One wonders why?

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...people in Bradford are using a walk-in service rather than their own GP?

Dr Damian Riley, medical director at NHS Airedale, Bradford and Leeds, said: “This change was needed to make sure the walk-in service is used to its best advantage and continues to provide real value for money.

“More patients than expected, especially those who already have a GP elsewhere in the district, have been using the service, even though their own GP has been available.

Perhaps getting an appointment with their own GP is a living nightmare? Maybe people want a "turn up when you're ill" service from their GP?

So who is the service for then, if not Bradford people? Ah, yes...

The change allows appointments at the walk-in service to be prioritised for patients who are not registered with a GP, and in particular communities such as asylum seekers, homeless people, travellers and refugees. A service will also be offered for people who are temporary residents in the district and not registered at a Bradford and Airedale practice.

So it's back to the same old lousy GP service then folks!

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We really don't like shopping do we? Thoughts on the future of town centres...

At the weekend there was consternation at the drop in high street footfall – it would appear that our retail civilization as we know it is collapsing.

Customer numbers fell 3.3pc last week compared with the same time a year ago, according to research undertaken by Experian Footfall and released to The Sunday Telegraph.

The numbers come after two months of almost uniformly poor data from the high street.

The high street is struggling – in some cases the struggle appears to be more or less terminal – yet we remain obsessed with retail as the principle purpose of the town centre. Here’s arch-guardianisto, Peter Preston:

At its root, shopping serves one crucial purpose: it defines communities. Your local shops are where you bump into friends, nip out to buy a toaster or pair of shoes, break up the routine of the day – a routine that is growing ever more tenuous as people spend their lives in front of a screen, stuck inside little office boxes or, increasingly, working from home. What happens when the shops die? Neighbourhoods lose reference points. Areas lose their identities. There's no throb of life to the place where you live. It becomes blank, anonymous, savourless.

This is arrant nonsense – I’m more likely to “bump into my friends” in the cafe or, you never know, in one of the few pubs that the management, the smoking ban and nannying fussbuckets haven’t yet closed. I could add a range of other social environments – the gym, the park, the school gates, the old people’s lunch club, the swimming pool, the bus stop.

Over the past ten years or so there has been a profound shift in our retail habits. The town centre with its expensive car parking, its dirty streets and its inconsistency has been replaced by the shopping mall, the retail park and the giant supermarket. Why is this if shopping is such a wonderful social experience?

The dark truth is that shopping is mostly something we need to do rather than something we want to do. Forget the ‘sex in the city’ imagery of retail therapy and think instead about feeding a family of five on a budget, of having to get the kids new shoes for school, of getting the broken door in the kitchen fixed and a whole host of essentially mundane tasks that make up most people’s retail experience.

We really don’t like shopping. We like having new stuff, we like good food, we like the children to be dressed in clothes with a minimum of holes and tears. But we don’t like the process of getting to that state. And we want to keep the cost down (most of us don’t have Peter Preston’s income) so our limited budget can stretch to some fun – going out for a meal, having a drink, a trip to the pictures and saving for the two week family holiday in Spain, Greece or Florida.

And now there’s a new threat (according to Peter Preston):

But now beware: there's a new kind of threat. That threat is stagnation out of town, and degradation in town. The vans I see day after day – busy delivering vegetables next door, groceries across the road, bringing books, clothes and fridges at the push of a button – are not lifelines but the harbingers of a colder, more lonesome world.

I saw a tweet the other day from someone – I forget who – saying they were surfing Amazon on their phone while in Westfield shopping centre. Which rather makes the point – right now, on-line retailing is cheaper, more convenient and (wait for it) time saving. So we’re buying on-line it and taking the time and money we save to do other things – having a good time doing something other than the tedious chore of shopping.

The idea that shopping is the acme of consumption has always been nonsense – it is the having and using of the stuff we buy that gives the pleasure not the process of obtaining that stuff. To put is simply, shopping is a precursor to consumption not consumption itself. If town centres are to recover then we need to ask more about what I call ‘leisure and pleasure’ and less about retail and commerce.

Think for a second about those places you return to again and again and ask why? Notice that there’s always ‘something on’ – it might be retail, a market of some sort maybe. It might be entertainment, perhaps music or dance? And it might be sport or art or food or drink - just a damn good party.

We are in a phase of denial about town centres – providing incentives to retailers to set up shop, slipping taxpayers’ cash into ‘regeneration’ schemes and saying that it’ll all be fine once the recession’s over and the sun shines again. It may work – I’m happy to be wrong about this – but my fear is that we’re simply filling the cracks in the dyke with tax money (or rather freshly minted notes from the central bank’s ‘quantitative easing’ programme) and in five years time we’ll still be wondering why the shops are closing and the high street is struggling.

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Hey Lib Dems, you could try truth and liberalism for a change?

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Nick Clegg - I'm guessing the party has a new marketing boss or something - has been told that he needs to "rebrand" the Liberal Democrat Party.

Last week, Liberal Democrat MPs were summoned to a meeting to be told that "external brand experts" had been hired to try to boost the party's standing with the next general election still more than three years away.

In a further internal move, Mr Clegg has recruited a party donor and millionaire accountant, Neil Sherlock, to run his Cabinet Office team with the title of director of government relations.

Aha, not a marketing director - worse, an accountant!

And the strategy appears to be that old Lib Dem stand-by - taking credit for things they didn't do (a sub-set of their usual dissembling and unpleasantness). Starting with the abolition of slavery:

MPs should also, they were told, claim more credit for "Liberal" achievements of the past such as the abolition of slavery - even though the leading abolitionist, William Wilberforce, was an independent MP. 

And let me just correct the Daily Telegraph there - Wilberforce was, of course, a Tory.

However, in the interests of a coalition partner, let me suggest how the Liberal democrats might resolve their problem. It seems to me, a humble observer, that the party might do better if it:

Stopped laying claims - whether locally, nationally or historically - to things it had no hand in (this applies equally to the filling in of potholes, the abolition of slavery and the introduction of universal suffrage)

Started being a liberal party - you know one that actually believes in liberalism rather than the statist, social democratic, nanny state party it is at present

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The right isn't stupid - it just disagrees with your stumbling and mumbling

Apparently “the right” – of which I am a proud member – are stupid:

What interests me here is: why should the standard of rightist argument be so low - almost wilfully ignorant of opposing evidence?

And the reasons – such as they are explained – relate to several specific factors:

1. The relationship between “employment protection” and levels of employment
2. How minimum wages – especially for the young – affect the economy
3. Whether taxes and specifically higher rates of income tax impact negatively on enterprise

We’re told by this (I assume) left-inclined expert that there isn’t any evidence supporting what the right asserts.

So let’s have a look:

Here’s the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on the subject of how employment protection legislation (EPL) impacts on the labour market:

EPL is significantly correlated with certain labour market flows across countries, such as labour turnover, inflow into unemployment, duration of unemployment and the share of long-term unemployed. The stricter the EPL is, the lower the labour turnover, the higher the inflow into unemployment, the longer the duration of unemployment and the higher the proportion of long-term unemployment in total joblessness are.

So the ILO says that stricter EPL contributes to higher levels of unemployment and especially long-term unemployment. There are a load of caveats to this but it seems that “the stupid right” do have a point when they suggest that looser employment rights might have a positive impact on employment.

In the case of minimum wages the research is (I’ll be kind) all over the place. Much of this is because of ideological and/or theoretical prejudices – both for and against minimum wages. However, nearly all the research shows a small effect on employment and a bigger effect on levels of long-term unemployment especially among young people.

We find that movements in both French and American real minimum wages are associated with relatively important employment effects in general, and very strong effects on workers employed at the minimum wage. In the French case, albeit imprecisely estimated, a 1% increase in the real minimum wage decreases the employment probability of a young man currently employed at the minimum wage by 2.5%. In the United States, a decrease in the real minimum of 1% increases the probability that a young man employed at the minimum wage came from nonemployment by 2.2%.

The “stupid right” are on pretty sound grounds questioning minimum wages and in suggesting that reducing the level of such wages for young people might stimulate employment. For sure, like changes to employment legislation, it won’t solve the problem but it might help!

And the high marginal tax rates – they don’t helpeconomic growth:

This article explores the impact of tax policy on economic growth in the states within the framework of an endogenous growth model. Regression analysis is used to estimate the impact of taxes on economic growth in the states from 1964 to 2004. The analysis reveals a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on economic growth.

OK it’s just one piece of research – there will be others that suggest different outcomes. Indeed, some studies on entrepreneurship see cuts in personal taxes as a disincentive to self-employment – mostly because it’s a damn sight easier to avoid taxes if you’re self-employed!

But again the research suggests that the “stupid right” have a fair point - lower marginal rates of personal tax ceteris paribus have a positive effect on economic growth. Therefore, cutting the UK’s top rate is a good idea!

None of this suggests that there aren't different policy options, different taxes and alternative appraisals of the effect that such decisions have on the economy. What I am saying is that these suggestions – lower minimum wages, less strict labour laws and low marginal rates of personal taxation – are not “stupid”.

And saying they are is well...pretty dumb, really.

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That's what comes of fixing prices - shortages

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And it works for life-saving drugs too:

Health minister Simon Burns blamed dwindling stocks of potentially life-saving asthma, cancer and diabetes medication on companies selling to lucrative export markets.

Now I'm guessing that those exported drugs aren't being used to make pasta sauce or children's toys but are used for their life-saving purpose. So the number of people made better by the drugs hasn't changed, just that fewer of them are under the NHS.

That's what comes from fixing prices, Simon. For heaven's sake, you're Tory MP, you should know this stuff!

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Do public sector employers "buy" union reps?

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Not my usual source for interesting stuff but a very interesting observation from the loonier part of the left here:

My own experience of partnership working has been in the public sector. It was nothing more than a social club, monthly committee meetings, followed by a huge buffet and chit chat. The organisation decided that the senior union committee members did such a good job for the workers, that they would give them all a pay rise of between £10,000 - £15,000, over and above their substantive post and for the duration of their time in a full time union position.

All the facility time was given to reps that the staff side ‘leaders’ wanted, rather than who requested it. This meant that the union leaders would always win the annual election, as most of the reps had their facility time and other perks tied in to certain individuals winning elections.

All very cosy and, for the lefty agitator the result:

Certain individuals saw themselves as part of the board of directors, naively thinking they were part of making decisions, when in actual fact they were ridiculed and laughed at behind their backs. There was actually was ‘partnership’ working that took place. It was the board of directors and the unions working in partnership to try and soften the blow on every bad thing that was handed down to workers.

The union reps behaved like arrogant, pompous, slippery politicians. Never answering the questions of members directly, patronising workers, telling them that they ‘don’t understand’ etc. etc. They also colluded and collaborated with senior management when reps get out of line.

The solution? Stop funding trade unions representatives with tax money and start funding them from union subscriptions. Simple really.

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Bradford's planning fiasco - another fine mess!

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The Council made a mistake. This happens - sadly too often. And this one is a classic!

Let the City's great legal minds explain:


Further to your request for clarification regarding the council’s legal problems relating to housing sites, I have summarised the position as follows, which I hope that you find to be of use.

Under the old Revised Unitary Development Plan (RUDP), the council allocated development sites to meet future housing needs throughout the district. The council was then required to work with the Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber, to transfer the allocated housing sites to become an integral element of the new Local Development Framework (LDF).

The council was required to identify which of the policies from the former RUDP it wished to “save” as part of the new LDF and which it would allow to expire.

Policies H1 related to allocated housing sites and H2 to unallocated housing sites, with H2 relating to about 90% of proposed housing development. Policy H4 protected sites for housing use. In 2008 when required to undertake the “saving” and thus transfer of policies, the council interpreted the requirements to mean that it should save policy H4 which protected the housing sites, but not H1 & H2, which the council deemed to be phasing policies and thus redundant. H1 & H2 were subsequently allowed to expire on 31 October 2008.

A resident, who happens to be a planning law solicitor, has now challenged the legal basis of the council saving of unimplemented housing sites, stating that it should have saved policies H1 and H2 and that by failing to do so, the council has allowed its housing allocations to expire. 

Legal advice sought by the council concurs with the conclusion and the reasons set out in the letter from the local resident, ie that the lapsed allocations are no longer allocated as part of the council’s statutory development plan.

As they say...ooops!

So the Council is frantically trying to fix the problem (not having any allocated housing sites):

In order to rectify the situation, the council considered an urgent report into the matter at the meeting of its executive Committee on 21 November 2011 at which it resolved that; the “Executive reaffirms that it was council’s intention that the unimplemented Housing sites should be protected to meet the district’s housing needs”, “unimplemented housing sites previously allocated under policies H1 and H2 should be given significant weight when considering their use for residential development” and “any planning applications which related to an unimplemented Housing site and which have been considered but not had a decision notice issued be reconsidered by Regulatory and Appeals in the context of the new legal considerations”.

That should do? Maybe not!

At the meeting, the Chairman of the Menston Community Association stated that he had received legal advice questioning whether the Executive could add weight to expired policies.

Until such time as the matter is tested in court, or the time allowed for a Judicial Review expires, which interpretation is correct cannot be absolutely certain.

I think the phrase: "see you in court" applies here!

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