I read a report in the British Newspaper the Telegraph about the abolishing of some  192 public bodies, including the Film Council, the Audit Commission and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.Unveiling the plans in October, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, had told the house of commons that the aim was to restore accountability to large swathes of Government and as a side benefit save some money!

Now however MPs on the Public Administration select committee said much lauded “Bonfire of the Quangos” had been poorly run and that “it won’t deliver significant cost savings or improved accountability”. The cross-party committee suggested that the Tory pre-election promises about cutting “costly bureaucracy” of quangos was responsible for creating a falses expectation of high savings.

Seems to me that the commitee is missing the point although it may be possible to acheive some savings by getting rid of some of these bureacrats the main point is to get rid of these unaccountable job’s worths who do nothing more than provide a level of oppressive control  and provide jobs for political has beens and quangocrats. What is needed is to avoid the setting up of organisations that in many respects act as buffers between those who are ruled and the politicians. Those who set policy should be directly responsible and accountable for the implementation and not be able to fall back on blaming a quango to avoid any due blame for their own incompetence.

Bonfire of the quangos is damp squib, MPs say – Telegraph.

Industry Leaders and Conservatives contemplate commercial rates for student loans

I was a little annoyed by the recent call by the industry leaders and the Conservative policy of selling the student loan book which will mean in practice students paying the equivalent of a commercial rate of interest for their loans at University. Currently the rate of interest for a student loan is set at around the rate of inflation – so assuming inflation gets back to a more normal rate over the next few years the long term loan rate will settle at around 3 to 5%. Although this seems high it is the cheapest way to borrow money to pay for a course and in effect a student will be paying back at purchase power parity. The value of the money paid back is at the same purchase value at the money drawn now.

Actually the interest rate due on loans fell to a negative number – 0.4% recently so at least in theory the principal was being reduced but the government fixed the minimum rate at 0% which sounds great but means that in these deflationary times the loan principle remains fixed and not reduced in line with the notional purchasing power.

One of the justifications for the student loan system was that graduates over a working lifetime would earn substantially more in salary – currently this is being mooted at around £100,000 over a non graduate. This looks like a substantial figure but when the time value of money is taken into account it seems not so much of a justification and when commercial loan rates are taken into account even less so.

The value of money depends upon its timing – money in the hand now is worth much more than money in 20 years time. Over time the value of money is reduced by inflation or by interest charges. For example a shopping basket in twenty years may cost around £45 more on a hundred pound basket of goods just to account for a 4% annual inflation over the time. This means that a £145 basket of goods can be valued at £100 at today’s prices. Similarly higher salaries are spread over the working lifetime and extra cash as a result of your degree can appear in twenty or thirty years time and be worth much less in today’s terms than you might expect.

Lets assume a student loan of £20,000 at the end of a course and treat this as an investment to achieve extra cash flow over a non graduate person each year over a forty year period of £2500 (£100,000 divided by 40). On a discounted cash flow of this money stream at 4% interest the breakeven is some 13 years away and the total value of the £100,000 at today’s prices is about £45,000. In other words for the loan of £20,000 it is paid back and you make £25,000 return on your investment over someone who did not bother. Behind these sorts of figures is the sad fact that most graduates will end up in jobs that pay no more than a non-graduate and will thus never get the return.

The situation is worse if we go along with the hare-brained idea to charge students a commercial loan rate currently at 8%. If we assume a 10% average interest rate over the forty years we are talking about breaking even on the investment in 25 years and the value of our £100,000 coming down to £20,000 at today’s prices. This sort of benefit is so far down the line that in investment terms in a business such a proposal would be thrown out.

We often are taken in by large sounding numbers that materialise years away (remember the endowment fiasco) and forget to account for the timing of the investment or the probability that we can cannot achieve it per se. Most graduates will have rather routine jobs that a generation ago were handled by A level high school leavers and the rewards for others may be years away whilst they find their feet. Training graduates is a long term investment for this country in ‘its’ intellectual capital and should be treated as something that will benefit society as a whole and help us stop or even reverse the long term decline in our global position as a trading nation. University education should be available to those who can do it in a grant maintained format without burdening young people with debts that take years to pay off in exchange for dubious long term benefits.

Although the reality is very different a recent article in computer weekly (a UK based IT Magazine) suggested that companies are being more flexible and attempting to spread the risk by outsourcing to different suppliers in different countries. As Leslie Wilcox of the LSE suggested the process looks like ‘spread betting’. Although this was a nice idea at least in print the practice of doing this for real is proving more difficult as the basis of off-shoring is often to move low value commodity call-centric services to locations where the language matches that of the home country. Accordingly much of the UK based off-shore market has naturally gravitated to India where a large number of skilled, low paid and disciplined people are available to man the phones. The Indian subcontinent turns out twenty to thirty thousand IT graduates a year for example and as a corollary of their degree course often speak English to a high standard. Another factor that causes management heartache with multi-shoring is the problems of managing several off-shore suppliers – its bad enough with one as the practice has shown.

Although innovation is appearing as more important at least in surveys when deciding on outsourcing the main attraction for off-shoring still remains labour arbitrage – i.e. cheaper wages. However in India of late they have been ‘enjoying’ 25% wage inflation in the outsource industry as highly skilled graduates are demanding better salaries – furthermore the attrition rate is extremely high and it seems that graduates do not relish a long term ‘career’ in a call-centre but treat the job as a stepping stone into the world of work. It is these factors (rather than risk reduction) which is causing companies to explore the world more carefully looking for the next low wage spot. Unfortunately there are not many options and talk of using Malta, Singapore are fanciful and only really in the margins, and Russia and China have immense language barriers to overcome before they can be considered

Another remark was made in the article that rather than always going down the low cost route ‘companies are asking for more innovation’ from their suppliers – this is not borne out by any evidence of course and is not clear what is meant by innovation but there is something useful in this comment. That’s the idea is that outsource providers can take up the proposition of innovation and actively improve their service, be more efficient, deliver in more up to date means, whilst constantly improving the cost base. In my view you can have innovation and cost improvement at the same time and suppliers rather than resting on their laurels after the deal is closed should from day one start to improve the service and pass on a fair part of this to the customer. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a customer of such an outsource provider? Working to improve their part of your business to make it more efficient and effective whilst reducing your bill year-on-year – rather than the account manager just turning up once a month to make sure you pay the bill and renew the contract! If suppliers did this they would probably have continuous rights to the business and be invulnerable to critique and outsourcing would look something more like a real partnership based on performance rather than just a mechanism gaining access to the market without much risk.

Royston

see more of my posts on the Bizface Forum

Change Managers in an Outsource often assume that if the rationale for change is made clear to the people affected then change management is unproblematic and resistance negligible. People assume that if we rationally explain to the employees affected they will ‘buy-in’ to the process and thereafter work actively to realise the change or at least moderate their resistance to it. There is a assumption behind all this that changes are negotiated and developed over time and that the change agent’s task is but to make clear the imperatives and the people fall into place – communication mechanisms (usually Slide-Ware) are the main carriers of this type of intervention.

Whilst this approach has been roundly criticised for ignoring political and social aspects it is also more and more disturbed in major system changes. In outsourcing or mergers and acquisitions we are often faced with transitioning organisations within a strict deadline. Here the degrees of freedom are limited and failure to successfully implement can result in stiff penalties for time and cost overruns. In such circumstances our room for ‘negotiation’ is constrained as the change outcome is a given and the people affected are faced with a forced change.

Of interest to us as managers and consultants in such circumstances is how we support the change in particular minimising the business risk, defusing change resistance and avoiding long term damage to the organisation.

Forced change against a strict deadline is the reality and we also see that the complexity in a major change is increasing as many major programmes consist of several big initiatives in their own right. In one major change programme I worked on the client was disentangling from a parent company, implementing major systems changes, whilst outsourcing a part of the operational IT. All of these forcing substantial changes in role and responsibility right across the organisation and this programme also included the outsourcing of substantial parts of the finance function in a phase two.

Don’t forget Managers are affected by an Outsource as well…

At a management level change of status assumes high importance with any perceived loss in autonomy or the need to acquire new skills key aspects to consider. In another change programme the author was involved in the financial controller had a significant change in scope as a result of a system implementation and outsourcing which included loss of staff from her department. This resulted in much prevarication and concentration on detail, non-acceptance of the rational for change and question/problem raising that came over to the central project team as structural resistance.

Also don’t assume managers know how to support their staff through change – because they often do not. Special training and development is necessary. Also be sure that the management has bought in, in one case the stiffest resistance came from the team leader whose scepticism fed the resistance of the whole team being outsourced.

Three Key points in managing change communication

• Relevant - We all know the value of clear communication but forget to caveat this with the need for relevancy. Exhortations of the value of the change at high level are useless unless made clearly relevant to the people affected. Unless the communication is explicitly tailored to the hearer’s specific needs general broadcasts will be discounted and perceived negatively.

• Clear – Avoid the ‘Englishman on Holiday’ change communications approach – i.e. if they don’t understand speak slowly and louder! At a feedback meeting on the situation at a French manufacturing plant the consultants gave a withering overview of the impact of the various initiatives, changes and improvement programmes a major high technology company was imposing on the factory. The response to this from the company – “the management have not explained this clearly enough therefore ‘they’ do not understand it” – obviously they did not get the message either!.

• Segmented – People in change need focused information – how does this new system affect me? Will I still have a job? Will I be able to cope – will they train me? This means communications must be relevant, focused and bespoke aimed at a segmented audience – don’t treat people as the same with the same vanilla information requirements.

Some interventions I have used

• Local briefings at department or group level to strengthen team feelings of unity and develop focus on the task in hand.
• Cutover process – form well managed meetings to act as resolution and solution forum to build for the change-over.
• Tighter linkage to the change-over particularly for the management to expose the organisation to the task in hand and encounter change.
• Activate processes to resolve/close personnel issues — close these issues managers often have difficulty in handling these.
• Mentoring management to actively participate and lead change
• Visible presence of change manager to emphasise the company’s commitment to making the change over
• Reflect listen but not judge issues — allow self-reflection.
• Ensure deployment communications is done (Watch for gate-keeping in one project when I checked the communications had got no further that the secretary)
• Provide recognition of any process improvements ideas and try to push upwards any ideas the team has.
• Recognise that resistance is a legitimate concern for the well-being of the business.
• Ensure communication channels are open and deployed (again this is sometimes not done).
• Hire a consultant to act as change focus (reflecting with support but not judging)
• Tighter engagement of the organisation into the change process — they will switch to solve mode.

As an endnote — Know the limitations of rationally based change methods and avoid broadcast communication. Target and segment communications at the various groups in an organisation and you will be much more successful and managing communicating even bad news. When we design a marketing communications approach we segment our audience and focus messages at specific target groups – this is a lesson we could use within change management.

Royston

Forced change against a strict deadline is now the reality for most changes and what we see more and more is that the complexity of change is increasing and many major programmes consist of several in their own right substantial change tasks.

In one of my jobs I had to advise a major European unit of a global company which had particular change issues that made their changeover within a global project have high perceived business risk. This unit for example had already gone through several changes of ownership in their recent past and was again heavily impacted by the new global program. Our first step was to understand how the change impacted on the group in some detail – on the departments and individuals within the business. Change needed to be thought ‘through’ not ‘about’ and the changes in role and tasks were worked through at a detailed level of granularity – and how these would change as the global project proceeded.

The intervention strategy we considered was based around thinking through what the ‘changed’ organisation’ would look like when the dust had settled. The patterns of communication, the new roles and responsibilities and the impact on individual tasks were considered and what the steps would look like to bridge the gap from the current situation to the future. We worked backwards from the desired state and forwards from the current to meet in the middle! This defined inter alia the changes in role and task, and the necessary training and coaching for the individuals. The transition was trickier, and this was handled by facilitating the transition cutover planning at group level. This acted to involve the organisation in the changeover (it’s on ‘its’ way!) and confronted them with the change and engaged them in participating in the design of the whole process. Getting them to define in detail their future roles and tasks as well as the timings were key aspects of this intervention. Further, interviews and group meetings around the changeover period itself allowed ‘voice’ to be given and concerns and issues to be fully surfaced.

Key learning points

Do not interpret all resistance as opposition to change. Opposition can often be a sign of interest in the outcome and an expression of legitimate concern Capture the concerns and rationale. It may be that someone has identified a flaw in our reasoning and may have identified a route to possible failure, perhaps from the last time this occurred. To find out why it did not work last time may reveal some interesting lessons. However, be cautious about agreeing with an issue as this may be interpreted as a sign that the change can be negotiated – capture without judgement.

The assumption that all employees will go through the same cycle of resistance is false and too simplistic. Often there are winners in a change process. Identify these and build coalitions to build a success culture. Furthermore, some departments or groups of people are more successful or more robust with handling change than others. Building on these departments within an organisation help bring the whole organisation along

We all know the value of clear communication but forget to include the need for relevant clear communication. Exhortations of the value of the change at high level are useless unless made clearly relevant to the people affected by the change. Unless the communication is made explicitly relevant to the employees specific needs they will switch off and ignore you.

Royston

In a recent Dun & Bradstreet report they noted that “25 percent of all outsourcing fails” completely and over 50% of all outsource deals do not deliver any substantive benefit at all. Outsourcing failures are often the result of companies rushing into transactions with unrealistic or unsubstantiated expectations of cost savings and performance improvements that cannot be met because the client does not communicate its requirements in a clear way either internally or to the potential vendors. The outsourcing of many business processes besides IT also has the same less-than-stellar results – call centre problems are almost a
cause célèbre. Some people believe you need hundreds of pages of detailed specifications as complex as War and Peace to make outsourcing work at all tying up the whole thing in a tight contract that covers every possibility – clearly not a practical proposition.

The main causes of failure in an outsource in my view are :

• The buyer’s unclear expectations up front as to its objectives – poorly defined goals and requirements and a lack of outsourcing contract management capability are two of the top reasons for IT outsourcing failures.
• The parties’ interests maybe aligned up front but become misaligned as the buyer’s business environment or needs change over time (as they will inevitably)
• The provider’s poor performance against service level agreements – which in some cases is dramatic.
• The parties do not consider each other’s interests to ensure their relationship is mutually beneficial – the naturally conflicting objectives and the need for vendors to make money are often not really internalised by clients.
• Poor governance structure for managing the ongoing relationship – in some cases this is left just to account management.
• Poor cultural fit compatibility of the parties – asymmetric sizes between client and vendor as well.
• Poor communication; the parties do not proactively share necessary information with each other – the relationship deteriorates rapidly when information is hidden

In another recent work I have been involved with there have been several instances of buyers and outsourcers in direct conflict and not inclined to acknowledge their own influence on outsourcing failures. The blame game starting early on in the relationship. Hidden costs, high staff turnover and poor cross-cultural communications are also some of the key causes of offshore outsourcing failures. Another big source of outsourcing failures is the way that outsourcing vendors tend to “sell high,” pitching their projects to the CEO rather than to the IT staff and managers who really know how to run the business – this enrolment of ‘C’ level managers is often the source of great difficulty when the real discussions take place. They have bought into a process based on high level aphorism that have little practical value on the street corner.

If you choose to look at global outsourcing as an opportunity, as numerous companies do, you may quickly realize that making it work requires a carefully planned and orchestrated approach. I suggest, though, that the current failure rate of performance improvement in outsourcing is only tolerated because the full extent of failure is disguised; few organizations or individuals are willing to admit the extent of failure on a major outsource contract. Failing at this game can have career damaging consequences.

See more at Bizface in the Outsourcing forum

So we are told that IT heads are keeping the faith in outsourcing (survey computer week) despite the sight of bedraggled refinery workers picketing outside factory gates carrying placards with ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. A slight whiff of fear is evident in the Outsource market as the implications of what these workers were saying quickly sunk in. What they were complaining about was not just about jobs being given to others but the way it was being done – using labour arbitrage – i.e. cheap labour in a situation not too dissimilar to the ‘globalisation’ of the IT services market. This is where executives scour the world to save a few cents on labour cost and when the advantage is gone move onto the next cheap site of well disciplined labour. Globalisation in this context meaning the ability to transfer work without hindrance to the area that is at that moment the cheapest – then moving on. Surfing the world to where there exists a compliant government to ensure the unions do not get out of hand and rock the economic boat and get in the way of more profit.

I think it is interesting that already attention is starting to switch from India as a supplier of commodity services for example to countries such as the Ukraine. This trend partially as a result of increased labour cost in India where top level graduates are not putting up with low wages in call centres for handling routine service calls from the UK. Wage inflation, currency movement, and intense competition for the low end commodity services is driving out the advantage they once had. What they will find is that the train moves on – just as it did in the manufacturing industry some years back – their initiatives to attempt to move away from commodity is a sign of this.

Keeping faith with globalisation in outsourcing or off-shoring means carrying on the illusion of creating better organisations and delivering illusionary savings by shipping work to low cost areas – deskilling the local workforce and removing opportunities for entrants in the IT professions. The refinery workers are reflecting this and they are waking up to what the notion of globalisation really means – it is not abstract but has real consequences – particularly in periods of economic stress. They are resisting and although we may disagree with some of the xenophobia – they are shouting out that they are stakeholders in our society every bit as important as managers and executives who assume so much control over their lives and livelihoods.

Royston

Having had a disastrous handover to comrade Brown – in fact those of us in the know when the question of whether Tony or Brown should head up the Labour Party and fight for a new labour government at that time knew Brown would probably never win the first labour election victory. His weaknesses at an early time being evident to all: member of the living dead, no charisma (not surprising as member of living dead), and an unfortunate speaking tic (where the jaw is dropped at the end of each sentence ) that drives one mad. No one doubted his intellect, at least compared with the rest of the Labour Muppets around at that time, but what he lacked was leadership – Brown for all his ability, is a manager, not a leader – no one will identify or aspire to be him or, will internalise his pronouncements and make them their own – In the end this will do for him even if he manages to divert attention from the mess he got us into after ten years in charge at No11 by convincing autocratic millionaire Arab kings to fund his public sector spending splurge. It must be said that we want to be led like sheep in this country, and that’s why Tony Blair was so successful – he talked a load of crap – but did this so well and effectively that we thought it was eminently sensible to follow him to the back of beyond – i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now we are faced with another year or two of Brother Brown burying this country in debt and then what may be an election defeat for him (even though the labour party has built up quite a client state over the last ten years) the labour party has cooked up a ruse whereby in the future we can ensure a constant supply of party leaders in the mould of good ol Tony. Now personally I find this the kind of hell my Sunday School teacher talked about (can you imagine Tony being on the Throne for ever its almost as bad as thinking of Madge or Charles on the Throne) but almost a logical extension with this blind following of ever more outrageous claims made by scientists in the area of cloning, ‘embryo’ research and animal experimentation.

As a stake inoculation I might point out I have several postgraduate science degrees and so know the game quite well when it comes to getting funding for, or permission to experiment in, areas of dubious ethical and scientific value. There is an inevitable testing of the boundaries by scientists researching at the limits of relevancy into some aspects of human health. We have over the last few years seen a procession of eminent scientists telling us poor mortals that a new area of research must be allowed in order that some disease or other will be banished, couples helped to conceive, or needed in order for the brain drain of our top scientists to be prevented. Now the arguments or discursive practices being deployed is never ‘oh we need the Dosh to carry out some PhD research’ because we need the grant money, ‘its’ always posed as: needed to find a cure for genetic diseases, or childhood diseases (usually muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis), possibly cancer which is always good for a bob or two, or helping childless couples conceive.

What is disturbing is not obvious good intentions co-opted for political gain but the way this cock and bull nonsense is swallowed by politicians and how a bevy of worthies (my eminent scientists) are wheeled out of the closet to tell us we (Jo Public) should allow all this without any critical discussion. They offer vague platitudes and little critical justification other than implied self interest that we or close family will be helped by this further extension of the ability of science to play with life or to carry out revolting experiments on primates.

Elsewhere in one of the other Blogs on www.Bizface.co.uk the blogger talks about stewardship, doing something that does not have any implied gain but doing something that is right for rights sake. The extension of life for a few months, or the ability to allow someone to overcome biological constraints to conceive, is not enough justification for me to allow playing with the fabric of life. It is not the specific issue of allowing hybrid cells to be created in order to improve stem cell research, as in this case, but the systemic problem of constant leverage of ethical boundaries without informed consent and the labelling of those who raise a yellow card as latter day Luddites – or even labelling them as going beyond their brief and interfering in the secular political world. What’s at issue here is ‘issue selling’ to the public to permit an anything goes approach and we need to think more clearly about setting the bounds. An informed debate in the Commons needs to take place , not constrained by party loyalties to begin this process, as a start to an informed approach.

Some Quotes on this:

“The irony is that this secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people, and to play games with the humanity of those in between.”

Anglican Bishop of Durham Rt Rev Tom Wright

“For people out there suffering from Parkinson’s disease and motor neuron disease, this is not a question of some issue about the procedure through the House of Commons. This is an issue about whether we can find the drugs that can cure their illnesses. So this is the heart of the matter.” Alan Johnson Minister of Health and Former Postman

“It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which more comprehensively attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill.

CARDINAL Keith O’Brian

“This research has massive potential to provide treatments for serious debilitating disorders ranging from developmental abnormalities in young children, to stroke, cancer, HIV/Aids, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, as well as better and safer treatment for infertile couples.” Medical Research Council (this was a good quote as they managed to get in all the worthy causes in one piece)

Some years ago I was sitting in the accountancy module B212 ‘window dressing and off balance sheet techniques‘ during my Masters course when the lecturer at the time piped up that one of the biggest fears in finance was the fact that mortgages were lent long whilst money was saved or acquired from the market short. In principle short money can be called for very quickly whilst paying back a mortgage on demand is impossible. A interesting discussion took place as we considered the possibilities of savers suddenly loosing confidence and withdrawing funds to stuff under the mattress or inter-bank lending suddenly drying up and the fact that as mortgagees we would be unable to pay our loans on demand loans so all chaos could result.

Obviously I am drawn to this reminiscing from a course more than 20 years ago by this weeks events and the thought that we have actually looked into the abyss. If this loss of confidence had gone much further there is actually no way that any government could cover all of the required finance without long term fiscal consequences when looking at the proposed bailout of 700billion in the US this is clear – the figures are simply too huge – and there was (perhaps still is) a chance or a real depression. So how did we get here when the risk was well known. We have and governments are too blame here began to assume that the ongoing growth period from the mid nineties would go on forever – we believed for a short while the Brown and Bush nonsense that the boom and bust and the cyclic nature of economies was a thing of the past. Actually not many economists bought this line but there seemed to be over the last ten years a creeping complacency in the market and in the economy at large that growth would continue house prices would rise and all would continue as before – a complacency that ended a few short weeks ago.

One of the problems faced by HBOS for example was the breaking of the linkage between grannies saving, and loans being made to the newly forming families to buy their homes. Grannies tend to keep their money safe in a Bank for a rainy day – so save relatively long. More of the money that was being lent was being acquired on the wholesale market thus very short and when money becoming in short supply and loans were called in the whole circus came to an end. Coupled with this trend the window dressing of junk debt and reselling as triple A in other areas meant in some cases these inter-bank loans were unpinned by toxic and rubbish debt that could not in any case be collected. So a prediction of an accounting professor twenty years ago came all to true in a few turbulent weeks.

What is a little depressing about the saga of some of those who have fallen is they carried out these feats of financial engineering to the plaudits of their peers only a short while ago. The CEO of HBOS for example was hailed as a ‘genius’ only last year – to some extend it was rather pleasing to see a rueful former CEO contemplating the handover of his company in a garage sale to one of his former rivals. A 300 year old company sunk during his short three years at the helm – a nice achievement not unique unfortunately if you look across the water.

There is an old saying that goes ‘when the going gets tough the politicians run for cover’ and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic squarely place the blame on the city or processes such as short trading and not themselves. Not minded to the fact that their policies and management of the economic context and their abject complacency has led us to where we are now. In he UK eye watering public sector borrowing to finance the client state, virtually no monetary policy, the encouragement of a reckless financial environment the surreal belief that would go on forever and the belief in the infallibility of their stewardship and lack of responsibilities are where some the explanation lies. It was even more unedifying to see Brown and Captain Darling claiming credit for facilitating the solution to HBOS which they themselves had practically caused – now for more weeks of historical reconstruction.

I am becoming used to seeing Gordon Brown in his many guises or relaunches (currently around number seven) giving out the impression that he is more or less single handedly running every ministry in this country. From facilitating mergers between banks, solving Clostridium difficile in hospitals, greeting our hero Para Olympians back home to lagging. It is the latter theme I would like to dwell on as I was astonished to see the other day the Prime Minister of the country on national TV launching a very minor initiative that in more normal times would have been handled by a much more junior member of staff. Here we saw the great man extolling (well droning on about) the virtues of his new ‘lagging credit’ where if you are destitute or living in a croft somewhere in the god forsaking north of Scotland you can get a grant towards cavity foam insulation or lagging the turf on the roof. It was a careful exercise in avoiding any concession to the middle class and ensuring that only his clients in the north (well it is cold up there) would benefit from his largesse whereas the rest of us have to fork out – the proposal being completely riddled with caveats and exclusions designed to exclude anyone not minded to vote labour.

What was more annoying was that he was in fact not giving us anything. Dressed up as a government initiative and as a vehicle for relaunch it seems that the energy companies on threat of swingeing ‘windfall’ taxes have to do this. If you are living in a turf roofed and lined croft in Brown’s constituency you have to apply to the companies for the work to be done gratis or at the discount rate if you have some spare cash. This whole thing was yet another example of a politician making an announcement, claiming the credit whilst taking no responsibility for the implementation or the consequences. What is certain is the energy companies, quite rightly in my view, will have to cover these costs by adding ‘it’ to the bills of Joe Public you and me – of course turf living Brown voters will be able to claim relief. Now for me it is a good thing to concentrate on energy saving we cannot go on as we are but to dress all this cock and bull nonsense as some sort of give away by Brown is absurd. This was only designed to make him look good and defuse the Left of his party who regard any aspect of profit making by energy companies or otherwise as an anathema so wanted the so-called windfall tax and this boil had to be lanced before his next relaunch (the eight) at the conference this week.

I don’t think this (the seventh or is it eighth I forget) relaunch will work either – the labour party have to come to terms that Gordon Brown is not and never will be a leader – so stop trying to make him out something he is not. What we need is some management by ministers including Brown to at least steer the ship of state roughly in the right direction until the next election when thank god we have the chance of getting rid of these incompetent bunch of morons – although what job any of these could do when they bombed out is beyond me.

Cheers from a Croft in Wales

Royston