“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?

“Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the UK Payments Council – the body that oversees payments strategy – has said. The Council said there should be ‘no scenario’ for using cheques by 2018. The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in ‘terminal decline’”.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque; in fact, it’s so long ago that I can’t even remember when my last cheque book ran out of cheques and I didn’t get a new book because they stopped sending them out, and the process of ordering a new book had become so cumbersome that I couldn’t be bothered.

All the news coverage of the arguments from the banking institutions about why in nine years time there should be no more cheques has focussed on how in the modern era supermarkets stopped accepting cheques years ago, and anyway everybody is doing their shopping online with their cards anyway; there’s been a little discussion about the small trader (the plumber, the rooder, the small seller of handmade jewellery at a local craft fair) who currently doesn’t have the ability to accept payment by card, and that has been turned around into how the banking industry still has work to do to make it easy for those people to accept electronic payment.

Now it’s true that modern business needs to adapt to the modern world, even if the business you are in is the oldest business in the world.

But what is – as always in situations like this – being ignored is that it’s not just business which needs to hand over money from one party to another.

What about the scenario of the auntie who wants to give her nephew a hefty cash present for a significant birthday? She can hardly withdraw a hundred notes from the cash machine and put them in the envelope with the birthday card, can she? She admittedly could do a bank transfer, but (a) it’s not the same as receiving the actual token of cash, and (b) it’s more faff for her. Internet banking is an option for many, but even me - Digitally Engaged™ since 1982 – doesn’t bother with that because of the faff involved, and as more and more people take up mobile internet options as their primary if not sole internet connexion that option is so much faffier. Or the scenario of the mate who needs to borrow some money from another mate – again, it’s technically possible for an electronic funds transfer to take place from one account to another, but practically, it’s a major bother, when simply writing a cheque is the easiest option for them.

But then that’s the modern world, isn’t it? Stuff The Customer.

Five key points which emerged for me were:

The days of the global media corporation are over

In the olden days, the media industry was dominated by just a handful of ‘boulder’companies – such as News International, CNN, Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, the BBC, etc. When Channel 4 launched, and when Eddie Shah launched the Today newspaper they were big, national events, because there were so few other media brands. Today, all new media companies are ‘pebble’ companies – small start-ups, with small costs & consequently small profits. New digital television stations come and go almost unnoticed; for most people literally unnoticed, as most people rarely update the channel lists on their televisions / set top boxes. There will be no more new boulder companies.

The paradox of the media industries in free-fall

The media industries – especially those of journalism and of music – are in free fall; profits for record companies and newspaper companies are plumetting, as people turn their backs on their offerings. The paradox of this is that now there is more music, and more journalism (and yes, some blogging should be counted as journalism) around now than ever before. It’s not ‘media’ itself that’s in crisis, but the notion of making a lot of money out of creating media. The ability for media customers to get their media for free (whether via piracy or legitimately) is only part of the story – media creators now take their product to market themselves, bypassing the middleman who used to pay for the creation of the media product, and accordingly take a cut of the price of the product. When you can create your album in your home studio and distribute it across the internet yourself, what value is the record company adding?

For creativity to thrive, experimentation needs to embrace the possibility of failure

This is clearly an obvious statement when written down like that; as with most obvious statements it never occurs to anybody until they see it written down. Common sense, innit? In the olden days, the music business was just that – a business. Record companies invested in artists, and took risks. Sure, manufactured pop has been with us since the beginning of popular music, and the number of experimental pieces even getting in to the hit parade, let alone topping it, can be counted on your hands. But in the olden days record companies used a bulk of the profits they made from chart-topping artists to subsidise artists which were unlikely to be vast earners, because they recognised that a healthy diversity of available music was good for society, good for their own portfolios – and consequently good for their own ultimate balance sheets. Similarly in newspapers, press barons of old saw newspaper proprietorship almost as a civic, philanthropic, duty – they didn’t want their newspapers to make losses, but conversely saw the provision of news and information as having primacy over the provision of profit.

In the modern era, with the boulder media companies, media businesses have become media industries – no longer do they invest in new, experimental talent, no longer do they take risks; by focussing solely on maximising profits they have lost the souls of their industries, with the consequence that their customers are deserting them in droves. Pebble companies are in the best position to experiment – such as BooneOakley, having made their whole website as a series of YouTube videos!

Quality, not quantity

Question – was it worth £6bn to make the Eurostar train journey between London and Paris 40 minutes faster, cutting the travel from 2 hours 55 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes? Would that money have been better spent on improving the user experience, so passengers didn’t notice the drudgery of spending three hours on a train? First class carriages (with the food and drink to match) throughout the whole train? More cheaper fares (or more cheap first class upgrades)? Does three hours even feel like a long time to spend on a train to Paris anyway?

Don’t underestimate the propensity of users to re-purpose things

There are plenty of objects on Twitter, such as Tower Bridge. It’s cute – it posts a message every time it lifts, and then when it drops again. But what started off as a cute gimmick has actually turned into something useful – if you live in London & need to travel around the area, it’s actually a bit of an inconvenience when the bridge lifts, because it holds up your travel – but if you know it’s lifting, you can re-route your journey. Which people in London are increasingly doing.

Other themes

• The current creative revolution will be as economically & socially disruptive as the industrial revolution – and we’re woefully unprepared for it. Our education system does not encourage creative thinking, significantly unchanged as it has been for the last 200 years.
• The physical space will always matter for making connexions – we should be using the digital space to feed the physical space.
• Always design a thing by considering it in its wider context – a chair within a room, a room within a building, a building on a street, etc.

And finally…

…can you remember a world before smartphones?

“It all began with a tin of cat food, an empty coffee tin and a hairdryer. When air was forced between the two tins, the ensemble began to float on its own little cushion of air. Thus, through a combination of eccentricity and genius, Sir Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft, in a shed, in a boatyard, in Norfolk”.

The hovercraft, whilst as a passenger carrying vehicle was superseded by the channel tunnel, is very much a British success story.

Development was largely funded under the aegis of the National Research and Development Corporation, a government body set up in 1948 expressly to help British inventors develop and commercialise their work. As well as the hovercraft, other British inventions which benefited from NRDC assistance include:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Interferon
• Continually Variable Transmission, &
• Disposable daily contact lenses

The NRDC was privatised in 1992 after being renamed British Technology Group, and thus public funding of research and development ended. BTG itself scaled its operation right down in 2005 to concentrate only on medical research. Of course, private enterprise hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful in bringing brand new products to market, as Clive Sinclair, Eric Laithwaite, James Dyson, and Trevor Baylis proved (though the first two clearly could have benefitted from better help in making their inventions commercially successful), but in an era where enterprise is supposed to be key to Getting Us Out Of The Recession(tm), what real help is government offering to British inventors? Indeed, what real help has government offered for enterprise in the last 25 years?

“Britain is vulnerable to terrorist attack from the sea because no single body is responsible for protecting the UK’s coast, MPs have warned. Just nine Royal Navy ships along with a ‘motley collection’ of police and coastguard boats guard a shoreline more than 7,000 miles long”.

If there’s a point being made about having so few ships on patrol to guard 7000 miles of coast that we’re under serious threat, how many ships do they think are necessary?

And more to the point, what kind of sea-borne threat are they thinking of anyway? A bunch of terrorists turning up in a fishing trawler equipped with mortars, firing shells on to Brighton Beach?

Like most government / military responses to the supposed increased terrorist threat over the last 10 years, most of the scenarios they have come up with have been largely fanciful, whilst ignoring the basic scenarios of a bunch of loons climbing on to a train with a rucksack full of fertiliser.

And there’s the rub.

For all the bravado of the security services and the military, the simple sad fact is any terrorist attack is a simple matter – even for somebody to simply load up a bomb with petrol, sail up the Thames, & light a match outside the Houses of Parliament. Such a simple improvised device would almost certainly cause no damage to the building itself, but the publicity generated would be no less intense.

No plotting with others would be needed, the probability of spooks discovering the plan would be zero, and even the Thames River Police would be unlikely to see anything amiss until it was too late, let alone the Ark Royal.

So basically we have – in a time of a severe squeeze on public spending, resulting in thousands of public sector workers at risk of being made redundant, with a consequent shifted strain on to a different part of the public purse – the military wanting more shiny toys.

I wonder how many doctors, teachers, dole office workers, transport planners etc one more ship to jolly round the coast would cost?

“BT has said it will cut about 15,000 jobs this year, mostly in the UK, and has reported an annual loss of £134m. The firm also said it had cut 15,000 jobs in the past year, which was 5,000 more than had been expected”.

The BT spokesman said they hoped to remove the positions through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies, rather than through compulsory redundancies. How caring that sounds. Though it transpires that although BT is not planning on compulsory redundancies, it instead has a compulsory redeployment programme, where highly skilled engineers are removed from the job they have spent years training (and even more years becoming accomplished) to do, and given the option of either voluntarily being redeployed to a call centre, or voluntarily being made compulsorily redundant.

But that wasn’t what I was going to talk about.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article, but was mentioned in the radio coverage of the story, was that the anticipation was that most of the jobs to be shed would be the temporary staff, working through agencies. He said it in the tone of voice indicating “so that’s alright, then”, going on to say that they wanted to reward their permanent staff for their loyalty in being permanent staff.

I wonder how many of the temporary staff who are apparently disloyal because they’re not permanent have been working there for over 12 months? Disloyal for foregoing sickness pay, pension contribution, paid bank holidays, and any number of other benefits which permanent staff receive and are denied to temporary staff – no matter how long either have worked for the company.

And apart from a few people working in highly lucrative I.T. consultancy roles, being a temporary member of staff is not the route to riches it is commonly thought to be – it’s took a change in the law to force employers to pay temporary staff as much as their permanent colleagues doing the same work – though the employers themselves still end up paying more for temps because of the agency’s cut.

Workplace unions are also notoriously bad at standing up for temporary staff – usually their attitude is protect the permanent workers at all cost, and see the temps as worse than scabs crossing a picket line.

So it’s quite convenient when such as BT announce redundancies, proudly proclaiming “we’ll restrict the sackings to the agency workers” – they manage to make themselves sound caring on the radio, the unions stay relatively quiet, & 15,000 more people next month will be wondering how they’ll pay their rent / mortgage / food bills.

But that’s OK – after all, they’re only temps.