DICKENSIAN POVERTY

Please sir, can I have some more bacon?

Yesterday’s BBC headlines were so full of reports of Dickensian style child poverty that I half expected old Ebenezer Scrooge himself to leap off screen into my lap as I was typing this post.

I mean living in rat filled houses is no joke but is the author of said article expecting toddlers to ring Pest Control to complain about rodent infestations? Nope that’s definitely a job for mummy or daddy.

Having read the article, two questions swirled round the old noggin like a lump in a saucepan of Bisto:

1) What is meant by the term ‘child’? Are we referring to the legal definition of minor ie a person under 18 years of age or is there another benchmark being used by the Government to outline the hideous deprivation encountered by the youth of today?

2) What is meant by the term ‘poverty’? Since most minors own few tangible or financial assets in their own right then I struggle to understand how children can indeed be poor.

Dr Google’s Dictionary shows the below as a definition of the word ‘poverty’:

Poverty is generally defined as the state of being extremely poor, lacking sufficient resources to meet basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing. It can be measured in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute poverty focuses on the lack of resources to meet basic needs, while relative poverty looks at an individual's or household's income in comparison to the median income within a society.

So, in my mind, it’s not really children that are poor in themselves but it’s their parents/guardians who lack wonga. Looking at the above definition then it’s more a case of Relative Poverty than Child Poverty but using the term ‘child’ is likely to carry more gravitas and stoke up the outraged a lot more than just reporting on the fact that some families can’t make ends meet.

Part of me feels for these people. Decades ago, I was a single mother raising 2 children with an oversized mortgage to finance and a job paying slightly over the threshold for benefits. No Government assistance for you, lassie - maybe God will provide? Of course, no heaven-sent cheques ever landed on the doormat.

I soon realised personal wealth was the result of choices made in life and one would need to look closely at what choices families affected by ‘child poverty’ are making because as I discovered in my years of hardship, you can cover most bases by just making a few sacrifices.

Here are a few financial life choices we all face – if you were on the bread-line, what would you choose?

Do you choose to have a smartphone that might be on a contract plan costing £30 per month or do you choose to scale back your phone to an old-fashioned pay-as-you-go brick style one and use savings to pay off your energy bill? Same goes for expensive gym memberships or other monthly subscription services. There’s a lot to be said for free exercise in a local park, on the beach or buying DVDs in a charity shop that you can re-watch. It’s a £1 for 4!

Do you choose to go to the hair or beauty salon for a regular cut/blow dry, waxing or shellac nails which cost you around £25 or more or do you choose to grow your hair, paint your own nails, use a lady razor then blow the savings on kid’s shoes/school uniforms?

Do you choose to smoke, drink or gamble every week - £16 packet of ciggies, £5.50 for a pint and £10 for a punt, estimated expenditure of approx. £31.50 or do you choose to spend this cash on school lunches for your hungry little darlings? Same goes for designer coffees, meal deals or takeaways which often add up to a significant sum every week. You can live without! Better still – just make your own!

Do you choose to follow the latest fashions or drive a top of the range car or do you choose to wear the same old glad rags and pootle about on the bus? Kids usually go free or half fare on the bus or heaven forbid, you could actually walk to school which would be good for both physical and mental health. OK so demographics may rule out buses in a lot of rural areas but I’m sure you could do with a lot less cheap tat from Temu, Shein or other such websites.

As a struggling ex-single mum, I even went as far as getting rid of my telly and using cardboard inner soles to make my holey shoes last longer in order to make sure I had enough to keep a roof over our heads. Even changing the telephone landline so that it only received incoming calls made a big financial difference (no smartphones back in the 1980s).

I have two wonderful grown-up kids who lived through thick and thin yet have managed to survive into mid-life with not a single mental health issue. Both know the value of working hard to earn money.

Personal wealth or poverty is one of those Schrodinger’s Cat conundrums because we are all both rich and poor at the same time at every given moment. What? It’s true. Let me elaborate further on this point.  Elaborate me!

Supposing that personal wealth was calculated based on the present value (PV) of all the tangible assets owned plus money held by an individual. Add it all up and we’d arrive at a total value (TV). Now imagine we’ve done this for everyone in the UK. Compare your own PV to the PV of anyone else on this list and you’ll see that you’re both richer than some and poorer than others at the same time.  Who knew?

Bear in mind that the total value of all your worldly wealth also fluctuates pretty much on a daily basis because the underlying present value of tangible assets such as houses, cars or shares changes according to market valuations and loads of other factors. This means that rankings on a list of rich or poor people are like shifting sands pulled about by a daily tide. It’s all a matter of where you end up when the tide's in or out.

Without wishing to sound smug or preachy (I am?), at the end of the day what I’m trying to say is it all comes down to choices. We’ve also got to remember that there’ll always be HAVEs and HAVE NOTs in life – not every child can have Nike trainers or holidays to the Bahamas. It’s just the way it is.

And as for lifting the 2-child benefit cap – I have to vote NO on that one. Having children is most definitely a lifestyle choice and one that should be made according to the means you have available. If you can afford to have 3 or more kids then great - the more future taxpayers, the better but it shouldn’t be a case of popping out sprogs just to get paid so you can avoid going to work or live a life on benefits. The taxpayer cannot be expected to foot the bill for your personal Spice Girls line up or football team.

In any case lifting the cap will do little to remedy the situation for some families because again, it all comes down to looking at the choices being made and if parents are not prepared to make changes/sacrifices then giving them extra benefits is quite frankly a waste of time and taxpayer money. Come on, we all know it won’t be spent on school dinners or uniforms. 

What’s needed are better mechanisms to identify families who qualify under this ‘child poverty’ banner then provide them with dedicated debt/lifestyle counselling so they can make the right choices then stand proudly on their own two feet.

You’ve got to cut your cloth according to how much you ACTUALLY HAVE and not how much some society profiling bureaucrat sat in an air-conditioned office thinks you should have.

And as for the bacon - price of a packet generally under £2, packet of bread is about £1 so for less than the cost of a pint, kids could have bacon butties if their parents wanted them to.  

Shame on you BBC.  This is not NEWS!  Just Government propaganda guaranteed to pander to those do-gooding campaigners who probably have never been 'poor' themselves.

CHECK A&E TRADE

Well, well, well – I can’t wait to see how Two-Tier Health Kier is going to get this initiative off the ground

Front page of Saturday’s edition of The Times outlines a new proposal to link patient satisfaction to NHS budget payments by allowing punters to give feedback on services received. 

Leave a review on Check A&E Trade

Will Wes Streeting be setting up a new Check A&E Trade or a Hospital Trip Adviser type website where patients will be able to post reviews after appointments? I do hope so as I can’t wait to read other people’s comments on their experiences with the No Hope Service.

Performance related pay has been the mainstay of financial services for decades so I applaud this radical proposal to create a meritocracy in delivering healthcare. Those who provide the best service should be amply rewarded and those who don’t should be put on a Performance Improvement Plan with further sanctions imposed if targets are still not met.

However, my experiences of working in PRP (Peformance Related Pay) environments is both positive and negative. As an employee motivated by the thought of an extra couple of thousand quid in my pay packet at year end, I always strived to give 120% and go ‘above and beyond’ to use the bank’s own corporate jargon. My January pay packet was always a fat wallet making all those 12-hour days very worthwhile but not so for those at the bottom of the heap.

PRP breeds resentment. Those who can’t or won’t step up to the plate get de-motivated, resentful and even less inclined to meet targets. Performance Improvement Plans often do little to change the status quo.

As an ex-manager, I remember the annual PRP process as a vicious bun-fight. Departmental heads locked in an airtight room screaming at each other as they vie for a slice of the PRP pie for their staff. Oh yes, there’s only a finite budget allocated for staff reward schemes usually divided into Top, Middle and Bottom buckets into which all staff are categorised. The bucket you end up in determines your annual bonus so you’ve got to hope your manager has the loudest voice.

Assessing performance against PRP criteria is an exhausting and divisive process. It’s hard to remain objective and not let your own personal feelings or judgements come to the fore when ranking members of your own team making it even harder to come up with a Top, Middle or Bottom list.  Can you imagine how difficult it would be to fairly assess one hospital against another?

In life there’s always winners or losers. What criteria will the Government use to rank NHS trusts in terms of performance and what reward will this be linked to? Will they award a fixed amount for every positive patient review? Or will rewards be skewed by politics such as levelling up agendas? How will they deal with negative reviews? And what if all the best performing hospitals were in the South, would they get larger budgets than those in the allegedly deprived North? There are a million questions to be answered.

Rather than implement a standalone performance related pay system linked to patient feedback, the Government would do better to implement process changes to weed out all those needless bureaucratic institutionalised ways of working followed religiously by the NHS. The current health bible needs to be ripped up and re-written so it is a thinner tome. To reduce waiting lists what is needed are quicker patient pathways to effective treatments not that meandering A to B route via C, D and E in order to get the drugs or interventions needed.

Carrot and stick as a means of improving the NHS, cutting waiting lists and achieving excellence in service delivery sounds great from a patient’s perspective but how this will work in practice remains to be seen. 

In principle this idea could make poor performers buck up particularly if budgets are at risk but to be sure there’ll be squealers who’ll cry foul at these proposed changes.  

My 5 star review will be given when my ongoing neck problem has been properly sorted but as the NHS have washed their hands of me claiming there is nothing more that can be done then for now its a big fat 0 on the scoreboard.

CABINET CABERNET

2025 is a very good vintage, that is if your grapevines haven’t withered away in these sub-tropical temperatures.  However, it’s not all sour grapes this year.

We often say ‘can’t complain’ when talking weather but what we really mean is we’re going to endlessly crap on about all things climatic until the cows come home. Come on, this is Britain after all and complaining is another thing on the list of stuff we’re good at. When moaning becomes an Olympic sport, Britain will top the medals table.

But if you have managed to squeeze a few barrels of vino out of your vineyard then you’re going to need a fitting place in which to show off your bottles of homemade plonk. Like one of my beautifully upcycled vintage cabinets.

‘I thought you said no more cabinets’ muttered the other half gingerly tiptoeing round the array of paint pots, brushes and rolls of wallpaper scattered across the lounge floor once more. Yeah, I may have said that yonks ago but then again ….

Rachel from Accounts is not the only one splashing cash harvested from the magical money tree growing in the garden of No 11. I’ve spent the princely sum of £5 on yet another piece of old tat that caught my eye in Chi’s local Heart Foundation Shop. What a bargain! Definitely cheaper than the recent acquisition of British Steel or French gendarmerie paid to patrol Normandy beaches.

Vintage cabinet bargain at £5

This latest cabinet acquisition will be an upcycling challenge for me since it has not one section to wallpaper but two being a unique triangular shape.

Roomy interior 

Overall, the cabinet is in relatively good condition for its age except for the damaged veneered edge on the top. Not skilled enough to attempt a repair to the original veneer then my plan is to very carefully cut the broken sections out to create a new edging strip along the outer edge of the top piece.

Damaged veneer on the front edge

Using a very sharp thin bladed scalpel, carefully score a fine line on the veneer where you wish to cut. Don’t drag the blade backwards and forwards and this might splinter the remaining veneer. Repeat your cut in the same direction until you reach the wood under the veneer then using the flat edge of the blade, slowly lift away the veneer bit by bit.

Carefully removing some veneer to create an edging strip

The internet recommends using heat guns or steam irons and wet cloths to soften the underlying adhesive which then enables veneer to be easily removed. However, as I’m only removing a very small section then to prevent damaging the rest of the top section, I’ve decided not to use these methods but instead go my own way.

Once the wood underneath is fully exposed, the edging strip can be sanded then prepared for painting.

Edge ready to prepare for decorating

Having previously refurbished three vintage cabinets then it didn’t take long to prime up the main body, paint it with furniture paint and apply two strips of wallpaper to the interior of each side.

Primed using Zinsser Bin primer

2 x coats of 'Milltown' furniture paint

I’m using some of my leftover Holden Lemurs wallpaper in teal for the interior and paired this up with a furniture paint called ‘Milltown’ purchased from B&Q. The teal background colour of the wallpaper is an almost perfect match for this shade of paint.

Holden's Lemur wallpaper in teal colour

Tropical interior and lemur sanctuary

Once again, I’ve painted the cabinet legs in a metallic gold colour. The lemur wallpaper has many colours in it that could have been used as an accent colour for the legs such as vibrant pink, bright turquoise blue or even black to blend your design in with the actual lemurs. There’s a lot you can do artistically with this type of wallpaper as your background.

Gold painted legs

Fortunately, the cabinet door is pretty intact, no broken glass panels, missing keys or damaged locks which means little extra work plus lot of original features that can be kept. I like to retain some of the original character of each cabinet I upcycle so this time, I’ll be keeping the outer vertical bar unpainted as the veneered finish on it is very good. The remaining door edges will be painted, all inner borders picked out in metallic gold.

My four-legged assistant oversees door painting

So far so good. Now it’s time to rip off my clothes, stand naked in front of the oscillating table top fan whilst licking a cornetto in a bid to cool off my fevered blogging brow as it’s swelteringly hot in Chi-biza. Bollocks - the chocolate’s melted onto my boobies. What a messy bugger!

IN A FIX

Energy – one of my pet peeves which like the NHS is guaranteed to have me ranting in 60 seconds’ flat.

What now? Groans the other half, rolling his eyes to the heavens and tactically taking refuge behind his motor racing magazine. He knows better than to try to get a word in when the energy touch paper’s been lit.

So, the Government’s latest wheeze is to reduce energy standing charges for thousands of businesses. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ljnrrmd7jo

Oh, that’s a good one. I haven’t laughed as much in years. But wait, doesn’t that mean we’ll all have to pay higher standing charges in order to subsidise this business benefit?

Ha, ha, ha – yes it does she says with tears of laughter falling down her cheeks. Plus there’s likely to be an extra sneaky levy added to cover payments to EDF for the new Sizewell nuclear reactor, energy unit costs guaranteed by our Government for the next 35 years. Chortle, chortle - Oh you’re killing me! 

Or the claw back from energy suppliers from us muppets for the extended Warmer Homes Discount to all on benefits – LOL that’s just tooooo much! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!  Priceless!

Best joke in ages

It’s no wonder the UK has the highest energy bills than anywhere else on the planet because every time someone sneezes in the Energy sector, the cost is stealthily added to standing charges. Don’t even mention the words ‘Net Zero’ in my presence, you might suddenly find your brakes failing on the M27.

WE. WILL. NEVER. GET. REDUCED. BILLS. I am shouting this out loud at the screen because it not only makes me feel good but because if you believe all the empty promises about cheaper energy in the future then you need a lobotomy. Not going to happen. Ever.

This latest ploy coupled with the most recent global conflict has had me fleeing to the sanctuary of a fixed energy tariff something I haven’t had to do in years. Sorry but I can’t wait until Ofgem’s reduced price-cap kicks in next month or until Israel/Iran kiss and make up, I’m fixing my prices now so that I can forget all this shit for another 12 months.

I’ve discovered that Octopus, my new energy supplier, allows punters to change from their existing fixed tariff plan to a new deal mid contract with no exit penalties applied. Tariff hopping here I come!

I love pink octopuses!

If I wait until October when my current fix runs out, oil prices might have gone through the roof and so might standing charges; stuff guaranteed to pump up inflation, prices and interest rates. I’m jumping ship now whilst it’s still afloat as Octopus’s latest 12-month fix offers me lower consumption rates and daily standing charge fees than what I’m currently on.

I urge you to check your latest bill then get a quote from Octopus or any other supplier offering a yearly fix to see if rates are cheaper than what you’re on. Better to fix now before Labour come up with any more ridiculous policies guaranteed to bump up your bills.

It's great to see the Government supporting businesses but just de-couple the price of electricity from gas then we could ALL enjoy cheaper energy!!!