vodafone and o2 have both had a close brush with Ofcom for failing to meet the minimum 90% coverage requirement on 3g, whilst the other networks are at 98% +.

For voice only, vodafone probably has the best coverage but highest call failure rates, 02 uses half rate all over the place with the result that the sound quality is terrible but you’ll get a connection.

for the best overall service (voice and data), in most places test by rootmetrics so far, Three and EE have the best coverage and service quality. EE have reached around 70% population coverage with 4G and are aiming for 98% by year end – something it’s going to take o2 and Vodafone at least another 2 years to do.

GO isn’t exactly getting a “deal for the super rich” on his interest rate – at 2% he’s paying twice as much as we’re paying on our Santander mortgage.

top news – that’s made my evening.

Daft point really – but just designed to show how crass politics has become – IDS isn’t actually a millionaire but does live in a house worth £2m that isn’t his – as is the case with most people who work for the Royal Family.

Ed Milliband, who likes to promote the class war angle at every push with the constant references to Toffs, inherited a property through a series of trust arrangements designed to reduce the tax liability and now owns a house that’s currently worth 2.7m according to Zoopla – and had a mortgage of less than £400K in 2012..

Rachel Reeves, the shadow minister for Work and Pensions used to work in Banking as an economist and is potentially part of the nonsense that caused the recession and subsequent need to trim the benefits bill.

So which of these people would be “better” to run the department? The Banker, the millionaire leader of the Labour party, or the person who lives in a £2m house but doesn’t own it?

after fixed costs of rent, utilities, etc:

Mobile phone £2
Lunch / coffees at work £20
Cycle to work so no cost there
Food at home £25
Going out / beers £25
Clothes – probably averages out at £10 a week

The Times today carries a story about the Jury from the trial – who are now subject to protective measures and have guaranteed anonymity following threats made from the public gallery in the court room.

The article also tells us a bit more about the family and illustrates the difficult job the police have to do – protecting a man who only a week earlier was making threats to kill policemen.

“Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, met community leaders yesterday morning and expressed confidence that progress would be made.

“This is about a relationship. It has much history and many difficult moments over the years. Yesterday was another,” he said. “The positive and constructive way in which we have discussed this challenge gives me great hope for the future.”

The threat to kill two policemen in revenge for Duggan’s death is recorded in two entries in a cache of leaked police documents. A man newly confirmed as one of the six targets of the operation that led to Duggan being shot was reported by an officer to have made the threats.
Less than a week later, police were called on to protect the same man, after intelligence that his life would be at risk should he attend the all-night wake held after Duggan’s burial.

Duggan’s link to the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, can now be revealed. Police say both were members of the Tottenham Man Dem (TMD), but, like Duggan, he has not been convicted of any violent crime.

Officers from the CO19 firearms unit shot Duggan dead when police rammed a taxi carrying him. The inquest was told a limited account of his web of links to the criminal underworld, extending through London gangs to crime families in Manchester, where he spent his teenage years.

The cache of raw intelligence documents seen by The Times first mentions the suspected gangster — a successful businessman living in a large house in an affluent area — when police in North London tried to arrest one of three known gang members seen acting suspiciously in a black BMW.

An officer was attacked and two further arrests were made for obstructing police and assault on a police officer.
“A large crowd gathered whilst Officers were dealing with the Males,” the report states. “[The alleged gangster] was seen nearby . . . [He] approached Officers and tried to engage them in conversation.
“References were made to the shooting of Mark DUGGAN by Police and mentioned made [sic] that 2 Officers were going to be shot in retaliation.”

The man, who was granted anonymity during the inquest under data protection laws, was the subject of further intelligence later that week suggesting that he would be shot or stabbed should he appear at the wake.

It is not clear whether police acted on the intelligence, but there was no violence on the night.

Duggan’s links to known and suspected gangsters extend to his family. He was linked to Manchester’s feared Noonan family via his uncle Desmond “Dessie” Noonan. Noonan’s second wife, Julie, is the sister of Duggan’s mother, Pamela.

Noonan was stabbed to death by a drug dealer in 2005. His brother Dominic, the alleged leader of the gang, was arrested but cleared over allegations that he organised looting when the riots hit Manchester.
Duggan moved closer to the Noonan branch of the family when he was sent to live in the city with his aunt Carole, who has been perhaps the most prominent member of the “Justice for Mark Duggan” campaign, after his behaviour at secondary school became a concern.

On his return to the family home near Broadwater Farm in London, Duggan became involved in the TMD, which the inquest was told had been involved in a string of recent shootings at nightclubs and elsewhere.”

I’m interested – for those that think he should be removed, who is better placed to take on the role, and what policy changes should be made to drive significant improvements in the performance of our children in Maths, Literacy and Verbal Reasoning?

Given that the performance of children in the UK has been sliding on many international comparators for the last 15 years, what is the root cause and what is the solution?

the VM deal is worth a look but the speed is capped at 2 meg so if you download a lot that’s something to think keep in mind.

The claim that HMRC is understaffed is a nice story – it has almost as many staff as the US Inland Revenue Service but for a working population of only c31 million people compared to the 140m people in active employment in the USA.

rwamartin – thanks.. do you normally fit the icon 30 or 50 in bathrooms… I think the 15 might be on the small side but can’t get any help from the manufacturer because I’m not in the “trade”..

trail_rat, yep already tried that… thanks for the suggestion though..

does anyone know what flow rate / draw would be needed for a 13 m3 bathroom? Our current one (an Icon airflow 15) is useless but I can’t work out what I need instead – or whether the next model up in the range (an icon 30) would do the trick…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/10214802/Most-Coalition-free-schools-rated-good-or-outstanding.html

There was quite a good interview on Radio 4’s “PM” programme tonight that debunked a lot of the nonsense that’s said about Sweden. What came out was that a long term decline in educational attainment had been taking place for 20+ years and was driven by 3 factors:

1. “new” thinking on the purpose of education and a movement away from “teaching” and teachers as enforcers of behaviour and discipline.
2. a lot of unqualified teachers and very poor standards in teacher training.
3. The move to devolve management of schools to local authorities and a break away from a national curriculum.

If Labour were hoping to make political capital out the Swedish performance in the Pisa tests and the role of free schools they must be pretty disappointed because the schools that are disproportionately performing best there (as is the case here) are the Free Schools.

The other thing the PISA results show us is that a whole generation educated since Labour’s “education education education” pledge have sunk to the bottom of the class and the £30Bn of extra spending under Labour achieved precisely nothing.

What’s also interesting is that the apparent reason attainment dropped in Sweden are very similar to the UK experience – conversely the Asian model of “old fashioned” teaching, fixed curricula and strict discipline in the classroom continues to drive excellence.

“whilst trotting out the same old tosh about the BBC being leftist propaganda.”

To be fair even the BBC Trust has formally recognised via research that it commissioned that the political balance in news / current affairs programming is not balanced and overly sympathetic to the left.

And the last but one BBC Director General spoke of a “massive left wing bias at the BBC”

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thompson-bbc-interview

The last Head of News has also said the same:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2492363/BBC-big-left-wing-ignored-critics-immigration-Brussels-head-news-admits.html

and MPs have made the same point again recently:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10358533/BBC-accused-of-becoming-Ed-Milibands-mouthpiece.html

So if the BBC Trust, The last Director General, The last head of news and MPs all agree the BBC is biased is this really “the same old tosh?”

If you’re doing the gammon in coke, take it out, smoother it in black treacle then in the oven for 30 mins..

If you’re doing the gammon in coke, take it out, cut off most of the fatty rind, score what’s left into 1cm diamonds, smear it with colmans mustard, then smother it in black treacle, put cloves in on the join of every diamond then in the oven for 30 mins..

really enjoyed last night’s programme – I thought it was one of the best contemporary builds on GD so far. The combination of the flint and roof worked really well and the architect definitely has an eye for detail… it all looked spot on.

Anyone who steals hundreds of thousands of classified documents and then passes 58,000 of them on to journalists who subsequently try to move them out of the country on a laptop which has the encryption password in the bag it is being carried in deserves no praise.

Snowden is a prize fool and has put the lives of some security personnel at risk and also compromised their ability to discretely monitor favoured channels of communication that dodgy types currently use – the disclosure in the Guardian of the means used to evesdrop Tor are a perfect example of this.

Ultimately to many Snowden people will be a hero right up to the point someone they know gets blown to bits in an attack that wasn’t picked up in time. It’s worth remembering that nearly all of the 300+ britons convicted of terrorism related offences over the last 9 years have been detected through a combination of surveillance and intelligence.

Telling their peers how we will try and find /stop them won’t help the security of our country and given that MI5 are currently actively monitoring nearly 3,000 jihadists in Britain we’ve just made their task a lot harder and increased the chances of a successful attack.

I’ll have a stab at answering the cost of capital thing – it’s basically like a loan. Imagine the cash reserves of a EDF are operated as a bank. When a project like this comes along, the EDF bank “lends” money to enable the project to be delivered, and in this case does that over 10+ years before getting any returns.

The cost / return on the loan for the EDF bank is based on:

– inflation – lending £100 now and getting £100 back in 10 years time effectively represents a significant loss as £100 won’t buy the same amount in ten years time. This is a time value of money factor.
– the return the EDF Bank could achieve by investing the money in something else.

So in the case of the EDF Bank, the cost of capital represents an internal “interest rate” on the money that will be set aside for the project. If that interest rate is below the amount EDF could make on another investment and does not at least track inflation, they may still make a profit i.e. getting £110 back on their £100 investment but the loss compared to the other loan / investment is also taken into account – with inflation / time value of money they would need a return of at least £120 just to break even.

Ineos accounts are audited by PwC. Amongst other things Ineos have applied for a license to convert North American Shale Gas at Grangemouth (alleviating the problem with existing cost of gas supply). That won’t happen now though as a liquidator has been appointed today.

The unions refused to negotiate on pay / pensions.

The average across the whole workforce was over £50K base pay and employer pension contributions exceeding £30K a year.

Grangemouth is the most expensive site in Ineos’ network on operational costs and has been losing money for a while – with wages being one of the biggest costs today’s outcome can’t really have come as a surprise to the employees or their union representatives.

As an outsider it’s really hard to understand why the workforce / union chose not to negotiate when the most likely outcome would inevitably be the loss of all the jobs and everyone having to either face unemployment or finding new jobs further away that will most likely pay a huge amount less in salary and pension. It’s a very sorry state of affairs for the workers and for Scotland so I just hope that this is not the last round of something akin to high stakes poker.

a clear majority of the public want the energy companies to be nationalised at someone else’s expense but 70% of all households have never bothered to take 5 minutes and switch supplier through a comparison site.

AdamW – I’m curious at your suggestion that the national grid work is simply regular maintenance.

The most recent £4.5B programme to renew the national grid doesn’t appear to be maintenance as it’s being funded, managed and depreciated as an additional capital investment – and has been widely described as such, including by the regulator.

AdamW – both. The element of “continuing investment” in the retail price we pay actually relates to the ageing national grid (which loses 50% of the energy transmitted across it). The rate (and return ) of investment on that is regulated by government so it isn’t something the retail power companies make a profit on – but it doesn’t relate to production investment which is effectively separated from the retail market. As you correctly say, the rise in energy cost does account for the rest.

but Ernie, if (and it’s a big if) edf make a profit, it will be taxed at 23% and go straight back to the government. And the subsidies? What subsidy? The whole point of the way the deal is structured is that there’s no money up front, no money during the 10+ years of build and just a guarantee to pay double the current price per mw hour and likely 50% less than the going rate on the open market.

As others have said above, a 10% return on capital given they have to take all the risk is frankly a bonkers deal (a very bad one) for the french government / tax payer…

Seems there are quite a few misunderstandings on this deal so let’s put a few things to bed:

– The cost (and risk) are being borne by a third party, so the UK receives inward investment and new jobs for no up front cost and also doesn’t act as final guarantor – which means that the £13Bn it would have cost us to build it (more if it over runs) can now be invested in other things or used to avoid the tax raises that would otherwise be required.

– The strike price for electricity produced is twice the cost of current energy (so appears expensive) but half the cost of the strike price given to renewables by Chris Huhne a few years back – renewables typically require less capital and carry less risk (bigger construction projects that are more complex cost a lot more if they go off track) so by that standard this is a good deal i.e. half the payback for a more expensive project that won’t earn anything for 10 years (possibly 15). We also need to take into account the cost of financing the project for 10+ years with no initial return; if there was no profit in the job it wouldn’t get built.

– We have to take into account the time value of money on the strike price per megawatt hour – it will potentially be 15 years before the plant comes on stream, by which point carbon based energy costs will be 3.7 times today’s cost assuming rises of around 10% a year. By that comparator a guarantee of future energy at only twice today’s cost represents a 50% saving per megawatt hour and more than that moving forward over the 30 year service life even with the annual increments that are baked into the contract.

– The French are the contractors with China providing capital but much of the Labour will be British – it doesn’t give the Chinese any additional control of the asset-it’s like the many building and infrastructure projects overseas that are financed with capital from the UK.

HMRC deployed Browsium’s “Ion” at a year or two back at a cost of £1m that enabled them to upgrade their PCs and O/S and move to IE9 but retain backward compatibility with out any re-coding of the massive number of apps that had been coded for IE6.

They claimed a £34m saving over re-coding apps which seems pretty feasible:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/04/browsium_mhrc/

Not sure why more organisations haven’t taken a similar approach – it seems a reasonably low risk way of dealing with legacy.

but Grum – Thatcher’s response reflected what she was directly told by amongst others, the Chief Superintendents of the day. Should she not trusted such senior officers, and if not, which individuals who had relevant accountability should she have listened to and given weight to?

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/15/hillsborough-files-margaret-thatcher-merseyside-police_n_1347336.html

One of the comments above suggests that the police effectively helped the Tories / Thatcher do a cover up on Hillsborough. This comes up quite a bit but the information released into the public domain last year shows that quite before anyone updated the relevant secretary of state at the time, Douglas Hurd, or the Prime Minister, records were falsified – by over 150 police men and women.

After the records were falsified (this it turns out even included video evidence) the then government were given further false information.

It’s quite interesting that for the 20 or so years since it happened the suspicion has been that Government ministers tried to mislead the public when what increasingly seems to have happened is that the police conspired to cover up what had happened and their role in causing it.

The parallels with the Plebgate are obvious – at the time of Hillsborough Thatcher’s press chief is reported to have described the behaviour of the police , in notes obtained by the panel, that the police’s “defensive – and at times close to deceitful – behaviour” sounded “depressingly familiar”.

For me the issue in hand isn’t about individual officers who by and large are trying to do the right thing, often in very challenging situations, but more to do with leadership, a “closed shop” culture, a lack of transparency and the need for forces to do a lot more to hold themselves to account against the standards the public require of them.

a couple of posts have said words to the effect of this sorry affair being a stitch up but not a conspiracy.

The whistle blower who stepped forward in the last week, and also a policeman is reported to have given evidence of exactly that – a plan to make an example of Mitchell that was actually discussed some time before it happened and led by the officers actually involved in the subsequent staged event.

If this isn’t a conspiracy I’m not sure what is.

So basically the chronology of this story is as follows:

1. Economy breaks, new government elected and inherits debt of around £700B, much of which has accrued due to 6 years of excessive spending in the public sector.
2. New government comes in and commits to reducing the debt by reducing funding for public services including the police – but tells us it is possible to maintain services by transforming them / driving efficiencies in ways of working.
3. Police union tells everyone this will result in an unprecedented crime wave – claims the government’s opposition swiftly repeat to anyone who will listen
4. Time passes, crime continues to fall, cuts continue, desired crime wave fails to materialise.
5. Members of the Met’s team assigned to downing street are reported to have discussed “making an example” of a specific minister 3 months before plebgate.
6. “plebgate” is reported to have happened. Minister denies specific claims of what he said and is tried in the court of public opinion.
7. Police fabricate evidence and use it to stoke the fire.
8. Members of the opposition and police union stoke the fire and use it to prove that all ministers are toffs and nasty.
9. Embattled minister meets different police to explain exactly what happened.
10. These same police leave the building and immediately (and consistently) lie about what was said. Police union and government opposition party call for resignation. Public agrees, minister forced to resign.
11. Minister produces recording to contradict police.
12. Channel 4 obtain CCTV that shows plebgate didn’t happen and police who claimed to be there weren’t there, questions arise over log books. C4 also prove a key public witness wasn’t there and is also a policeman.
13. Head of the met police holds private briefings, fails to keep notes and breaks his own rules.
14. 100 police spend the next year pretending to investigate original conspiracy.
15. Different force investigates what has happened and even with audio recording proving colleagues lied decides there’s no case to answer.
16. Police Union and the Police forces involved continue to tell us there’s no issue.

If this was a banana state no-one would bat an eye lid at this disgraceful episode, but this is britain, and when the police conspire against elected officials they effectively conspire against democracy and the electorate.

It’s clear that a lot of heads need to roll on this but for starters the head of the police union, various newspaper editors, the BBC and Ed Millimuppet and chums all owe public apologies to a man that has clearly been stitched up and as it increasingly seems was telling the truth the whole time. The court of public opinion / us also need to reflect on our role in this shambles.

ernie – you’ve overlooked the £1Bn that National Express had to pay as a fee for operating the franchise for 8 years. The finance cost of £1Bn fully funded is close to or exceeds the £200m “profit” being currently made.

France is cheaper due to the proliferation of nuclear power stations i.e. they have more than enough capacity for france’s needs AND enough left over to export some.

When Labour took power in 1997 one of the key tasks in hand was to make decisions on how to replace the significant number of coal and ageing nuclear powered stations that were scheduled to be shut by 2010.

Somewhat predictably no new power stations were approved so the only tangible thing that Labour / Ed Milliband as energy sec did was to sogn up to decarbonisation plans that were more “ambitious” (costly) than the rest of the world and also agree rates for renewables at a cost of 400% the cost of existing supplies.

The combination of lack of supply and the additional costs on suppliers (and retail customers) of decarbonisation / home insulation have come home to roost. The only surprising thing has been the re-writing of history by Ed Milliband who seems to have forgotten the decisions his government failed to make and his own complicity as Energy Sec for decisions that were made and have significantly added to retail bills.

And in other news, National Grid have forecast a record number of black outs this winter due to lack of supply…

TooTall – I’ve just looked at EDF’s annual report for 2011 and 2012. The cost energy purchases went up year on year and operating profit fell year on year. Where are the “massively increasing profits”?

A few bits of evidence for my earlier post which received a few follow up questions / request for evidence: the Agenda for Change data are readily available here (see the PDF for the detail):

http://www.nhsemployers.org/payandcontracts/agendaforchange/pages/afc-ataglancerp.aspx

The £500m / year of Clinical Merit Awards is referenced here…

http://www.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/2013/09/16/hospital-doctors-collect-as-much-as-163-160-000-in-overtime.aspx

And the size of annual clinical excellence awards (bonuses) for medics exceeding £73K a year are covered in this review:

http://tinyurl.com/clinexc

…and finally the strange patterns of sickness absence in which some staff groups take an average of 16 days a year off whilst other directly patient facing roles take as few as 2 days a year off are covered at the link below. It’s a given that some roles are more stressful than others so that needs to be taken into account but even so when back office / admin staff are averaging 9 days off there’s a pretty big chance sickness absence isn’t as well managed as it could be.

Northwind makes an interesting point above and suggests that staff dealing with sick patients are more likely to be sick as a result but the data doesn’t support this – Hospital Doctors typically work the longest hours yet statistically take significantly less sickness absence than colleagues.

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/staffsicknesspr

Putting the sickness absence into more context The NHS in England averages 9.5 sick days per FTE a year – that’s over 13 million sick days a year at a cost of over £3B a year when extrapolated across the whole NHS workforce including Scotland and Wales (where sickness absence is actually higher) and on any given day means that more than 60,000 staff are off sick – that’s enough to run 12-15 large hospitals.

Just managing sickness absence in the worst performing Trusts to the mean that some of the best performing Trusts already achieve year on year would save the NHS £1.5B a year (possibly more depending how sickness absence is covered) or enough to pay the majority of the capital cost of of HS2 by the time it’s predicted to open in 2026.

Checklist for “under attack” workers:

– 60% of the employees do not get an annual length of service increment of 3.5% BEFORE the pay rise
– 20% london weighting
– 33 days annual leave when you have 10 years service
– 5 days additional annual parental leave
– an automatic pay differential of £21K a year just for being 4 years older
– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down
– Annual length of service increments that for nearly every person on Agenda for Change are in practice automatic
– “clinical merit awards” or to use naughty private sector language “bonuses”, for some clinical staff that can exceed £70K and are not performance based and ARE taken into account for pension calculations
– a completely unsustainable defined benefit pension that everyone else pays for…
– your annual length of service increment less year is only 100% more than the average worker in the whole population will get
– you have complete job security

It’s completely right that healthcare workers are paid well and compensated for jobs that are very often hard emotionally (and in some cases physically). But 3.5% compared to the 2% that everyone else will probably get in a year when the country is still broke reflects this more than adequately and is not a value judgement on the staff – or an attack on the service.

I can’t see how Nick Clegg can possibly claim this was his idea when the thinking behind it, and associated pilots in deprived parts of London actually came from a review that Gove sponsored and which was delivered by Henry Dimbleby (yes, it is the same family…) and his co-founder of Leon, John Vincent.

Gove signed off all of the recommendations put forward by the review months ago including “free school meals” for all so Nick Clegg is at best disingenuous at best to claim this is his work.

nacho – those “shareholders” are mostly the pension funds that hold the investments from people who are typically getting 3% employer contribution in the private sector. And you’ve missed the fact that returns to pension schemes started to be taxed under gordon brown – it’s the reason so many final salary schemes closed. Any any income paid out when pensions vest is subject to income tax. So that means Vodafone’s £54Bn will be taxed at least twice, possibly 3 times when you take into account that many pension funds declare operating profits which are taxed via corporation tax.

“Which of course barely happens and for many now no whatever they save they are lucky if their employer even puts in 4% – and you are getting 26.5%. “

This is the thin end of the wedge – some of the public sector defined benefit schemes receive employer tax payer contributions equivalent to 60% of salary.

Factor in wages that are typically higher than private sector (on average), shorter working hours, more holiday, “flexi” time, more sickness absence (paramedics on 16 days sick a year at the last count), an absence of effective performance management so no-one ever gets fired for poor performance… and the cries of “we’re not valued” frankly ring a bit hollow when you compare this to fate of the many poor sods who are struggling though on low wages in the private sector, trying to bring up families on limited incomes and resigned to having to struggle through retirement in the knowledge that the biggest contribution to pension was the contribution they made as a tax payer to someone else of the same age who retired 15 years before them.

“Pity this gang currently ruining the country show them some respect and think for a maoment”

This is part of the problem. The debate is basically framed as anyone who wants to change the status quo is bad, and the FF are victims.

It’s nothing to do with “respect~ it’s due to pretty much everyone not having any pension provision and the vast majority of private sector workers getting a 3% employer contribution against the 20-40% value of the public sector employer contribution of index linked / retire earlier / guaranteed benefits.

The other part of the debate seems to be “stop trying erode our benefits and improve your own” which is fine to a point but fails to take into account that if other employers had to make the same guarantees nearly every firm in the country would be shut in weeks, the country would be bankrupt and we’d all be unemployed (including the FFs).

The unions need to wake up and start telling some home truths – the good news is that we’re living longer but unfortunately working for 30 years and paying relatively little towards your own retirement provision doesn’t guarantee anyone the right to 40 to 50 years of free living. Like it or not, we all need to save more and work longer – the real focus should be on how we help people to do that – including putting in place much better provision to help employers and workers find solutions that enable more jobs to be done by the over 60s / 70s.

Japan can teach us a lot here – they have a much older population and already have many people in their 70s still working and living active lives – instead of telling FFs their lives are over when they reach 60 we should be helping them to plan for continued work in another sector for the ten or 15 years that follows. Just like everyone else.