but everybody gets it (until recently when it was withdrawn for higher earners). The total nominal payout is about £10 billion a year and fraud, error and admin costs are so small as to be barely measurable.

The cash value is nowhere near the average cost of bringing up a child (the bulk of which is loss of mother's wages) so eases the pain a bit without actually distorting behaviour.

The biggie is Child Tax Credits, up to £53 a week per child plus bits and pieces, which is a total payout of about £25 billion a year, the bulk of which goes to a small number of large families with low or no (declared) income.

For second and subsequent children, the extra cash you get from having another child is £66, which is probably more than the marginal cost of bringing up a second or subsequent child. If a mother is at home and not in paid employment, then the loss off her wages is a sunk cost. So this does distort behaviour quite a lot.

Fraud, error and overpayments are endemic; admin costs are enormous and they put a sadistic amount of effort into clawing back overpayments from randomly selected people. And it is savagely means-tested, of course.

Now, if you chuck Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits in the pot and divide it by the number of eligible children, it comes out to about £55 per child per week (see pages 8 and 9 of the Citizen's Income Trust booklet), without the need for means testing and so on, which seems fair enough to me.

If you want to cap this at three or four children per family/mother to "send a message about personal responsibility" then that also seems fair enough; any 'savings' from doing so are minimal in the grander scheme of things (£1 billion a year, perhaps?) but possibly worth having.

The other good thing about having a flat rate amount of £50-odd per child per week is that it sorts out the so-called gender pay gap, which is actually a mothers-vs-everybody else pay gap. If you means-test it, then you leave the pay gap as it is.

Personal Service Companies and Who Actually Pays Tax Confusion

Here


Now, clearly it cannot be 'right' to pay public servants through personal service companies whilst HMRC cracks down on the practice in private businesses under the IR35 rules.  (Which IMHO just highlight the stupidities of the massively over-complex UK tax code).


But to say that this will raise more money for the government is patently untrue.  All these people are employed by the taxpayer, so any tax they 'pay' is just a discount to Real Taxpayers.  It is just money going round in circles.  True, that if these people have less tax taken off their pay, then this 'extra' money in their pockets - or some of it - 'escapes' from the government.  But since it will no doubt be used to buy goods and services - which are themselves taxed - a lot will still 'go back' to the government.


FWIW I know for a fact the Financial Ombudsman Service employs people through Personal Service Companies.  I have fairly concrete suspicions that the Financial Catastrophe Authority does as well.  So the FSCS will also probably be at it.  These are not outside consultants (like another friend of mine is for the ad hoc work he does for the Bank of England) but people sitting in their offices doing 9 to 5 work, well activity, for them.

Even Guido is on the Bandwagon

Here


And the comments are off.  I wonder why?

The most popular search term on bing.com

Predictably enough

UKIP's Nigel Farage wants return to policy 'normality'

From the BBC

UKIP would cut the number of half-baked policy announcements but would not set an annual target, Nigel Farage said.

The party wants bar room policies to return to "normal" levels, said Mr Farage, with between 20,000 and 50,000 dog-whistle ideas given publicity.

A UKIP spokesman said last week that bullshit populist ideas should be capped at 50,000 a year.

Mr Farage insisted the party had not done a U-turn, but said the public were sick of talk about caps and targets, until they're not.

Short List

"Advisors to English kings in the Middle Ages who were called 'Thomas' and ended up falling out with the king and being assasinated/executed."

Thomas Becket
Thomas More
Thomas Cromwell

John b adds: Thomas Cranmer

An earlier treasonous - albeit probably fictitious - Tom got off lightly.

Gimme Shelter

From The Daily Mail and/or Metrolyrics:

Yeah, a local business is threatening
My very life today
If the planners don't turn them down
Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

The planned new café, children, is just two miles away
Is just two miles away
The planned café, children, is just two miles away
Is just two miles away, miles away, miles away, yeah

"Our goal is a Britain where everyone who works hard can have a home of their own"

Sez Dave Cameron.

But what if we turn that statement round:

"Our goal is a Britain where people who aren't working hard have to trade down into somewhere more affordable, and certainly won't be sitting back collecting rent from people who are working hard"?

How many people would sign up to that?

North Sea oil: tax and subsidies

A few ill-thought out ideas from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

From the BBC:

[Gordon Brown] suggested a number of measures that he claimed could help the industry, including;

* A North Sea reserve to maintain and upgrade essential infrastructure and to provide "last-resort" debt finance for companies who want to keep fields open.
* UK government co-investment through public-private partnerships.
* Government loans.
* Advance purchase agreements.

Yup, nationalise it and subsidise it; he doesn't appear to have mentioned tax cuts.

And from City AM:

Deep tax cuts are the way to go. Nothing less than a double digit cut or the elimination of the supplementary charge will achieve the necessary level of impact. The Basin needs help now, or much of it could disappear if the oil price stays at these levels for a number of years...

Rather reassuringly, the article also tells us that extraction costs are £18.50 ($28.50) per barrel, only half the current oil price, so there's still plenty to play for. Most of his special pleading is hokum, but here's the interesting bit:

And if policymakers want to be really radical, there is always the option of introducing production sharing contracts for North Sea exploration.

The UK is out of step with many other oil producing countries, where these arrangements are a standard alternative to our tax and royalty system. In essence, these contracts between governments and extraction companies guarantee a minimum and maximum return on capital, giving companies more financial certainty and governments more tax revenues.
-----------------------------
In outline, the original 1970s system for North Sea oil taxation was quite Georgist. Capital expenditure was allowed as incurred on a cash basis (none of this capital allowance nonsense), which minimised downside risk - but the corporation tax rate was very high. Norway and The Netherlands have stuck with this, quite successfully.

So oil companies ended up with a fair return on capital and the government kept most of the 'rent' or the 'free gift of nature' i.e. the excess of market price over extraction costs.

Interestingly, both Brown and the vested interest guy are stumbling in the right i.e. Georgist, direction, which is to abandon all current taxes on North Sea oil producers and for the government to enter into fixed-price agreements with them to purchase oil for cost-plus, say £30 a barrel.

This gives the oil companies incentives (the price would be set by however much they bid at a reverse auction) and certainty; and the government gets the freebie. It also gets the upside and the downside of oil price fluctuations, but as oil revenues are only a very small part of UK tax revenues, that scarcely matters.

Remember also that even if the world oil price fell below £30/barrel, the UK government would still not be making a commercial loss, because the 'pump price' of a barrel of oil (159 litres), minus refining and transport costs is £1/litre. It would just be making a smaller profit than it otherwise would have been.

Whether the government would get more or less revenue under such a system is neither here nor there, it would be getting the right amount of revenue and that is what matters.