Tag: bad economics

It seems Ms Snelgrove has been a little forgetful when it comes to paying her internet bills.

Swindon Borough Council’s Mr Martin is clearly no statistician. His social analysis skills aren’t too hot either. According to Mr Martin, a league table of wards based on levels of outstanding council tax debt will help them to ‘identify areas that may have problems’

The idea of breaking it down into wards is to help us identify areas that may have problems and see what we can do to help.

He does seem to have a few doubts though.

We have to look more carefully at these figures because for example, Abbey Meads is not one of the places with a lot of benefit claimants

Quite. As Mr Martin clearly hasn’t bothered, I’ll do the analysis for him. Here are the figures – and spin – from the Adver.

Abbey Meads comes in at fifth in the league of council tax dodgers – with over £572,000 owed from 904 court orders. The worst area is Central ward, which is £688,000 in the red with 1,390 court orders. Gorse Hill & Pinehurst, Eastcott and Parks are close behind, each owing in excess of £600,000. The most punctual payers evidently live in Ridgeway ward, where just under £44,000 is outstanding from 71 court orders.

Let’s concentrate on just the three wards for which full figures have been given. In the council’s chosen ranking, they are:

• Central — £688,000 from 1,390 court orders
• Abbey Meads — £572,000 from 904 court orders
• Ridgeway — £44,000 from 71 court orders

I can’t find figures for how many taxable properties there are in each ward. The best indicator of ward size I can find is the electorate (i.e. those registered to vote) at the last local elections.

• Central — 7777 electors
• Abbey Meads — 10,713 electors
• Ridgeway — 2464 electors

With the population of Abbey Meads four times as large as that of Ridgeway, any analysis based on totals per ward is going to be heavily skewed in favour of Ridgeway and against Abbey Meads. There are various sums one can do to try to remove that effect.

From that analysis you could say that it’s not the wards with high numbers of benefit claimants that have the problem, but the more affluent ones, as there the amounts owed – the last column in the table – are, on average, much higher.

Of course, if you pick the other columns in the table, the conclusion is different… but not more correct.

I’ve always been clear, since the my first pay cheque, that taxation is a one way thing. I either pay more tax or less tax, but it’s always me paying the government, not the other way round. That’s not the way Ms Snelgrove likes to spin things.

Last week the Pre-Budget Report announced a one year cut in VAT of 2.5% and the Government will give a payment to every basic rate taxpayer of £145 (up from £120 this year).

If the government’s representative in South Swindon thinks I’m going to be grateful to her for being allowed to keep a little more of my own money, whilst at the same time her government is running up massive debts that will cost me much more in tax later, and is insisting that banks cut the interest they pay on savings, then she’s very much mistaken.

Today I received Ms Snelgrove’s latest spin Parliamentary Report. This appears to be an annual event. She seems to think that, in the circumstances, Swindon’s economy isn’t doing too badly.

These are challenging times but I am confident Swindon can hold up better than most during the down turn in the global economy. Government schemes in Swindon… have meant that we are still seeing high levels of investment coming into the town. I am confident Swindon will continue to prosper and there will be new jobs in the future through this investment.

Today there was news of over 1,200 job losses in Swindon, at Honda and one of its suppliers.

Anne Snelgrove, keeping out-of-touch with Swindon.

With the current financial problems caused by far too many people — including Mr Brown’s government — borrowing far more than they can afford, you might think that the government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove, would recommend a little caution with how the council spends our money. No, she wants Swindon Borough Council to join the throwing-money-at-bad-debts party.

We all have to make sure that people are helped so I think that Swindon Council should be looking at its capital reserves and seeing if it can do something even if it is a one-off. Clever accountants can do clever things.

Leaving aside the banality of that last sentence, Ms Snelgrove seems not to have noticed that it’s clever accountants that weren’t quite as clever as they thought that got us into this mess. But then, Ms Snelgrove has never been one to allow reality or the needs of Swindon to get in the way of her spouting her party’s latest spin… which she is doing in abundance.

Government is not sitting back and doing nothing, it has cut VAT to put cash into more people’s pockets and there are a number of measures that the Government is carrying out to help hard-working families.

Ah, how generous of the government to allow us to keep a bit more of our own money, not that 2½p in the pound (or 0p in the pound on essentials like food) is going to make much of a difference when many retailers are already discounting prices heavily. And as the government’s intending to take this and much more back later in far higher taxes, this is really nothing more than an electoral gimmick, trying to bribe people — using their own money — into keeping Mr Brown and his fellow economic incompetents in power.

We are living in extraordinary times and we all need to be thinking about what action we could be taking and it is not just central Government that should be acting.

The only action I’m thinking of taking is voting for a party that doesn’t lie about ‘An end to boom and bust’, doesn’t lie in order to take the country to war, and is rather more careful what it does with our money.

What do you do if you’ve just bought a loss-making radio station, where things have got so dire that it’s almost down to just one presenter and has gone for long periods repeating the same tunes for hours on end? The South West Radio Limited approach seems to be to jump on the biggest passing media bandwagon.

THE new owners of Brunel FM are inviting comic Russell Brand to take a presenting role on the radio station…. Brunel FM is currently searching for a breakfast presenter and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of attempting to lure the witty motormouth to Swindon….
“Russell, give me a call,” said South West Radio director Paul Roberts, who hails from Wales. “We’ll sit down and discuss the possibilities.”

For a station that’s had the financial difficulties Brunel FM has experienced recently, those ‘possibilities’ could more accurately be described as Mr Robert’s fantasies.

We want the station to relate to the listener. It needs to be engaging listening. There has to be on-air personality. It shouldn’t be that you are just listening to a DJ, it should be like a chat in a pub or a conversation in a park.

In what way would recruiting Mr Brand help the station achieve that? The current breakfast show presenter, Kate Constance, may only be on that show as a temporary measure, but her presenting style is far closer to ‘a chat in the pub’. And neither Mr Brand nor anyone similar would attract the sort of listener that would bring in the best-paying advertisers — a significant factor for a hard-up station like Brunel FM.

We have been at the station a week now and the format hasn’t really changed. There should be no major internal changes.

Aah… some reality at last. With very little money to spare, big-name changes are unlikely soon.

The decline of Brunel FM seems to have been rapid and tomorrow could well mark the end of its parent company. Since the Adver first reported the departure of Dan Chisholm from the station’s breakfast show, others have followed. The weekend presenters were the latest to go. In their place was automated programming, with for much of the time the beep-beep of the feed from the news bulletin supplier audible in the background behind the non-stop music. Not that this will be totally unfamiliar to regular listeners, but at least in the past this poor quality programming was restricted to late at night — now it’s happening in the middle of the day.

Now it seems the station has just one newsreader and one presenter left, Kate Constance having been moved from the evening show, to the evening drive-time show and now to the breakfast show, as other presenters have left… and apparently doubling as advertising salesperson too. The Lime Kiln studios must seem rather empty.

With the economy in crisis and an economic and diplomatic feud with Iceland brewing, you’d think Mr Brown would be busy with the important affairs of government…. Nope, he’s been breezing through Swindon on his way to open a literature festival. Admittedly, he was in Swindon to talk about economics, but it’s hardly an efficient use of the PM’s time.

Having bought his own house through Halifax Estate Agents, komadori notes with some sadness — though not much — the imminent departure of said company from Swindon. And this isn’t just any estate agent that is leaving. It’s one of the few that was prepared to market some of the houses of pre-fabricated concrete construction in Swindon’s three Ps that other agents would not touch. Whilst some might cheer at this, for those hoping to buy or sell a cheap (very cheap), if risky, property, things are about to get much harder… which will do nothing for those estates nor for the general prosperity of Swindon.

I find Swindon Borough Council’s approach to fly-posting both half-hearted and inefficient.

The cost of removing a poster zip-tied to a tree or lamp-post is about £20 while a poster fixed to another surface could cost up to £200…. Mr Palacio said: “We are keen to stress that we are not trying to ban anyone from putting up posters – we just want to make sure that they are not left lying around for ages after the event is over.”

I can see that something that is very firmly glued in place may be expensive to remove, given the staff time and equipment needed — steam cleaning, for example. But £20 to remove a poster tied to a tree? Even if this includes the cost of someone at the council’s contact centre dealing with a report first, there must be a very inefficient process between the first report and the final snip to remove the poster to run-up a bill of £20. And why wait until after the event to get tough with the culprits? Fly-posting of the type shown in the Adver’s story is unsightly from the moment it is posted, not just several months later.