by David Merrigan

The amount of the refund is not quite life-changing, but it’s certainly game-changing as far as my own personal finances are concerned, especially since theoretically I should have another refund for similar  mis-sold PPI on another, now paid-off personal loan, due to me in the new year, once I get around to putting in the claim for it.

Now, I’m not going to deny that I’ve initially had a little bit of fun with the cash, by upgrading my camera equipment to help me to make better videos. Since I do that kind of thing as a ‘work’ activity (even though I don’t get paid for it), I think that’s a reasonable luxury I can grant myself. I’m also intending to put aside a little bit of the money so that I have ready access to ready cash in order to not have to always shop first in the reduced fridge at the supermarket – to know that actually, I now can afford to follow some principles in terms of looking at the origin of the piece of meat, and favour ethical production practices over dubious ones.

But the lion’s share of the cash I am indeed being sensible with, by using it to make a significant dent in paying off my remaining personal debt, and reducing the amount of my monthly income which goes into paying off that personal debt.

And that’s where the insanity comes in.

The balance of the loan on which the PPI has been refunded is £1,680, at an interest rate of 15.5%, with six remaining instalments to pay of £290 a month.

That’s not the only debt I have – there’s also three credit cards, one of which has a balance of £5,400 at an interest rate of 25.5%, and a monthly payment of £120.

Can you see what’s silly there?

For 95% of the population, debt is a reality, and not necessarily one to be afraid or ashamed of; few people under the age of 50 are truly completely free of debt, whether it’s a personal loan, a mortgage, student debt, or credit card debt.

The misery of debt is not, for most people, the actual balance of the debt, because that’s something which is purely notional and fictitious – it’s a number on a piece of paper they receive each month. The true misery of debt is not the balance, but the monthly payment required to service that debt – and the difficulty of seeing an end to that monthly payment in sight.

So for me, with a big wodge of wedge at hand to do something about clearing my own personal EU debt mountain, it’s insane to be presented with a choice of either clearing a (relatively) small debt attracting a (relatively) low interest rate entirely, or making a significant inroads into a much larger debt attracting a higher interest rate. The choice between releasing an expenditure of £290 a month or one of £120 a month is an obvious one – take the money, not the car. Realistically, big as the PPI windfall was, the most which could be put aside is £3,000, so actually that becomes a choice of releasing £290 a month or £70 a month.

The insanity of personal credit is how the repayments on credit cards work – not the higher interest rates, but the very mechanism by which the minimum payment – which let’s face it is what most people pay each month – doesn’t actually pay off the debt, it merely pays the monthly interest charge on the debt. The way the debt is structured, the credit card company holds all the power over the credit card owner; there’s no incentive for the company for you to pay off your credit card, because – like a gangland loanshark – the longer you remain in debt to them, the more money they will make out of you, way in excess of what you’ve actually borrowed from them. There’s no incentive for you yourself to pay off your credit card, because to do so will make little difference to what actually matters to you – your monthly outgoings.

This surely should be an area where government intervention should come into play?

It seems to me that the legislation around credit cards should be modified so that the customer is incentivised to not build up such a high credit card debt in the first place, to ensure that the monthly repayments are structured in such a way that the minimum monthly payment ensures they are always paying of a certain minimum amount of what they actually owe rather than just paying the interest, and that if the customer comes into a cash windfall, the monthly payment they are paying is sufficient that it will always be worth their while to pay off more than even the increased minimum amount.

If the customer then spends into that repayment the next month, then that is their concern – but the debt should always be structured in such a way that the balance of power of repaying it is put in to the hands of the customer, not the credit card company.

And in the meanwhile, if you’ve had a loan and paid payment protection insurance on it, consider the possibility that you too might be entitled to a refund; the classic reasons why you would definitely be entitled would be if your employment status was temporary, or self-employed at the time of the loan – but even if you were fully employed, being able to demonstrate that you were told it was an automatic part of the loan will be enough to get you a refund. You’ve got nothing to lose by making a claim! You don’t need to engage the services of a dodgy no-win-no-fee claims management lawyer (who will take a sizeable cut of your refund) – I just went into the bank and said ‘I want to make a complaint’, gave them the details, and six weeks later the money was in my account.

And of course, I’ve paid off the loan first.

The item mainly talked about how rubbish as a car it is, going on to become an item about what kind of car you could get on the second hand market for that kind of cash.

Coincidently, this lunchtime I called into the bike shop to get some new tyres for my bike, the current ones needing replacing partly because off-road tyres are a bit silly for somebody who never goes off-road, but mostly because they’re getting a bit ripped to shreds on the sides. Seeing the cheapest tyres that were any good came to £20 I did that sharp intake of breath thing, deciding that i didn’t feel like ponying up £40 at once instead getting just one tyre, to replace the other one next month.

Standing by the till waiting to be served, I saw this bike in the rack for sale:

I did manage to stop myself from saying out loud that for that price, I’d expect it to come with an engine attached.

Whereas I agree with the headline of what the students are protesting about, I believe essentially they are protesting against the wrong policy – it’s not the new policy which is flawed, but the policies which were instigated some 20 years ago which have led us to where we are today.

With current numbers of 18 year olds pushed into attending ‘university’ being in excess of 50%, the taxpayer frankly can’t afford the £20,000 per student cost. So rather than making students pay themselves – by whatever means successive governments have dreamed up – the policy of sending all and sundry to do four year degree courses in all and sundry should be reversed. There should only be one barrier to higher education – talent; that barrier should be set sufficiently high that only those who will most benefit from that education get to have it, for if everybody gets to go, then there is no barrier of talent, only a barrier of finance.

When I first went to college – Birmingham Conservatoire, the music college faculty of the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, in 1988 the entire number of students throughout all four years in my department – the composition department – was 10. By the time I left the Conservatoire in 1997 (by which time I’d become a part time lecturer), the entire first year intake of student composers numbered 45. Some of them were talented, but a significant number of them, frankly, I’m surprised they managed to pass their GSCE music. One of those whose work was particularly awful I noted nine years later hadn’t improved.

Also when I first went to college, there was a clear distinction between different kinds of higher education institutions and what purpose they served – universities were where the best went to spend three or four years intensively learning from an academic perspective, polytechnics were where the best spent three or four years learning from a vocational perspective, and colleges of further and higher education were where everybody else – with no slight intended upon them – spent one or two years learning how to do specific jobs, and then went and did those jobs.

But the then Prime Minister John Major had the idea that to create a classless society, he’d make everybody pay a contribution towards their higher education, and abolish the distinction between university and polytechnic. So at a stroke, hundreds of institutions across the land, previously known as prime destinations for specific courses, instantly became saddled with the stigma of being ‘new universities’, many of them having to make up silly names (and in the City of Birmingham Polytechnic / Birmingham Polytechnic / University of Central England in Birmingham / University of Central England / Birmingham City University’s case, keep making up silly names) in order to differentiate themselves from the other institutions in the same cities. That policy was extended further even now so that any old college gets to call itself a university, meaning the highly respected in its own field Birmingham College of Food, Tourism, and Creative Studies (a college of higher education) renamed itself to be University College Birmingham, clearly setting itself alongside such as University College Dublin, University College London, and University College Wales. And in the meanwhile some original universities have become less seats of learning and more seats of commerce, with education taking a firm back seat against getting in the conference business and ripping off international students.

Of course, in order to have more students in higher education (and thus not signing on the dole), you need to have more courses. And so, Golf Course Management became a university degree, as did Hair Studies. ‘Hair Studies’ is my usual example when I talk about this – I don’t mean to diminish the artform of a catwalk hair stylist who is at the top of their profession commanding in excess of £500 just to tidy somebody’s split ends, but for most people going in to hairdressing, saddling themselves with a £20k debt to get a hairdressing degree to get a £15k/year job in Chlo’sKutz  is not ‘an investment in their future’.

Society really isn’t improved by 70% of its young people going away to do degrees solely motivated by how much money they’ll be able to earn at the other end – heck, it was people being solely motivated by how much money they’ll earn at the other end which has got us into the current global financial mess in the first place! Society is improved by 70% of its young people not ‘accepting their lot in life’, but going and spending a short amount of time learning how to do something they’ll enjoy, and then going and getting paid for doing it (and thus becoming taxpayers by the age of 20), and the other 30%, the cream of the bunch, going away and getting paid – by us – to learn how to be nuclear physicists, doctors, concert pianists, mathematicians, jewellery designers, actors, and historians etc.

And those 30% who have that talent should have the opportunity to do that whatever their financial circumstances.

The announcements today are of course just the headline figures for each broad public sector area – it will be down to individual chief executives in each individual public sector organisation to decide the details of whose jobs are to go.

In the lead-up to the review over the last several months, politicians of all sides have made reference to the ‘back-office paper-pushing make-workers’ who should almost certainly be the first against the wall in order to ‘protect the valuable front-line services’.

So who are these back-room drains on the hard-pressed taxpayer, then? Let’s make a list:

Admin / filing clerks

Admin staff are perhaps the very definition of the back-office. But do you really want your highly paid professional staff having to spend their time doing their own photocopying or raising purchase orders for their own stationery? Admittedly, there is still something rather 1950s about the idea of a secretary printing out the email for their boss to read, scribble comments on, for the secretary to then type the reply to, but PAs do also fulfil a less obvious and more essential role – as gatekeeper, shielding the senior manager from having to deal with pointless sales calls from pesky private sector photocopier suppliers who are paid on commission, or fielding queries in the direction of the senior manager’s more junior officers who are actually doing the work and thus better placed to give a sensible answer to the question.

And, of course, even with modern computerisation of records, records still need to be filed, and require somebody with knowledge and experience to file them correctly – do you really want your doctor, surgeon, or dentist in charge of filing your medical records rather than the person who actually understands how the filing system works? Do you want your social workers to be spending their time looking into protecting and helping vulnerable individuals and families, or do you want them trying to decide (and changing their minds from week to week) whether the family with multiple surnames has its records filed under ‘b’, ‘f’, or ‘m’?

I.T. Support staff

If you’re reading this, you’re probably reasonably experienced at using computers, and like me cringe whenever you see somebody typing a URL into the Google search box (being their default browser home page) rather than in the actual browser address bar. But believe it or not, most people really are that thick! I once, some years ago, saw an occasion where an assistant director’s PA – of many, many years experience, predating the introduction of computers in the workplace – was having difficulty in opening a file off a CD. As I was helping her, it became apparent to me that she’d clearly never actually seen her computer’s desktop, didn’t understand the concept of the c: drive and the d: drive (so /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2 would be a total non-starter), and thought you had to open a file of any given type from the file -> open dialogue of the relevant program, rather than just double-clicking on the file icon from the file manager.

Of course, those are particularly dumb extremes, but still the majority of people aren’t that further advanced in their computer knowledge. And annoying as it is for people like us, that’s why your computer at work is locked down preventing you from fiddling with it yourself, because you might know what you’re doing, but most peoples’ fiddling would almost certainly completely stuff it up. And that’s why you need I.T. support staff – to do the work of maintaining the I.T., because most people aren’t capable of doing it for themselves.

Middle-managers

I know I’m not the only person who has worked in teams where the favourite topic of lunchtime-down-the-pub conversation has been to moan about the management. It’s almost enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! So of course they should be the first against the wall, since all they do all day is look at graphs and get on your case? Right?

In all the teams I’ve worked in where we’ve spent a lot of time bitching about managers, it’s not been about the concept of managers, but about how rubbish they’ve been – or at least how rubbish we’ve perceived them to be. Like it or not, managers are necessary. We complain about the rubbish managers because we need them to set targets for the team, build the framework in which we operate, and performance-manage our co-workers who are not pulling their weight (or indeed offer extra training and guidance to the co-workers who are neither lazy nor incompetent but just a bit inexperienced for their role). A well managed team is an effective team – a badly- or un-managed team more often than not flounders about; if it manages to perform well then that is testament to their particular and unique dedication and skill rather than evidence that managers are pointless.

Finance people

I’m not afraid of numbers – I understand that budgets, no matter how many noughts are involved, are simply a matter of sums and guesswork; I understand that when a budget or a financial forecast is put together, it represents the ‘best guess at the time with the information to hand’, which is a goal for people with budgetary responsibility in the organisation to work towards – but where overspends on any given heading occur, it’s not the end of the world, but almost certainly an underspend will have occurred on another line to balance it out. I’m also very good at noticing where a supplier is frankly taking the piss with their quote. Finance is not just about numbers, though – it’s about personal administration, which I’m utterly lousy at. So lousy at it am I that in my now-behind-me freelance life it’s been months before I’ve got around to sending an invoice, or claiming back the overpayment on a loan which actually was paid off six months ago.

Most people are rubbish at numbers, and although better than me at personal administration, still not hot at it. Finance people, however, love the lot – they love creating, adjusting, and balancing budgets. They love finding and logging the receipts for every last Mars bar, and tracking down every last pound owed to the organisation. Who do you want looking after the budgets – somebody who absolutely hates the very notion of numbers, somebody who is happy with them but has more interesting things to occupy their day than phoning up to chase the outstanding invoice, or somebody who has as their raison d’etre the job of accounting for all of your hard-earned taxpayer’s money?

Press and communications staff

OK, I’ll fess up – if you’ve come to this article via a search engine you won’t know that my job is in press and communications, or rather that favourite bête-noire of the local newspaper, the ‘town hall spin doctor’. My job has always been less dealing with the words you read and more the media you read them on, but I have had more responsibility in the past for the words than I have now. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish text I’ve been given to put on websites over the years – text that has gone beyond lacking what we in the bizniss call ‘Plain English’, and barely resembling what we call English-as-we-know-it entirely – sad fact is, most people who are even reasonably educated and with whom you can have sensible conversations can’t write English if their lives depended on it. When I was in a job with more direct control of the content of the part of the website I was responsible for, I’d got my content providers well trained to accept that they just needed to provide me with the facts, and I’d take it from there.

Where you do see rubbish communications coming from your favourite public sector organisation, more often than not it will have been because the service area has bypassed their communications team, rather than because the communications team is unnecessary. Get rid of your communications staff, and you’ll see a lot more blue-sky thinking run up the flagpole of integrated performance targets.

So, do you still think you need to get rid of the pointless paper-pushing back-office staff who suck the life from the front-line services?

Mr Osborne said: “There are five million people living on permanent out-of-work benefits. That is a tragedy for them and fiscally unsustainable for us as a country – we can’t afford it any more.

“Of course, people who are disabled, people who are vulnerable, people who need protection will get our protection, and more.

“But people who think it’s a lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits – that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end. The money won’t be there.”

Now, it is indeed true that there are some people who indeed simply refuse to work, who – somehow or other – find it possible to live an enjoyable life on whatever set of benefits they manage to accumulate. There are also people, as I did once myself, who think it’s better both for themselves and society at large to prioritise getting the right job rather than just any job – there really is no point whatsoever in a highly skilled and qualified person taking a job as a toilet cleaner, taking away that opportunity from somebody whose best option might frankly be a job as a toilet cleaner.

And contrary to popular opinion, a current job as a toilet cleaner really isn’t a good stepping stone into a ‘professional’ job – not to mention the likelihood the toilet cleaner’s manager taking kindly to the person infinitely more qualified than them who is almost certainly going to be a disruptive influence in the team, intent on getting out of it again as soon as they possibly can.

There was a prediction made that, as of right now, there are approximately 1,500,000 people currently on the standard jobseeker’s allowance. There are also right now approximately 300,000 vacancies known to the Jobcentre. Clearly, not all vacancies are registered with Jobcentres – the kinds of professional vacancies advertised in the Guardian won’t be in there, neither will the kinds of jobs that are so hyperlocal that they’ll just get the card in the newsagent’s window. But it’s fair to say, overwhelmingly the kinds of jobs that most of the1.5M will be suitable for will be the ones in the Jobcentre. Let’s be generous and say there are actually 600,000 currently unfilled vacancies.

So, if those 600,000 unfilled vacancies are snapped up, what are the remaining 900,000 people going to do?

“About £2bn was underpaid via the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) system in the past two years, with about 1.4 million people owing an average of £1,500 each. But £1.8bn has also been overpaid and some 4.3 million people will get a rebate because they have paid too much. Treasury minister David Gauke said that in the current financial climate, the government was ‘not in a position to just wave goodbye to that £2bn’”.

Surely that’s something which would be worth going to court over?

Saying ‘the good news is people won’t have to start repaying it until April 2011′ is hardly the point – £1,500 would account for a repayment of over £100 a month, which is a lot of cash to be removed from anybody’s monthly budget at the best of times, let alone for people who won’t have had any form of pay rise, not even an annual Cost Of Living Allowance, for two years.

If you buy a product off a supplier, and the supplier sends you an invoice and you pay it, the supplier can’t turn round two years later and say ‘sorry, I got my maths wrong – you’ll have to pay me some more’; it would just be tough on the supplier.

So why should the government be exempt from those same consumer protection laws? If the government is not in a position to just wave goodbye to £2bn, how many millionaires are there in the country who would completely fail to even notice the shortfall being divvied up between them?

In fact, the government (in the shape of HM Revenue & Customs) aren’t exempt from the law: if the taxpayer has a reasonable belief that they paid the correct amount in the first place – such as for example having had a bill from HMRC which looked about right in the first place – then the tax collector has to just accept their error and write off the underpayment.

It occurred to me that the phenomenon of the cheapskate company trying to get some professional work done on the cheap isn’t a new one:

First they came for the newspaper typesetters,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a newspaper typesetter

Then they came for the graphic designers,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a graphic designer

Then they came for the web developers,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a web developer

Then they came for the journalists,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a journalist

Then they came for the photographers,
And by that time there was nobody left to speak up.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

I would like to know the outline costs of the various BBC radio
stations:

Radio 1
Radio 1 Xtra
Radio 2
Radio 3
Radio 4
Radio 5 Live
Radio 5 Sports Extra
BBC 6 Music
BBC 7
BBC Asian Network

I would like the cost information broken down in terms of:

Total ‘on air talent’ (ie presenters & djs etc) salaries (I do not need to know individual salaries),

Total production staff (ie producers, broadcast assistants etc) salaries,

Total rights (ie music broadcast rights, drama first broadcast & repeat fee rights, etc) costs, &

Total transmission cost (ie, how much it costs for the transmitters etc to physically pump the broadcast out).

I would like this information separated for each of the stations listed above.

Additionally, I would like the number of hours per week that each station is broadcasting for, & the BBC’s estimated (or known) weekly audience figures for each station. If you were able to calculate the total cost per listener hour for each station for me,
that would be icing on the cake.

“A quarter of people living in England’s countryside will be over 65 by 2020, a campaign group has said. The National Housing Federation said figures estimate a 40% rise in older residents over the next 10 years. The federation, which represents England’s housing associations, said the number of over 65s living in rural England is expected to be 3.23m by 2020, compared with 2.32m in 2008″.

For me, there are two issues here. The first one is the one of the social contract which makes Society what it is; one of the problems the increasing number of rural over-65s increases is that of care for them. If there is too high a proportion of old people to young people (for want of more appropriate – but more cumbersome – language), then it makes it so much more difficult, and costly, to provide suitable care; at its most basic level, fewer younger people in the village means fewer younger people able to simply pop to the shop on behalf of their elderly neighbour who doesn’t find it so easy to get out of the house for themselves any more.

This is of course sad, but the thing is – and here I’m conscious of sounding quite uncomfortably tory – the social contract of society is a two way contract; if Society contracts to look after the elderly who’ve paid in to the National Insurance system for 50 years etc, do not ‘the elderly’ have a correspondent responsibility to facilitate being looked after? Is it really so unreasonable to suggest that somebody who has a high level of caring needs moves from their four bedroom house on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere (with three buses a week) to somewhere a bit more, y’know, central?

And then there’s the second issue – the dirty little secret of the countryside.

“The rising cost of housing in rural areas is driving out younger people as houses are, on average, £40,000 more expensive than those in towns and cities – even though wages are far lower, it said. At the same time, better-off older people are retiring to their dream country home”.

We’ve been hearing for years how awful it is that young people who are born and grow up in rural villages end up leaving when they come to need a home of their own, because they can’t afford to now buy a house there due to rising countryside property values; this is made out to be the fault of rich urban dwellers buying second homes, and Government Intervention Is Called For.

What always seems to be overlooked is that if rich people are buying all the houses in the countryside, who is selling them to them? Is it not the people already living in the countryside? Fair enough, you sell your house, you try to get the best price for it – but ‘the countryside’ can’t collectively sell itself out to the highest bidder & at the same time collectively complain about pricing its own children out of the market to remain there. Similarly, ‘the countryside’ cannot enjoy the peace and quiet that disconnexion from the urban rat race provides, and at the same time complain about the inconvenience which comes from that disconnexion.

“The British armed forces could be forced to shrink by up to a fifth because of a lack of money, a military think tank has predicted.  The Royal United Services Institute said the number of trained military personnel could fall from 175,000 to little more than 140,000 by 2016″.

So? It’s already widely discussed that public sector spending needs to be cut anyway, so why should the military be exempt from the pain? Are soldiers more important than nurses, teachers, librarians, and benefits clerks?

As it is, defence spending is currently 5.8% of total UK Government expenditure. What would the RUSI cut in order for defence not to share the pain of public sector cuts?