Category Archives: Officialdom

Jobsworths and state institutions driving Grumpy wild

Making simple things hard, Mrs May ?

Dateline 9th August 2013, and the government is under attack for only having brought to justice two of a large number of criminals who have defrauded tax payers of millions of pounds. Most of the offenders have absconded overseas, and the likelihood of them now being apprehended is infinitesimally small.

Could the government have done more? Well, the BBC published a list of some key offenders, and there was one common characteristic of them all; that was that they all had been arrested and charged, but then failed to appear in court, having been granted bail. All bar one were either foreign nationals or had probable significant overseas connections.

They include a Chinese man who had defrauded the tax payer of £2.5m. That is a significant major crime committed by someone who might reasonably considered to be a flight risk – so why the bail?

Is this lack or prison space (down to Theresa May) or fear of European pinko Human Rights legislation?

So, Mrs May, a simple solution to limit these multi-million pound losses to the tax payer is to not grant bail to those accused of significant fraud when it might be reasonably concluded they have a material risk of absconding.

[Let’s think this through; the fraudster or alleged fraudster has maybe millions of pounds secreted away, and has a simple choice; stay, be jailed and probably lose the ill-gotten gains, or flee. Does the judge really think they will do the right thing and appear in court for option one? Utterly unbelievable.]

There is always potential for holding someone who is innocent (but shorter time to trial would mitigate that somewhat) but in these cases the courts seem to have got the granting of bail wrong in every single case. Think again, Mrs May.

Hertfordshire County Council idiocies

Taken 28.04.2014 after road closed for ‘repairs’

Take the first picture as an example. Why on earth didn’t the contractors repair this large pothole next to the patch they did? Almost certainly this will have to be repaired before the original repair needs rework.

This strategy is proven mathematically to be sub-optimal and a waste of Watford taxpayers money. In my opinion Herts CC have a case against the contractors for patently sub-standard execution of these works.

Large pot hole erosion next to repair

Another example of some jobsworth following road markings to the letter and leaving a pothole adjacent to the repair itself !

One of many single holes left un-repaired.

Smart Meters from hell – part I

The UK government is in the process of ordering the compulsory installation of ‘smart’ metering devices for electricity and gas in every home in Britain. The first question that might come to mind is why the government is mandating that these intrusive (and sinister) devices are placed in every home; however, when one realises that the uber-architect of this plan is one Chris Huhne (the chief proponent of government policy to cover half the land with windmills in the name of green energy), all is explained.

Mr Huhne, Liberal democrat MP for the constituency of Eastleigh, is Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. He comes from an identikit ‘Conservocrat’ mould i.e. wealthy family, Westminster School (a sort of Eton for intelligent children), First in PPE at Oxford, and the Sorbonne.

The issues this plan raises are complex, and hence Grumpy plans to devote no less than three posts to cover the aspects of the policy which concern him most.

The first warning signal comes because the government is promoting the installation of smart meters as something which is really going to benefit the consumer. Anyone who has been through at least one election knows that in reality this means that it is going to benefit one or all of the government, consultants, large business, and most usually, HM Revenue and Customs first, and the consumer not at all.

Grumpy’s checked his electricity supplier to see what the consumer advantages were, and their web site lists the following as the key benefits of smart meters

“you can claim credits towards the Code for Sustainable Homes – helping you meet your environmental obligations”

Grumpy had no idea that he had any environmental obligations, and as at of the time of writing he could not indentify any legal requirements with regard to energy use – what does the provider know that is yet unpublished?

“smoother handover to the new occupier”

This is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of benefits … how often do people move? And when Grumpy last moved house 12 years ago, he called the utility company and informed them – that was it. How much smoother can it be?

“there’s no need for you to manually read the meters or send us readings”

It currently takes about 60 seconds per quarter to read the meter, and 5 minutes to key the reading into the internet. Done. If Grumpy were looking for savings of either cost or time in his life, this would be about number 1000 on the list, if that. They cannot really believe this is a serious consumer benefit.

“make a great selling point when marketing your properties”

Who writes these things? Every home will have a Smart meter, because the government is going to make it compulsory. So what’s the selling point? This guff must be written by Westminster School alumni in Chris Huhne’s department.

Even more bizarrely, the website also claimed that a benefit would be ‘accurate bills’. The clear implication is that bills are not currently accurate; this is certainly news to Grumpy, and rather disturbing. Moreover, if the provider has known that it hitherto has furnished inaccurate bills, it’s frankly unacceptable for them to have been silent on the topic until now.

The paucity of logical and credible benefits dreamed up by the pathetic copywriter of this rubbish clearly hides a less benign rationale for their introduction – and the odds are that what it won’t bring is any free will benefit to a consumer. Further, this is a plan which involves changing over 50 million meters in domestic homes at a cost which is estimated at over £11 billion – and we all know what credence to give to government estimates.

No, this is a serious heavyweight project, rather than something giving dubious and at best frothy consumer benefits; in the next two posts Grumpy will examine the real drive for this plan and how it links to the fantasies of ‘Windmills” Huhne.

Please, Mr Postman, deliver de letter …

I had cause recently to send two letters using a service from the UK Post Office called ‘Recorded Delivery’ which is a tracked, ‘signed’ for service.

Sadly, neither document made it to their respective destinations, and I checked back to remind myself how previous use of the service had fared. In fact, of all the documents I have sent using this Royal Mail facility in the past 3 years, over 65% never arrived.

I’m happy to accept that this public, union dominated, relic of 1950’s statism is bloated, inefficient, ineffectual and completely devoid of any notion whatsoever of customer service. It’s how such organisations are.

What raised Grumpy’s ire is the pointless framework for seeking redress; irrational barriers are raised against the wronged claimant so that there is no economic logic in making a claim.

The whole point about a tracking system is that Royal Mail knows whether an item has been delivered or not. Since (as shown clearly on the tracking site) my items had not been so delivered, it is irritating to have to complete two pages of claim and submit original documentation in support of this self-evident fact. The simple outcome is that the time spent on conforming with these procedures to claim the postage of £1.23 renders it meaningless.

In fact, in a previous spate of vanishing deliveries I did submit a claim just out of irritation, complete with the forms and original documentation, which I sent by (you guessed it) Recorded Delivery. Predictably, that was lost as well. Now we get to the real catch22 – I sought to resubmit the claim, but of course now had no original receipt. The claim was accordingly rejected, even though they in fact lost it. Beyond belief.

This is an organisation that was granted £1 billion of taxpayers money in 2010. No wonder the union, the CWU, opposes any attempts to introduce market discipline by privatisation into this out-of-control gravy train .