'"Park and Skim" still proving a nice little earner for Work Programme Prime Providers'

says House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions 'but that aside, it isn't really delivering much".

Commenting on the report, Dame Anne Begg MP, Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, said:

“The performance of the Work Programme in its first 14 months was poor. There are signs that it is now improving significantly for mainstream jobseekers. We hope the next job outcome statistics to be published in June will bear this out – we will be very concerned if they don’t."

or: it is quite good at placing those people who would have found themselves a job anyway in work of some sort, as further clarified by Dame Anne who goes on to say

"However, the Work Programme has proved much less successful to date in addressing the problems faced by jobseekers who face more serious obstacles to finding a job – people with disabilities, homeless people, and those with a history of drug or alcohol abuse. It is clear that the differential pricing structure is not a panacea for tackling creaming and parking. The Government must do more to ensure that the Work Programme provides effective support for all jobseekers, not just the ones who are easiest to help”.

The Committee concludes that the Work Programme’s differential pricing structure, which is designed to financially incentivise contracted providers to support those with more challenging barriers to employment, is not having its intended impact on providers’ behaviour. The hardest to help jobseekers remain at risk of being “parked”—given little or no support by providers who assess them as being unlikely to find sustained work.

or: maybe have a go at removing or toning down the "money for old rope" aspects and get these so called experts actually doing something to try and justify having the programme at all.

Home-Owner-Ist In Chief on top form

From City AM:

Wealth taxes – on property(1), cash, equities and other assets, including unrealised gains – always mean that some people will end up paying more in tax than the amount they earn (2) – while this might sound crazy, it is a feature, not a bug, of the system. The whole point is to make people poorer(3) and to reduce their overall wealth.(4) By contrast, income taxes and other levies on new income – as well as on realised capital gains – only reduce the increase in wealth, rather than seizing previously earned and taxed income (5). There is a big difference between those two approaches.(6)

Yes, this man wants you to vote for a system which makes you poorer, because it enables his sponsors in The City to become ever richer.

A few simple facts which he would never admit:

1) No sane person is proposing a general tax on wealth; they never raise much and collapse under the administrative burden of precisely defining and measuring "wealth". Which is why we have income tax on dividends and interest income, that does much the same job (i.e. if shares yield a dividend of 4% and higher rate income is 25% of the dividend received, that's like a 1% annual wealth tax).

Like all good Homeys, he insists on using "property" as synonymous with "land" and on bracketing in land wealth with private wealth when it is fundamentally different. Land "wealth" is merely a measure of the total annual rental value of land, which as we well know is created by the actions of the whole nation (or even whole continents if the nations in it are not at war). Land rents are national wealth. So a tax on the annual rental value of land does not affect private wealth and can't possibly reduce national wealth, it is just a fair user charge.

And people who want to live off national wealth for nothing in return are referred to by his ilk as "scroungers". Why do households who get a couple of hundred quid a week in welfare count as scroungers but people who get hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in land rent count as "aristocracy"?

2) That only happens if people insist on over-occupying. If people want to pay less, they can trade down. It makes more sense for workers and businessmen to live near where they work, land rents are higher where there is more economic activity and they are the ones who can afford to pay the tax, why not let them live there?

3) The whole point of income tax (and private collection of national wealth) is to make workers and businessmen poorer and landowners, bankers, politicians and quangocrats richer. So he has completely missed the point as per usual and turned all logic upside down.

4) Income tax is far worse than that. Taxes on earnings, output and profits have huge deadweight costs. For every £1 collected, the economy shrinks by 50p (and then we need to collect yet more income tax to pay for the unemployed). A tax on land has no dead weight costs and actually stimulates economic activity, so for every £1 collected, the economy grows by a few pence. And of course having a user charge for consumption of national wealth does not reduce the amount of national wealth. Imagine: businesses were no longer allowed to charge their customers. Would total wealth increase or decrease?

And while a tax of £1 per year on each worker makes all workers £1.50 worse off in eternity, a £1 annual tax on a plot of land does make all owners of that land in future worse off. The price will be reduced to compensate future owners. We get over it and move on.

5) Typical Homey crap: "I bought my land out of taxed income". No you didn't. You paid off a mortgage out of the money you saved in rent, and the bulk of the value (all the increases in rental value or selling price since then) is an entirely unearned free gift bestowed on you by the equally Home-Owner-Ist government (and if you are old enough, they will have done you the favour of wiping out half your mortgage with inflation).

6) Yes, there is a big difference. Taxes on earned income stifle the economy and help to transfer wealth upwards so that it becomes ever more concentrated and work becomes less and less worthwhile compared to land speculation. Taxes on land rents stimulate the economy (however slightly) and constantly level the playing field between regions, between generations and between the vested interests and the vast majority.

Well duh!

Work Programme staff struggle to help unemployed when 'jobs aren't there'

Well, slap me down with a wet fish, who would have thought it. Think it we might but what we must remember is that various really clever people holding important positions in governments present and past had an inkling that that might be the case, which is why they set up highly expensive because they are so really clever special schemes operated by the people with the right sort of proven expertise and skills and connections to just bypass that and get at least 3 unemployed people into "long term" work for every single job vacancy declared … Clever or not, the article seems to suggest that “all is not going well” and things are being made oh so difficult by the absence of...

The fiscal multiplier in action

From City AM:

THE PLANNED cut in national insurance payments for employers is making one in three small- to medium-sized companies more optimistic about hiring staff, according to figures out today.

Chancellor George Osborne said in his March Budget that the government will waive the first £2,000 on employers' national insurance bills from April 2014. The so-called employment allowance is set to save companies £5.9bn between 2014 and 2018 and a third of employers will no longer pay national insurance contributions, according to government estimates.

Why would it encourage small businesses to take on a significant number of additional employees? If anything, it's a big incentive for a small employer to stay below the £2,000 threshold, which is quickly reached - that would only cover the Employer's NIC on one employee paid £22,000 per annum, on two paid £15,000 or on three paid £13,000. Beyond that, the marginal cost of employing people is exactly the same as it ever was.

But most galling is this bit of fiscal multiplication right at the end:

National insurance, a tax paid by both workers and employers, funds certain state benefits, pensions and the NHS. The coalition has attempted to reform the levy since being elected three years ago.

Does it f-ck!!

From memory, NI raises just over £100 billion a year. State pensions are £90 billion a year, the NHS costs well over £100 billion a year and there's another couple of £ billion for contributory Jobseeker's Allowance. So it covers pensions and a bit of working age benefits but it certainly does not magically pay for the NHS as well. It wouldn't even pay for the NHS in isolation.

And no, the coagulation has not "attempted to reform the levy", they cheerfully bumped up the total rate from 23.8% to 25.8% of gross earnings and left it at that. Sod the employers and employees, those nasty grubby little people who have to engage in free exchange of goods and services in order to make a living.

"Pensioner dragged off his scooter before being kicked and bitten to death… by DONKEYS"

It all sounds far too gruesome for words. Those cute little animals which carried Mary to Bethlehem and give kids rides on the beach etc. have started kicking and biting people to death?

Actually, there's a good idea in there...

From the BBC:

The charity* is calling for more action from central and local government - and parents - to get more young people walking.

In Hertfordshire, it says a pilot scheme it was involved with, funded by the Department for Transport, led to more children walking. Tactics included offering incentives, such as badges or stickers, to children who walked to school, plus promotional events.

A "park and stride" scheme was brought in, where parents dropped their children at a place close enough for them to walk to school with a teacher or other nominated adult.

* The "charity" is called Living Streets. You know straight away that this is probably a fakecharity story because it's full of crap about the "obesity epidemic" and the article ends up with a spokesman for the government agreeing that "more must be done", but let's just check... aha, right, just look at their list of sponsors, it's mainly government departments and other fakecharities.

But the "park and stride" could be a very good idea - in certain circumstances:

For example, I walk my little girl to school. It is next door to another school on a narrow one-way residential street, and there's another school on the other side of the main road (behind the two schools), and of course most of the mums drive to school and then they have to stop and chat and admire each others' 4x4s for ten minutes so the whole thing is a nightmare. Why is it that women always have to form groups right where it is most inconvenient for everybody else, for example in a doorway or clogging up the pavement outside the school? All the dads just drop off their children at school and then stride purposefully towards the Tube station.

These three schools could do the walking parents and local residents a huge favour by asking the parents who insist on driving their little pets to school to drop them off somewhere where parking is much more convenient/safer (there are a couple of large car parks within ten minutes' walk), and every five or ten minutes, a responsible adult could accompany a group of them up the hill and drop them off at their schools (the uniforms are a handy kind of colour coding so that it's easy to make sure the right children go to the right school).

Ooooh! Kinky!

From Pink News:

The Conservative MP [Jacob Rees-Mogg] for North-East Somerset has said that he will choose to be "whipped" by the Catholic Church rather than by his party.

The mind boggles.

In today's Metro he was reported as saying:

"I believe it is the right of the churches to define marriage, not the right of the state, so I shall vote in accordance with the Roman Catholic whip"

Righty-ho. But that doesn't answer the question "Who decides what is a 'church' and what isn't?" The answer must be either a) the members of the church or b) the 'state'.

As an aside, after 1945 there were a lot of so-called "uncle marriages" in Austria and Catholic areas of Germany. This was because war widows were set to lose their war widows' pensions if they remarried, so what a lot of couples did was to have the big wedding in the local Catholic church (to make the relationship socially acceptable) but never register this at the official register office. So in the eyes of the 'state' these war widows were not actually married and could continue to draw their war widows' pensions.

The expression "uncle marriage" arose because the widows' children were encouraged to refer to their step-father (?) as their "uncle", just so that there would be no nasty mix-ups with the authorities. But the point of the example is that there is quite clearly a difference between "being married" from the point of view of the Church and "being married" from the point of view of the 'state'. A couple can be one or the other or both as it sees fit. And presumably there are bizarre situations where one parner is considered to be married and the other isn't. And what about polygamists who come to the UK - do the second and third wives actually count as "wives"?

As per usual for religious fanatics, Rees-Mogg wants the best of both worlds (like Islamists complaining about the UK government abusing their human rights).

Fun Online Polls: The next General Election & Sandwiches

On a good turnout of 116 votes, the results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who do you think will form the government after the next General Election?

Labour-Lib Dems - 33%
Conservative-UKIP - 28%
Labour - 28%
Conservative - 4%
Conservative-Lib Dems - 1%
Other, please specify - 6%

That's most interesting. My current assumption is that the Lib Dems will lose a lot of their MPs and Labour will just about get a majority of seats. One thing we can be quite certain of, going by recent history, is that the next government will be slightly worse than the current one. Even if it's another Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.

And electorally, the Conservatives and UKIP could do themselves a huge favour by having some sort of electoral pact (overt or covert). But both parties are far too proud to be seen approaching the other and it is unlikely to happen in the near future (but two years is a long time in politics). To some extent, they each pretend that the other party does not even exist (and how can you approach a party which you refuse to admit exists?).
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Somebody (I can't remember who) complained about all the proliferation of words for "sandwich" and listed a few. That's a fair point, some of them are rather stupid.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll - which do consider to be acceptable synonyms for sandwich?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"some significant doubts about the quality of the new regime statistics"

Spare a thought for Iain Duncan Smith,  and indeed his junior ministers at the Department of Work and Pensions,  who, as if they aren't burdened enough by having to deal with one needless problem getting in the way of their broadcasting  their success in the mission to solve unemployment, and also having to contend with running needless enquiries into the non-existence of targets up pop two more.

First up some damn fool members of the judiciary have decided  that members of the public ought to be allowed to know which employers and organisations are being public spirited enough to provide work experience places, something which says the DWP the employers and organisations doing it, no doubt through reasons of modesty, do not wish to publicise.

And secondly; having gone to the trouble of establishing beyond peradventure via a rigorous internal enquiry that there aren't any "targets" of any sort operating on the matter of "sanctioning benefit recipients and claimants" the department has now it seems uncovered a few possible inconsistencies in some data it was due to publish on the impact on the issuing of "sanctions" following changes to its procedures last October, and has had to delay publication of these for an as yet unspecified period. 

A similar fate appears to have befallen the data it collects on Employment Support Allowance - the replacement for Incapacity Benefit - claimants and recipients, and the fate of former IB recipients on being given the Work Capability Assessment by Atos, to see whether they qualify for either of the two tiers of ESA, or were simply pulling a fast one all along, something the present government and indeed their predecessors who actually brought in Atos and the WCA have repeatedly said at least a million IB recipients were and are.

So, tough times at the DWP.   On the matter of that judicial decision that despite the wishes of the work experience providers to remain so far as possible anonymous, the public should be allowed to know who they are Iain Duncan Smith might wish to seek another special out of the way meeting with his opposite number in the Labour ranks, Liam Byrne about "another deal” around having some hurriedly introduced retrospective legislation that puts every single aspect of the Work Programme firmly out of the reach of meddling members of the electorate and the damned judiciary...

... and possibly Parliamentary Select Committees too... a matter on which under the deal Labour will once again have a "whipped abstention" on the legislation to ensure it passes quickly and without fuss which Liam will explain via an article on his personal website has been done in order to extract a concession from I D S whereby anyone on the Work Programme breaching the new "confidentiality rules" that will be brought in as part of that retrospective legislation which bar them from ever letting anyone at all know where they are doing or have done some "work experience" that anyone who fails to abide by those confidentiality rules wont have their benefits suspended for more than 12 months as a punishment.

On the matter of those damned stats, well the call has gone out for someone experienced in the matter of presentation to come lend a hand.

Will the £600,000 Help to Buy ceiling be "far too low" for some?

Well possibly, given it doesn’t kick in until 2014