I’ve just been playing about with a few pension calculators and even with a 13.9% employee contribution, the retirement benefits of the revised police pension still represents an employer contribution of 40%.

So whilst we are having a debate about a “starting salary” of £19K it really should be pointed out that the starting remuneration is effectively £26,600 (above the average national wage) including pension, and a police constable on £35K is actually on £49K a year – the £14K / 40% of employer contribution at this level needs to be compared with the typical private sector contribution of between 3 and 8% of salary.

It’s hard to work out the exact employer contribution as most of the pension modelling tools can’t even calculate the pension investments needed to buy the police pension benefits as a money purchase investment.

MSP – not sure it does to be honest.

If we want MPs who can actually get things done, deal with complexity and make rationale decisions, for the most part people with those attributes will have some track record of success no matter what background they come from (whether it be nursing, social care, private sector or other).

I’d actually argue that for ministerial positions where significant leadership experience is a pre-requisite (leading a whitehall department of 10,000+ isn’t something you can learn on the job) it would be better to have a “leader” of any flavour rather than a mechanic (and for clarity – this could be someone who has led a large charity, company, part of the sector, whatever). What we often get is MPs and Ministers making poor decisions and wasting huge amounts of our money because they frankly don’t have enough experience to operate successfully at the level required by the job.

I know someone who went into Parliament at the last election. Prior to that they were running a successful business they started and which they no longer have any day to day involvement in / pay from. Since being elected, the person has been extremely visible in policy making around science and trade / industry development in the same area their old business operated in but has seen their effective remuneration fall from c£150K a year to £65K.

With the best will in the world, most MPs don’t fleece the expenses system and having done it myself, spending all week away from home for years on end is a tough gig – not least for the families of MPs.

So for pay then, my observation is that if we want experienced, knowledgeable, successful people to lead our country and use their experience to develop UK Plc, then a big pay cut is a hard sell. In contrast, there are plenty of MPs who have never done anything apart from politics / trade union work and for whom becoming an MP was a big step up in pay – John Prescott’s tenure in the ODPM is almost a case study in what happens when someone with no leadership experience or common sense lands a role with a big budget – the total fraud and overpayments he was warned would happen if he implemented the tax credit system without any of the recommended changes made now runs to £440B and is largely due to his poor decision making.

One other point – someone on the first page asked which other profession of self employed people get a final salary scheme and the answer is most GPs. As an aside one of our local GPs made £650K 2 years ago which puts him on £590K more than an MP despite not actually seeing many patients himself – even he was “underpaid” compared to another GP in kent who made £770K plus pension.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-271688987.html

all three of my orders have been despatched so whilst it’s a small saving overall (given the higher original sale prices), Evans are still quids in as they are selling the joystick I bought off them 5 weeks ago for £60 less now.

To be honest I’d use them more if their prices were better and they actually bothered acting on the feedback I submitted on the rather numerous website programming errors which can make the buying process a lot harder than it needs to be.

These are the real deal

If you can get even a whiff of 3G whilst standing on the roof of the property one of these should get you up and running

http://www.wiberouter.com/

About £250 to buy but loads cheaper than sat broadband to run

Interesting…

“Exclusive: Dispatches and Channel 4 News reveal CCTV footage of the exchange between Andrew Mitchell and police officers that raises questions about the account in police logs leaked to the media.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20764044

something’s a bit fishy here – now one of the original officers who claimed to have witnessed the altercation is being investigated…

can’t quite see how it’s “rip off Britain” when it’s clearly detailed in the contract (which no-one ever reads these days) that they (and other companies) can raise prices annually – every other phone company has done this for the last 20 years so it’s not exactly a new thing.

we’ve just put an order in for BT broadband after Virgin confirmed that the ongoing network problem that sees our broadband go from 120 meg to .03 to 4 meg every evening won’t be fixed until the end of January at the earliest – this is after previous promises to fix it in December, November and October.

In the last year we’ve only had 4 months where service has been normal and for the rest of the time have been resorting to 3g dongles as Virgin can’t seem to manage their way out of a paper bag let alone manage their network.

Add in 3 replacement TIVO boxes and a couple of weeks with no landline service and it becomes quite apparent that Virgin Media is a complete joke.

a couple of these high up enough that they can’t be knocked off, a new alarm box and PIR security light should help – you could get the whole lot for £100.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/imitation-dome-camera-pnp-25-d-589168?c=maplin&utm_source=endeca&utm_medium=endeca_search&utm_campaign=N44KG&utm_content=Dummy+Cameras+%26+Warning+Signs

have a look at fischer fixing catalogue – they have fixings for this sort of task – a bit like the extra heavy duty ones in the picture below:

almost – I worked for a manager for 6 months who the whole team round the bend with his tantrums and bi-polar like decision making process.

We delivered carefully planned payback on a team night out that resulted in him being woken up by the cleaner at 11:55 the following morning to find himself lying naked in a lake of his own vomit on the bathroom floor of a hotel room. He made the mistake of sharing this fact with someone else he’d screwed over earlier in their career and fortunately for us they were very happy to broadcast the fact to all and sundry.

http://www.convertfiles.com

free web based converter tool that works really well

cockerpoos like to please – easily trained and will be quite biddable to kids. Spaniels lovable as they are tend to be a bit bonkers and having watched the neighbours 9 and 11 year old kids trying to “walk” their 1 year old dog I’d have some concerns for the safety of the kids and dog anywhere near a road.

pedalhead – not sure the advice you got was correct. The actual value of the property for mortgage purposes will still be £450K or so, in which case the property cannot be undersold without the risk of stamp duty being retrospectively levied on the real value rather than the free transfer.

Edit – there’s **potentially** (hard to say based on the info above) also an issue of beneficial interest if person A continues to live in the property – strictly speaking that could make person B subject to capital gains unless they live there before the property is sold on or disposed off via probate, and even if no rent is paid HMRC may decide that it’s effectively an informal rental arrangement with reservation of future benefit issues.

Quite a complex scenario and I’ll be watching the subsequent replies from more knowledgeable folk with interest.

how about a motion activated CCTV camera with a voice alert so that any scroats know they’ve been filmed?

if it’s true then it’s an own goal by endura. I rarely buy any clothing from high street bike shops in person as they either don’t have the stock or right size when I do try.

not a killjoy – there are plenty of closed circuits where enthusiasts can do that sort of speed in controlled conditions and with less risk of injuring themselves or others.

anyone who drives at 198 mph on a public road (even on the continent) is a prize fool – the stopping distance is somewhere between 250 and 400m depending on road conditions. One small unforeseen incident at that sort of speed won’t just kill the driver but would probably take out a couple of other road users as well.

talktalk are a shower – both my parents have it and on two seperate lines in different places their broadband regularly packs up for days on end, the voicemail on their phones doesn’t work and the line quality is absolutely terrible – as if TalkTalk route voice calls over low bandwidth VOIP or something via India and back. Sure they are cheap but there’s a reason for that…

ransos, a real indicator is the number of times I drive to / from work and that turbine is not moving. The fact is that even with a peppercorn rent from Green Park, we actually have to spend £2k a week just to keep it in operation. Bonkers.

Ecotricity also extract massive subsidies to operate windmills in places where there’s no wind – the £134K annual subsidy to operate the turbine by the M4 in Reading is a prime example. The owner of Ecotricity, Vince something, also likes to lecture everyone on renewal energy and doing their bit whilst himself swanning round in gas guzzling company Range Rover.

Caffe Nero are also on my list of places not to go now it’s been revealed they have paid no tax at all on £39.5m of profits:

http://www.marlboroughnewsonline.co.uk/news/all-the-news/1241-a-boycott-call-follows-revelation-that-caffe-nero-pays-no-corporation-tax-in-the-uk

the figures up there are missing a small but important caveat.

For any full time vicars who entered the church over the age of 50, there is no salary and no accommodation – they basically volunteer for 40 to 60 hours a week for free which irrespective of different religious views is a pretty substantial contribution to the wider community.

http://www.fixmystreet.org – councils seem to fix reports quite quickly as there is a formal record so they become liable from the point it’s reported to them.

these Huawei wifi repeaters work pretty well – about £30:

web link to wifi router

You fat …..

This week O2 (tesco’s network provider) announced they have reached 90% 3G coverage. Which still means they have the smallest network and in 2012 have managed to get to where Three got to 6 years ago. The leading networks (EE and Three) are hovering around 99% coverage and have networks that don’t fall over for days on end.

one other option for the original poster – if you have a t-mobile account, you can add a “booster” on that gives free calls, texts and picture messages between 4 t-mobile numbers. That means the kids can be on PAYG but the family can always keep in touch even if there’s no credit. This is actually a pretty good way of keeping a lid on costs.

To be honest pretty much everything on Virgin doesn’t work – it’s not just youtube.

We’ve had 7 outages this year ranging from a few days to 4 weeks – even on the 100 meg product we get as little as 9 meg in the evenings. To be fair they always credit the bill for the loss of service, but don’t seem to be able to get the service working reliably.

They will be getting the boot from our household as soon as we’re out of the minimum contract term.

A cursory review of the Sunday Times Rich List from 2007 and comparison with 2012 figures shows that although the Super Rich have “gained” in recent years, the majority of them are still sitting on massive losses in capital.

The Guardian conveniently overlooks this, as well as the more obvious fact that the “rich” don’t tend keep their wealth as bars of gold hidden under a mattress – much if it us used as working capital to build and expand businesses that employ people and in turn generate taxes.

one of these is great for cutting small grooves in walls to stuff the cables into:

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/7111112.htm?CMPID=GS001&_$ja=tsid:11527|cc:|prd:7111112|cat:home+and+garden+%2F+diy+tools+and+power+tools+%2F+diy+power+tools+%2F+multi+purpose+power+tools+%2F

Just had a play on the Hargreaves Lansdown pension calculator to see how much this pension would cost most people.

Fudging his actual age (I used the age of 37 to get a planned retirement age of 55 / 18 years service as the calculator doesn’t have 43 as an optional retirement age) even the lower figure still represents an effective employer contribution of over £2000 a month towards his pension. If he’d got the original lump sum the effective employer contribution works out somewhere between 3000 – 3500 a month / £42000 a year!

fenwicks is quite good – bright blue and paste like – it turns to liquid when the wheels spin, which makes it very easy to paste onto the tyre beads and get a good seal. Also lasts for 3 years or so.

The only downside is when you put your new pump up the new tubeless tyres on the kitchen table (don’t ask) and the bead “pops” into place, spraying bright blue gel all over the table, down the floor, over the cupboard, up two walls and in a perfect arc over the ceiling.

I didn’t notice the ceiling bit until a week later and would have nearly got away with the post-debacle clean up had the better half not noticed first.

Well my iPhone 5 in black is being swapped out tomorrow by a free courier sent by Apple. The battery lasts about 3 hours when 3G is turned on, and that’s if it can find a 3G signal in the first place – it spends most of the time displaying “no service”.

Apple were very helpful even though I didn’t buy the device from them – I just called customer support and they said something about some models from one factory had problems and that they would swap it for free.

Whilst the product in this case didn’t work well, the customer service was excellent.

but isn’t half of the problem that there a lot of pseudo-disabled claimants mixed in with the genuine ones that the system was originally set up to support?

there have been many reports about the range of disabilities that now qualify for support that don’t quite fit the public understanding of a disability that prevents work (obesity, alcoholism, drug dependency amongst others), and equally many reports that tell us that a lot of long term claimants have withdrawn claims when asked to undergo an assessment.

if the current system is so tough, how come long term claimants who have been assessed by medics, council social workers etc can so easily fool the experts and fraudulently obtain money that should be going to be genuine claimants who are now apparently suffering? Anyone who saw “fake britain” last night will have seen the long term paralysed claimant (who wasn’t) and I think the value of benefits he had obtained very easily through fraud was in the region of £400K. Is it really possible to tighten the system without imposing new rules or tests when it’s so clear the current ones don’t work reliably?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01jjvdp/Fake_Britain_Series_3_Episode_10/

Having seen first hand the impact on parents who lose young children through illness I think it says a lot about the integrity and ethics of the professional “campaigners” that they are willing to even suggest the PM’s reference to his own experience of disability and loss in his family isn’t as described.

and in other news:

Companies that moved offshore under Labour are returning to the UK and will pay corporation tax:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/advertising-giant-wpp-plans-return-to-uk-8095515.html

30 tax evasion task forces launched:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9103962/HMRC-launches-tax-evasion-task-force.html

Creative tax avoidance schemes are being investigated:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9593444/Taxman-investigates-shipwreck-salvage-tax-break.html

“Mansions” held via company structures are now subject to an annual charge of £15K to £140K PLUS 7% or 15% purchase taxes:

http://www.tltsolicitors.com/resources/publications/private_business/uk_tax_changes_affecting_high_value_residential_property_mar_12

I find it quite strange that when the “rich” are scrabbling over themselves to unravel property ownership structures that were in place for the whole of the last government (including houses owned by Tony Blair) precisely because of the new punitive taxes / charges, it’s apparently the current government which is “soft” on taxing the rich and not the last lot that were quite happy to turn a blind eye to this.

Meanwhile, Ed Milliband can tell us all about rich “toffs in mansions” as his own £1.6m house is apparently not a mansion and doesn’t make him a millionaire, even though there’s £1.2m equity in the property and his currently annual salary is only £3k less than that of the PM.