“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.

“A tribunal is considering how much the MoD must pay a female soldier after she won her case against the Army for sexual and racial discrimination. Tilern DeBique, 28, was disciplined after not appearing on parade because she had to look after her daughter”.

To my mind, this incident gives a completely bad name to the whole concept of the right to work free from discrimination, and just plays into the hands of the foaming Daily Mail readers who like nothing more than to scream ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ at every opportunity.

The question of the appropriateness of a single mother being a serving soldier in the armed forces – even as a signals technician rather than somebody required to actually shoot people – required to be on call to be deployed to an active combat zone is a whole discussion of itself.

It’s also a fair comment to pose that if the Ministry of Defence is going to actively engage in recruiting overseas, then it needs to make sure it can properly accommodate the overall needs of its recruits.

But as to being disciplined for being late for parade due to being unable to organise childcare at short notice; this is not a normal office environment we’re talking about here – any normal job, it would be a harsh uncaring employer indeed which didn’t offer understanding and flexibility.

But the armed forces are not normal office environments; when you are just about to be deployed to a warzone, you can’t say ‘sorry I’m late, traffic was murder and my childminder let me down’. And the whole point of the way military discipline works is you treat every single day as if you are about to be deployed. You also don’t have a right to not have a nasty howwid drill sergeant say nasty howwid things to you – if you can’t take that kind of environment, then the army isn’t really for you.

In this instance, the army disciplined her (note, didn’t dismiss her), and offered her alternative employment as an option if she felt life in the army was incompatible with being a single mother. Instead she opted to leave and pursue a discrimination case against the MoD, facing a possible payout of of the order of £100,000.

“Wellderly, webinar, disbenefits and under-capacitated are among new forms of jargon being used by the public sector, a survey has revealed. Such impenetrable phrases are on a list of banned words published by the Local Government Association (LGA)”.

It seems to have become a new biennial news story about office jargon, especially in councils:

• Why do councils love jargon?
• Workplace jargon isolates staff

At least this time around the LGA admits that jargon is often necessary for internal use:

“The LGA said it was ‘impossible’ for organisations to avoid all jargon in internal communications but there was no excuse for such language to be used in public information”.

Indeed.

Of course, as the point I made last time around – council’s don’t deliberately want to obfuscate, it’s not in their interest to. When council-speak does leak out, overwhelmingly that’s due to a staff member in a service area putting out communication themselves, rather than – as they are supposed to – going through their service area’s communications teams, part of whose core function is to check the text & convert it into plain English.

But sadly in the current era of cuts and “slashing make-work back-office paper-pushers in order to protect front-line services”, communications staff are considered superfluous, and communications budgets - both for activity and for salaries – are being slashed.

So with a reduced number of people employed in local government to ensure your leaflet reads like it was written in English, expect more webinar trialogues over the coming years.

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?

In the greenwash department, this carton of Sainsbury’s apple juice speaks for itself, really.

In my day job recently I’ve been doing a bit of project planning, using existing numbers to predict future numbers. Let’s play with these swine flu numbers a little, shall we?

On June 10 the number of reported swine flu cases was 800.

Meaning that at the reported exponential infection rate, by June 17 there were 1,600 cases, June 24 3,200, July 1 6,400, by July 8 there will be 12,800, July 15 25,600, July 22 51,200, August 1 102,400, August 8 204,800, August 15 409,600, August 22 819,200, and ‘the end of August’ gives us 1,638,400 cases. We’re of course not counting the people who no longer have the illness by the end of August, because news reporting hasn’t been telling us how well and quickly people have been recovering, just how they’ve been succumming.

So, lets say now that by the end of August, we tail off the exponential infection rate and just keep with the linear infection rate of 100,000 per day. That’s a million people every ten days, or three million people per month.

October will in that case give us 4.5 million cases, November, 7.5 million cases, December, 10.5 million cases, January, 13.5 million cases. Or a full fifth of the whole UK population.

Scaremongering?

Over the last few days I’ve watched this skip, on King Edwards Drive near where I live, gradually fill up.

Not your usual house clearance though – the skip contains a brand new futon, brand new bed, brand new clothes, brand new microwave oven, brand new designer chairs, even a brand new washing machine (though I noted that was liberated – not by me – within just a few hours of being deposited).

I can’t help wondering about the story behind the skip; it seems unusual for so much new stuff to be chucked out.

The obvious prediction is an eviction of some kind – the tenant couldn’t keep up with the rent, so was chucked out by the landlord at short notice. Or worse still, the tenant was keeping up with their rent perfectly fine, but the landlord themself weren’t keeping up their mortgage payments – leaving the tenant, immorally unprotected in these instances, put out on the street with nowhere to go.

Perhaps there was foul play involved? Maybe a drug deal went wrong, and the tenant found themselves having to skip the country at short notice?

Or perhaps it is for a nice reason – the tenant has just inherited a wopping legacy, or had a substantial payrise, and is having a total clearout, a replacement of new stuff. Perhaps they’ve moved out because they’ve just embarked on a new phase of a relationship and moved in with a partner, who has better and even newer (or perhaps older, pricelessly antique) stuff?

Whatever the story, what a criminal waste, chucking out all these perfectly good household items, especially in an area where just a few hundred yards away lies some of the worst deprivation in the country. Freecycle, the Ladywood Furniture Project, eBay, the British Heart Foundation shop in Northfield, or even friends would make much better use of these items than the council tip.

“European buyers of Windows 7 will have to download and install a web browser for themselves. Bowing to European competition rules, Microsoft Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer”.

I trust in the spirit of fair competition, Apple is also going to remove Safari from OS X, meaning Mac users will also need to download a browser before they can look at websites?

“In preparation for a potential heatwave this summer, people need to make sure they have a fair weather friend they can call on for aid, officials advise”.

The Met Office are apparently not quite sure yet whether we’re actually going to get a serious disaster-level heatwave like we had in (was it 2006?), but they do think we’re definitely going to get a hot summer.

If we do have a full scale heatwave, fortunately the Department of Health has published a Heatwave Plan containing lots of top advice about how beat the blazing sun:

“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?