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Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Tuesday, July 30, 2013 Posted by Hari No comments Labels: , , , , , ,
Cameron and Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan Smith work out why...

Sunday, 28 July 2013

Sunday, July 28, 2013 Posted by Jake 3 comments Labels: , , , , ,
Excessive pay in the banking industry has long been justified by the need to 'stay competitive' in the global market. The UK has to pay bankers exorbitantly, we are told by UK bankers, because everybody else does. We can't stop until they do, the bankers tell us. To add insult to injury, banker pay provides cover for executives in other industries (energy; transport; MPs; etc.) to pump up their own salaries and perks. Which they pay for by keeping ordinary workers' salaries down, and pulling off more and more consumer rip-offs. New data on banker pay has exposed the whole "everybody else pays pots" as a fib.

Figures published by the European Banking Authority expose the lie. They reveal that the UK has more than three times the number of bankers paid more than 1 million Euros than the rest of Europe put together. 

"The EBA published today a report featuring data on the remuneration of EU bank staff who received one million Euro or more in total in 2010 and 2011. The report focuses on the gathering of numerical data and provides a first analysis of remuneration structures across the EU. "

Second in the list, after the UK's 2,436 bankers, is Germany with just 170: fourteen times fewer.


Bankers taking more than one million Euros in remuneration

Friday, 26 July 2013

Friday, July 26, 2013 Posted by Hari 1 comment Labels: , , , , ,
Chris tells KJ the answer...

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Thursday, July 25, 2013 Posted by Jake No comments Labels:
Archbishop of Canterbury wants to 'compete' Wonga out of existence
The head of the Church of England, Justin Welby, laid down a challenge to the UK’s leading payday lender after launching a new credit union for clergy and church. Welby, who served on the parliamentary Banking Standards Commission, said he plans to expand the reach of credit unions as part of a long-term campaign to boost competition in the banking sector. There are also plans to encourage church members with relevant skills to volunteer at credit unions. Small, local lenders could also be invited to use church buildings and other community locations with the help of church members. GUARDIAN

New bank rip-off: banks face £1bn bill for mis-selling credit card fraud insurance
Millions of bank customers mis-sold useless credit card theft insurance are set for payouts from a £1billion compensation fund, but there are fears that it could be higher. Customers of HSBC, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and Nationwide will be paid compensations over the next few months. It follows an investigation last year by the Financial Conduct Authority into CPP, a company which sold so-called card and identity theft cover via banks between 2005 and 2011. Not all banks sold these policies. While many high-street operators did, Lloyds and Halifax chose not to. Roughly nine in ten were sold via banks and the rest bought directly from CPP. These policies, which together cost £120 a year, promised cover of up to £100,000 if crooks went on a wild spending spree with a stolen card. But banks already cover customers for this for free. DAILY MAIL

HMRC yet to collect £2bn in unpaid tax held in offshore trusts
The taxman believes approximately 6,500 companies used employee benefit trusts (EBTs) as a mechanism to pay high earners yet dodge tax, particularly in the early 2000s. EBT's are a loan from a trust set up by a company to pay its employees. Usually the loan does not need repayment for a substantial amount of time, some even for 100 years. Around £650m of the total £3bn dodged has been collected, with a further £300m expected. But most of the businesses involved are holding back while the outcome of litigation is known. ACCOUNTANCY AGE

The end of rip-off council parking fees? Barnet residents win landmark court battle against permit hikes
Residents argued price hikes made parking in Barnet's residential streets more expensive than parking outside Harrods. The case could prevent other councils from using parking charges to raise revenue for other transport purposes. The cost of parking leaped from £40 to £100 in 2011 in the north London borough. Barnet council intended to use the additional income to meet projected expenditure for road maintenance and improvements, concessionary fares and other road transport costs. But London's High Court ruled that the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act ‘is not a fiscal measure and does not authorise the authority to use its powers to charge local residents for parking in order to raise surplus revenue for other transport purposes’. This is thought to be the first successful legal challenge against the level of parking charges set by a local authority and could see thousands of Barnet residents reclaim millions of pounds in unlawfully collected charges. DAILY MAIL

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 Posted by Jake 7 comments Labels: , , , , ,
We can't blame everything on 'Austerity' since the 2008 banker induced crisis. The number of hospital beds available has been dropping for decades, through Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron.

Shortage of beds is compounded by shortage of staff. The Parliamentary Health Select Committee reported in July 2013

  • Only 17% of emergency departments were able to provide 16 hours of Consultant cover in a working day, and even worse than that during weekends.
  • "Emergency staffing at all levels is under strain and a 50% fill rate of trainees is now resulting in a shortfall of senior trainees and future consultants"

Of course, this doesn't affect you if you can afford to go private.

Saturday, 20 July 2013

Saturday, July 20, 2013 Posted by Jake 9 comments Labels: , , , , ,
Would it surprise you to know the greatest perpetrators of the government premium rate phoneline scam, exposed by the National Audit Office, are IDS's Department of Works and Pensions and Osborne's HMRC? (Yes, we know HMRC is supposed to be 'non-ministerial'. But who are they kidding?). 


"Callers to higher rate lines paid £56 million in call charges in 2012-13. Callers spent a total of 880 million minutes on calls of which they spent 402 million minutes waiting to speak to an advisor. Customers incurred call charges of £26 million waiting to speak to an advisor."
  
“Callers do not receive a better service from higher rate numbers and many callers are put off calling government phone numbers altogether. The most vulnerable callers, such as low-income households, face some of the highest charges.”

The worse offenders are DWP (70 million high rate calls) and HMRC (47.4 million high rate calls), scamming money from the "most vulnerable callers, such as low-income households". 



Now there are depressingly many among us who believe the best time to kick a man is when he is down. They may see this £56 million as a decent contribution taken from the poor to save the nation's finances. They would be wrong. The lion's share of the loot goes to the telecoms companies:

Friday, 19 July 2013

Friday, July 19, 2013 Posted by Hari 1 comment Labels: , , , , , ,
Fee, Chris and KJ reckon it's not just about the money...

Thursday, 18 July 2013

Thursday, July 18, 2013 Posted by Hari No comments Labels:
Iain Duncan Smith defends himself against ONS claim he mis-uses statistics over success of benefits cap
Duncan Smith has already been criticised by the Office for National Statistics for claiming the cap had led to 8,000 people finding work. He was told by the ONS it was not possible to find any causal link between the cap and those finding work, as thousands of unemployed find work anyway. An unrepentant Duncan Smith said: "You cannot absolutely prove those two things are connected – you cannot disprove what I said. I believe this to be right.” Duncan Smith denied he was punishing people, saying it was "no life to lead to accept the fact that you languish on benefits, trying to avoid ways of getting back to work". But polls show many say their chief barrier to work was the lack of opportunities. GUARDIAN

Poll: the average person thinks 24% of benefits budget is spent on fraudulent claims. It's actually 0.7%
An Ipsos MORI poll exposes gross misconceptions around key political and economic issues. On average the public also thinks: that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the actual figure is 13%; that one in four people are Muslims when it is actually 5%; that 15% of girls under 16 get pregnant each year, instead of the actual 0.6%. More people think capping benefits at £26k will save more money (it actually saves £290m) than stopping child benefits for those earning over £50k (saves £1.7bn) or raising the retirement age to 66 (saves £5bn). TELEGRAPH Ipsos MORI

Serious Fraud Office called in after G4S 'overcharges' by tens of millions for tagging of prisoners
The “phantom” billing is estimated to have cost tens of millions of pounds. Both G4S and Serco have been billing for tracking the movements of people who had moved abroad, already returned to prison and had their tags removed, and even people who had died. Serco has agreed to a forensic audit, but G4S has not, hence the SFO investigation. Cases date back to at least 2005 and possibly as long ago as 1999. GUARDIAN

Drug overcharging ‘scam’ costs NHS £100m a year
Drug companies are exploiting a loophole in the law to hike prices by as much as 2,000 per cent. Big-pharma firms sell on medicines to businesses acting outside the Government’s price-regulation scheme. The purchasing firms are then free to mark up the prices they charge the NHS. The British Medical Association has warned that vital treatments risk being denied to patients if costs rise so much that the NHS can no longer afford them. In one example, Pfizer sold the rights to its epilepsy drug Epanutin to another business, Flynn Pharma. The medication, which is used by around 100,000 people across Britain, originally cost about 67p per 50mg. But after the sale this price shot up to almost £16 for the same amount. INDEPENDENT

Over 2,400 UK bankers paid €1m-plus, more than three times as many as in the rest of the EU put together
Almost three-quarters of the 2,436 who received more than 1m in 2011 were classified as working in high-risk investment banking – some 1,809 – while 85 work in retail banking, 182 in asset management and 360 in other business areas. The European Banking Authority will now publish the data on high earners annually as regulators attempt to analyse the way pay deals are structured, particularly as a new bonus cap is introduced across the EU. GUARDIAN

Wednesday, 17 July 2013

Wednesday, July 17, 2013 Posted by Jake 1 comment Labels: , , ,
It is, I suppose, some consolation that the 1% are undiscriminating when they rip-off the 99%. Even when you look at the 1% itself: the top 1% of the top 1% get a far greater share than the bottom 99% of the top 1% as is shown by this report from a London School of Economics study "Banker's Pay And Extreme Wage Inequality In The UK". The report states that the top 5% of the top 1% took 23% of the top 1%'s wages. Hope that is clear.

Remember as you read this post that the graphs show data for the top 1% only.

"we rank the top percentile of all workers into 50 equally-sized bins based on total wage. So the workers in the top bin are the top 0.02% of [all] earners. We then compute the share of the top 1% wage bill that accrues to each bin in 1998 and 2008. It follows that the sum of all these shares will be 1. Figure 11 shows the results. In effect we are now focusing on the extremes within the extreme. The top 2% of the percentile took 11% of the wage share in 1998 and 13% in 2008. The relatively large share taken by the very top earners seems consistent with superstar theory, though they by no means account for most of the gains that have accrued over the last decade."

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Tuesday, July 16, 2013 Posted by Hari No comments Labels: , , , , , ,
Cameron checks whether Jeremy Hunt has got his sums right. He has!..

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