This is the oldest post on the blog and read by chance witnesses or people who want to know the start.
The start is that
What system?
* Bournmouth Symphony Orchestra say "Local Authority grants in 2013/14 amount to £392,535 (2013: £480,545)". They also do very well on investment income, which a lot of charities don't, and of course their main service is charged-for so they have trading income. The investment income does come with a management fee. I think charities ought to risk a lot of their 3-month reserves on safer P2P lending such as sites like Savingstream that share-out bridging loans at 12%. Failing that, some on low cost stock market tracker on over 5% average rise per year. This could be organised by a volunteer treasurer and cost nothing in management fees. There is a list of sites on P2Pmoney.co.uk.
Getting back to my main point, £392,535 could pay some care worker salaries. If tax and mangement costs are a quarter, that's about three average wage with tax per hundred thousand or about 15 front-line average wage earners at £26,500 each. I'm vague about mangement costs because I've never done it, but employers' costs of about 25% come-up online. I don't know how much difference in care could be provided by 15 average wage-earners in the areas of local authorities that contributed, but it sounds like more than the staff of a dementia care daycentre and a bit over for training and respite residential care. My political interest is to scrap the violin-players and the tennis coaching in favour of care workers.
The start is that
- I don't want care services cut, like dementia care day centres, when there is money for a
- National Tennis Academy now Tennis Foundation only a bike ride away. It's quasi-autonomous but it sprang up a the same time as the Olympics, it admits to a lottery grant, and there is a Department for Culture Media and Sport for funding such corruption of the welfare state. It says here that £530,000 a year could be cut from Sport England's grant for tennis alone. If that can be cut, I should look-up what the total amount syphoned out of the welfare state for tennis is.
What system?
- I believe a welfare state is a big national insurance system. The purpose of the state is to give us cheap deal on our national insurance.
- There are great benefits apart from unemployment pay, housing benefit, pensions, schooling, and healthcare.
♦ The system is so cheap to run that it's possible to help a lot of people who did not pay-in to the system.
♦ There is less need for a separate parallel system run by charities for people who did not pay-in
♦ Poverty tends to breed population growth in third world countries, or I think so anyway. With secondary schools including ones for girls, health advice, and pensions, I think there is less pressure for poor families to become baby-farmers and prolong poverty. (Obviously the Daily Express can find examples that point the other way, where people become baby-farmers just for the child benefit, and that's bad, but it's rare.) - The system is like insurance because we (have to) pay when working, and get benefits when pupils, patients, pensioners, on the sick or on the dole.
- The system does not suit local services delegated to local councils for local people. That's what happens for care services like a Dementia Care Day Centre, and it's a bad system. You can see why people were so keen for health services to become a national health services years ago when you see how little-known and little examined are the services for keeping people out of institutions.
- Councils get a block grant for some of the institutional care that some of us end-up in, like old peoples' homes, so it's cheaper for them to pay for social services to keep us out of institutions a little bit longer if that's what we want. The system can work in theory, but the biggest council - Birmingham - went to court defending a claim that they didn't have to provide a certain level of care for people a certain number of months or years for having to go into an institution; they wanted out. It may have been a good idea or a bad idea, but it was down to the office politics of one organisation rather than the accountable national politics that's covered in the media and debated more; people of Birmingham did not have that safeguard.
- Local councils are local. Social insurance works over time. There is no connection between what my neigbouring 100,000 people voted for when ticking a box for a councillor, and the amount of contributions I have paid in the different areas I have lived during my life. I may earn a lot of money in London. I may retire to Bournmouth. I want to assume that Bournmouth residents get the same budget for care of the elderly as people in London. I do not want my neighbours to divert the money I paid decades ago into Bournmouth Symphony Orchestra*, but they do. That is the reality.
- The system is unlike insurance because less money goes on admin. About half the cost of signing-up to a private pension in the first few years used to be the cost of selling it to you. There are similar high costs in car insurance, including Brian the Robot and the Meerkats that we see on TV. I'd like to think that modern IT makes it cheaper to say who has paid-in to what national insurance fund, but news about attempts to change the benefits system suggest that it's better to say nothing because nobody really knows.
* Bournmouth Symphony Orchestra say "Local Authority grants in 2013/14 amount to £392,535 (2013: £480,545)". They also do very well on investment income, which a lot of charities don't, and of course their main service is charged-for so they have trading income. The investment income does come with a management fee. I think charities ought to risk a lot of their 3-month reserves on safer P2P lending such as sites like Savingstream that share-out bridging loans at 12%. Failing that, some on low cost stock market tracker on over 5% average rise per year. This could be organised by a volunteer treasurer and cost nothing in management fees. There is a list of sites on P2Pmoney.co.uk.
Getting back to my main point, £392,535 could pay some care worker salaries. If tax and mangement costs are a quarter, that's about three average wage with tax per hundred thousand or about 15 front-line average wage earners at £26,500 each. I'm vague about mangement costs because I've never done it, but employers' costs of about 25% come-up online. I don't know how much difference in care could be provided by 15 average wage-earners in the areas of local authorities that contributed, but it sounds like more than the staff of a dementia care daycentre and a bit over for training and respite residential care. My political interest is to scrap the violin-players and the tennis coaching in favour of care workers.
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