On day eleven of the EU withdrawal bill, some 90 or so hours into the marathon, I slipped into oblivion for 39 seconds. Alas, I was behind Ken Clarke when he was on his feet and therefore, in full view of the TV cameras.

 

In an earlier existence I would never have lasted that long. I recall that the lecture theatre at RMA Sandhurst was known by all the officer cadets as ‘the dormitory’, within minutes of getting in there half the company would be asleep.

 

In fact I had felt a bit woozy and thought I’d go for a coffee, but Ken had just got to his feet and I thought it would be polite to wait until he had finished. Alas, the next thing I remember was my phone vibrating with messages from Priti Patel and Colonel Mark Lancaster telling me to wake up as I was on camera. 

I hoped I’d got away with it, but it was Ken himself who informed me that we were ‘tending’ on social media as the most watched video, and that he had never enjoyed so much publicity for a speech.

 

The constant ribbing is no difficulty, what is rather wearing however, are the sanctimonious emails from people who never succumb.

 

I apologise unreservedly. I must develop the habits of getting up later and going to bed earlier.

 

Carillion secured its business by bidding too aggressively. Anyone letting contracts needs to beware of the dangers of going for the lowest bid without the due diligence necessary to determine if it is the best bid.

That lesson aside, are taxpayers being ripped-off in the way that our newly rediscovered socialists claim?
(Just listen to the contempt in their voices when they spit out the word ‘profit’ as if it were a profanity).

The National Audit Office report does not say that we are getting poor value for the 10% of public services that are provided by through private finance. It does point out however, that capital projects like schools and hospitals cost up to 40% more than had they been financed by government in the traditional way. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that government borrowing costs are always lower than any credit that can be had by the private sector.

This points to the fault at the very heart of the Private Finance Initiative, indeed it’s in its very name.
The proper reason for turning to the private sector is to secure expertise, experience, skills, and a project management culture that might not be readily available in the public sector. The one thing that the public sector can always do better however, is to finance the undertaking more competitively.

I have made my belief clear in this column over many years that the original motive for the private finance initiative owed more to meeting the Maastricht criteria for joining the Euro than it did to sound public finance. The mission was to get the borrowing necessary for important capital projects off the government’s books, even if it cost more in the long run.
In the event we didn’t join, but by then we had fallen into this bad habit.

Further to my column on NHS winter pressures last week, events- in the form of the cabinet reshuffle- have intervened: Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health has had Social Care added to his brief.  This is an important change.

 

The problems of the social care sector have had a direct impact on the NHS, adding to the winter pressures. Frail and elderly patients living alone, who -for whatever reason- end up in hospital, are subsequently unable to be safely discharged because there is nobody at home to look after them. This then leads to the clinically unnecessary occupation of a hospital bed.

 

We are in the front rank of nations where grown up children no longer live with, or close to their elderly parents. In other cultures there is much greater reliance on the family for social care.

 

In the absence of family, the burden has fallen on local authorities to make provision on a means-tested basis, and the squeeze on their own finances has led to inadequate service levels, the withdrawal of providers, and the closure of care homes.
With the number and the proportion of elderly people growing, this problem has to be addressed by more money, much more.
Ever since I entered Parliament, the key question has been, from where will that money be had ?

 

We can all pay much higher taxes, or we can share the cost more equitably between taxpayers and those who need the care. There has however, always been outrage at the prospect of asset-rich elderly people having to deplete their savings, sell their homes, or have their homes sold after their death, in order to meet the costs of their care.

A number of schemes have been devised to protect assets by shifting some of the care costs and splitting them between the insurance market and the taxpayer.
Such a scheme, based on the Dilnot Commission findings, was adopted by George Osborne for implementation in 2021 (allowing further time for the public finances to recover).
Unwisely, as it turned out, the Prime Minister changed this policy during the election campaign last summer, and now the issue is to be revisited over the coming months.

 

I do not share the horror that many fellow politicians have at the prospect of meeting the costs of care from one’s estate, including the principal asset, the home.

As we have made a decision not to expect families to care for their elderly, then families should in turn, not expect to benefit from heritable assets handed on unencumbered.

 

People should always save for a rainy day (and overwhelmingly the British people have chosen to hold most of their savings in the form of property), well, when you need expensive social care, isn’t that a ‘rainy day’ ?

Why is it that we always expect someone else to pay?

Every January when the post-Christmas news is thin, reports of the winter crisis in the NHS take up any slack in the news-feed, and with plenty of hyperbole. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t severe problems facing the NHS, there definitely are. Nothing however, is ever as bad as reported.

From my own experience, a close relative required treatment and an emergency ambulance over Christmas and the service could not have been bettered.
Over the last 20 years I have measured progress in the NHS by the temperature in my postbag (now replaced by my email inbox). It was once at boiling point, but in recent years has come down to room temperature. That measure is corroborated by patient satisfaction ratings, and the fact that independent think tanks and international organisations rate the NHS the best, safest and most affordable healthcare system in the world.

Yet, there are enormous challenges that the NHS has to deal with more effectively.
First, people are far too fat. This obesity epidemic places an enormous chronic burden on the NHS as patients present with any number of conditions that ultimately arise from eating unwisely and doing too little exercise.
Second, the success of advances in medicine over the last half-century brings its own challenges: new treatments have added eye-watering expense to the system; and the beneficiaries of those treatments over the last few decades, who previously would not have survived, now present in their eighties with multiple and complex nursing needs.

Despite these challenges, the NHS treats millions more patients every year and performs millions more operations. This should not surprise anyone because there are thousands more doctors and nurses in the NHS, more than ever before in fact.
(Statistics often mislead: when figures are published showing that the percentage of patients being treated within the target time has fallen at the margin, they conceal the fact that the absolute number of patients treated within the target continues to rise.)

The NHS winter ‘crisis’ however, has become an annual fixture when flu and respiratory conditions, particularly among the elderly are at a peak. Taken together with all the other pressures facing our healthcare system, the organisation is at full stretch and routine treatments have to be delayed in order to manage. This has become part of the annual planning cycle, but given that none of these pressures are going to diminish in future years –on the contrary they are bound to get worse, clearly the organisation needs to change in order to cope more effectively.

All this is true of every other healthcare system in the developed world. The difference is that because ours is a ‘nationalised’ healthcare system, we tend to blame government and complain to politicians.
I don’t believe that money is essentially the heart of our problem. NHS funding is at a record high, and our adversarial political culture will ensure that the parties always competitively bid up the amounts that we are prepared to spend.
The real problem arises when the NHS needs and wants to change and modernise the way that it delivers treatments in order to be more effective and efficient. Invariably vested interests are affected and local concerns may be at variance with larger regional needs. The appeal is then to the politicians, with the NHS becoming a political football. Alas, politicians are not best placed to decide what ought to be  clinical led decisions.

 

 

There are alarming predictions of the toll that artificial intelligence will take on jobs. Every technical revolution has replaced existing forms of employment but ended up creating many more jobs elsewhere. I doubt that this one will be different. Of rather greater concern is my perception that we are in need of artificial intelligence as a replacement for our own, which is diminishing rapidly.

 

We are informed that we are in the midst of a growing epidemic of loneliness. Yet my lasting impression of months of electioneering is that nobody wanted to talk at all. One is greeted with the little notice displayed at the front door ‘no unwanted callers’. (How on earth is one supposed to know if you are unwanted, until you’ve called?)

If there is an epidemic, it is an epidemic of these little notices. Some are more specific, such as ‘no canvassers’ or ‘no religious callers’. The best one I spotted this year was “no purveyors of religious wisdom of any kind”. Others are downright rude.

 

My correspondence by letter has almost completely dried up, to be replaced by a vast amount of email. This differs not just in volume however, people who sent letters to me composed them themselves, and took the trouble to purchase a stamp and make their way to a post box. By contrast, my emails have largely been composed by a website and arrive with other identical ones. Many even leave the instruction ‘Insert name of MP here’ unaltered.

 

Our reliance on electronic communication is unhealthy. High streets are dying because customers sitting at home prefer to shop alone and on-line. People spend hours alone ‘surfing the net’, exposing themselves to fake news and much worse. Often, the few personally composed emails that I do receive, ask for my comment on some daft story that they’ve seen online and believed to be true.

 

People spend their time communicating by text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, becoming anxious and unwell as a direct consequence. Frankly, I resent it every time my telephone buzzes in my pocket to tell me that some other politician has re-tweeted a message first tweeted by the Prime Minister (how nakedly ambitious can you get?), or that a ‘friend’ wants me to ‘like their page’: What drivel human intercourse has been reduced to.

 

In the same way that refined white sugar is poisoning our bodies -we are just not designed to cope with it, so the sheer volume of electronic data, for which our brains were never designed, is similarly affecting us. Our attention spans are getting so short, and we can be persuaded to believe anything.

 

Even teenagers spend mindless hours gawping at electronic screens instead of getting out and doing something useful. When I was that age (14) I was the personal fag to a fellow who rejoiced in the title of ‘Captain of Boats’. One of my daily chores was to wash his rowing shorts: no detergent, only cold salt water. Now that is what I call living.

The Scottish Nationalist MPs at Westminster are a disciplined lot: when they get something between their teeth they stick at it relentlessly as a team effort. Recently their chosen subject for this remorseless treatment has been the closure of bank branches in rural areas. It is an emotive subject and I’ve made my own representations earlier this year against the closure of the last branch in Fordingbridge.

 

The problem isn’t a new one. I recall that when I was working in banking over 20 years ago, we had spotted that our branches were increasingly a cost to us without the benefit of generating much revenue. A cunning plan was hatched to make the branches more productive by having them sell insurance and other financial products to our customers. Well look how that turned out: The banks haven’t yet fully put the payment protection insurance scandal behind them, at a cost of £ billions.

 

The fact is that I haven’t been in a branch of my bank for years, I just don’t need to. It is unrealistic to expect banks to maintain a branch network which is increasingly under-used. Those settlements in this constituency with whom I joined in protest at the closure of their bank, have defied predictions and continued to thrive. The reason is this: there is not much you can do in a bank that you can’t do in a post office, and there is a lot more that you can do besides.

 

It is the post office that is at the heart of communities across the UK, with millions of customers and small businesses relying on their local branch every day to access a wide range of important services. Last week the Government announced up to £370 million of new investment in the Post Office to ensure that the network continues to develop.

Figures published this month reveal that branch numbers are the most stable they have been for decades. There are more branches than last year, with the network growing in size for the last two years to over 11,600 post offices across the country. The number of rural branches has also risen to 6,185. Today, 93% of us live within one mile of a post office.

 

£2 billion of investment in the Post Office since 2010 has led to over seven and a half thousand branches being transformed and modernised, bringing almost a million extra opening hours per month for customers, with 4,400 branches open on a Sunday. Over the next 3 years new technology will be implemented to support products and develop new ones.

 

For the first time in 16 years the Post Office has made a profit. So, don’t worry about the bank, shop at your post office.

In my column of 20^th November, I ended with a question: do the opponents of BREXIT have the numbers to derail the EU Withdrawal Bill?

On Wednesday that question was answered in the affirmative by a majority of five.

The demand was for a ‘meaningful vote’ in Parliament at the conclusion of our negotiations on withdrawal from the EU, but that isn’t what the wrecking amendment actually delivers.

If fact, the Government had already conceded this ‘meaningful vote’.

The Government’s opponents are determined that ‘meaningful vote’ means one that isn’t just “take it, or leave it”. They want to be able to change any agreement that the government makes. They want the ability to send the Government back to the negotiating table with detailed instructions. In effect, this is a bid by Parliament to enter the negotiating process.  This weakens the position because Parliament does its business in public but, to be effective, negotiations have to be conducted in private: you don’t reveal your hand in a game of high stakes poker.

I consider the action of the Government’s opponents as an attempt to wreck the EU Withdrawal Bill.

The bill seeks to incorporate 44 years of EU legislation into UK law so that there is certainty for business, organisations, individuals and government; that we leave the EU in an orderly fashion and that the law will function properly on the day after we leave, as it did the day before.
This is a massive task and, accordingly, the bill gives order-making powers to government to get on with this enormous job without delay.

The amendment that the Government’s opponents voted for -and on which they triumphed- puts off the moment from which some of these order-making powers may be used, until the agreement with the EU has been made, and the bill to give it legislative effect is before Parliament. This delays elements of what is already a complex and very tight timetable.

So where are we now?
In her Lancaster House speech the PM defined Brexit as leaving all aspects of the EU including its internal market and customs union, and instead replacing it a negotiated free trade deal.
As Wednesday’s defeat proves however, the Parliament elected in June has a majority of members who do not share the PM’s definition of Brexit.
Her opponents fall into three categories: Those who really just want to use the issue as a means to bring down and replace her government; those who want to hang on to some form of EU participation in the internal market and customs union; and finally those who see this as really a strategy to prevent our leaving the EU at all, and they are using the others as what Lenin used to call the ‘useful idiots’ in delivering this strategy.

Who will prevail?
It’s still too soon to tell, but the contest will run, and run: So, we all need to cultivate strategic patience if we are to retain our sanity

Of the problems that constituents bring to my ‘surgeries’,  I would estimate that for nine out of ten cases, in whatever way the problem has presented –be it housing, debt, schooling or whatever- scratch the surface, and the real underlying cause is family-breakdown.

 

Sometimes that breakdown is explicit and presents in a dispute over access to the children.

I never cease to be amazed at the way in which some parents are prepared to use their children as weapons in a continuing vendetta against their former partner.

 

I think that the current state of family law exacerbates the situation and cries out for reform.

 

In practical terms, the amount of access that the non-resident parent can have, is set by the resident parent. If the non-resident parent accepts this then that is fine, but if this is not accepted, then the only option is for the non-resident parent to go to court.

 

The court will decide the matter in accordance with the principle set out in the Children Act, namely ‘the Child’s best interests’, but nowhere is this defined, and nowhere is it set out what reasonable expectations of access ought to be.

 

Of course, cases will differ and there must be discretion. Indeed, there will be some parents that ought properly to be denied any access to their children whatsoever.
There ought to be however, a principle underlying a child’s right to see a parent and a parent’s right to see a child. I suggest that the principle should be: ‘unless there is a good reason not to grant reasonable access, then such access should be had’.

 

This still leaves us with the problem of what ordinarily will constitute reasonable access. The Judges in the family courts rely on the ‘expert’ advice of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS). I am suspicious of this expertise: I understand that CAFCASS gives its officers no written guidance on the parenting-time that should be recommended. Neither does it offer that advice to parents, so that they can have an idea of what sort of access is expected in their type of case.

 

The absence of any published guidelines is a standing invitation to the resident parent to be unreasonable and to resist any settlement arrived at by mediation, because there is no expectation about what a court would decide in their sort of case. So, the burden and expense then falls on the court system. Where, because there is no defined principle or reasonable expectation, the outcome can range from full reinstatement of contact to protracted and near total severance as the case grinds on.

 

Furthermore, unreasonable behaviour can become habit-forming. Resident parents -having got into the habit before a court settlement, find it hard to get out of it, resulting in multiple returns to court.

 

I believe that it is high time that the judiciary defined reasonable expectations for broad categories of cases (age related, or whatever).
This guidance needs to be given to separating parents so that they know how the courts are likely to deal with them, should they get there.
This will then inform their behaviour from the outset and make for more reasonable and less costly mediation.

 

At the very least, it’s worth a try.

 

 

I return to the subject of this column published on October 15^th: the student loans system; I concentrated then –as did most of my email correspondence- on the question of the level of fees and the debt with which students are left, but since the Chancellor’s decision to raise the income threshold from £21,000 to £25,000, below which no repayments are made, my correspondence has shifted to the question of the interest rate charged on loans.

 

My emails complain that the rate of 6% is ‘daylight robbery’, and that the extra money should have been spent reducing the interest rate for everyone with a student loan rather than raising the repayment threshold which only helps those who will be on incomes below it.

 

I give two answers. First, it is always best to concentrate relief where it is most needed and this is better done by raising the threshold to protect those on the lowest incomes. Second, the complaint betrays an ignorance of the student loan interest rate system (I don’t blame them for that, because it’s complicated, and it is complicated in order to be fair to students, very few of whom will be paying 6%.)

 

The Government introduced a new tiered rate of interest for students taking out loans from September 2012.

Those with incomes above the income threshold and paying-off loans taken out before 2012 (known as plan 1) will, for the current year (1 September 2017 – 31 August 2018), pay a rate equal to the retail price index (3.1%) -but subject to a low interest cap- which means that they will actually only pay 1.25%

For those who took out loans after the new system was introduced in 2012 (plan 2), interest accrues at a variable rate over the life of the loan dependent upon their level of income:  while studying the interest rate added is RPI + 3%, when a student graduates however, and is earning under the income threshold the interest rate falls to RPI  and when a student is earning over the threshold the interest rate starts at RPI and rises gradually back up to RPI + 3% only when a graduate is earning over £41,000 per year.

The intention of the scheme is to make repayments more progressive so that graduates earning more would repay more. The amount of interest charged therefore depends on the circumstances of the student, which is much fairer.

What we should not return to, is a system where opportunities are fewer, and where 18-year -olds who don’t go to university end up paying higher taxes to pay for the courses of the lucky few who do get a place at university.

 

That said, students do need to be much more forceful in demanding value for their money. An undergraduate complained to me recently that an effective lecturer and tutor on her course had been replaced by a dreadful one, I enquired as to what the students on the course had done about it collectively or individually, the answer was ‘nothing’. Well, nothing will come of nothing: They need to agitate about teaching standards.

I’ve had a worried correspondence about Universal Credit. This has not been informed by experience: the benefit has not yet been implemented in the New Forest; rather, it is based on the hysterical ‘shroud waving’ of politicians and commentators.

Many of my correspondents ask for implementation to be paused until problems are ironed out. This is unnecessary because we learnt from the experience of Working Tax Credit which was introduced as a ‘big bang’ in 2003 -with truly disastrous consequences. For this reason the roll-out of Universal Credit is deliberately very slow. It will not be complete until 2022 and currently only 10% of eligible claimants are on it. The process is designed to identify and remedy difficulties as the implementation proceeds.

Universal Credit replaces 6 benefits, each of which have their own problems and disadvantages. To compare Universal Credit with some previous ideal state is ridiculous. No benefit can be perfect and without anomaly. A benefit has to address the needs of the community as a whole, by encouraging claimants to seek work, and also be effective in the very diverse circumstances of individual claimants who have different attitudes and needs.

Universal Credit addresses many of the limitations of the ‘legacy’ benefits that it replaces.
It removes the discouragement to work more than 16 hours per week that is built into Jobseeker’s Allowance.
It removes the cruel choice between financial support and work which is a feature of Employment Support Allowance  -when most claimants really need a bit of both.
It addresses the disadvantage of Working Tax Credit where, once claimants are in work, there is a disincentive to increase their working hours because they lose 70 pence of every additional £1 that they earn.

The results speak for themselves: Claimants on Universal Credit find work quicker and remain in work longer.

The principal complaint has been that there is six week wait and that people are left to go hungry and their rent arrears to build up. This is just not true: Claimants can get an advance that very same day if necessary.

Most benefits have ‘waiting days’ before which the benefit does not start to accrue. This is to discourage very short term claims when people are between jobs. There were six waiting days for Universal Credit but the Chancellor has now abolished them in his budget last week.
There is a calendar month in which the evidence of the claimant’s circumstances is collected and the amount to which they are entitled is calculated. Then, there can be up to a further week for the payment to reach the claimant’s bank account.

Remember, the purpose of the benefit is to prepare claimants for the world of work: and three quarters of workers are paid monthly in arrears. So, encouraging claimants to budget over a similar period is a good discipline.

For those claimants who need money right away, a same day interest free advance can be had. This was repayable over 6 months, but the Chancellor has now extended it to a full year.

As for the allegation that rent arrears are building up as a consequence of Universal Credit, actually the reverse is true: many claimants arrive with rent arrears and, after four months on Universal Credit, these have on average fallen by a third.

Nothing is ever as bad as reported.