The fact that it doesn't at present is the point I'm making, along with the fact that people *assume* that it does.
Mmm, in the villages I've lived in the parish councillors were generally more likely to actually act to benefit the village (unlike the local landowner, say). Or indeed at least one of the local farmers who now is having a dozen or so windmills built on his land, against local objections including those from the parish council.
Sounds like your lot were/are not so good.
Let's hope so.
I agree that it *ought* to be, but at present it's not. Not unless the council has money to burn. The windfarm I mentioned above is a good example. South Cambs DC turned it down, on grounds, IIRC, that the area was too nice to spoil. Goes to appeal, and the developer gets it. I was't entirely surprised as I felt the reason was a bit flimsy. But the net result is that councils are a bit stuck at the moment.
Mostly round here, I don't give a shit. BUT when they want to stack Stansted incoming overhead at 3000 feet plus one plane every 5 minutes, turn the village into a town, spend a million of European money turning an illegal traveller site into a 'legal' one and handing it over to the lucky diddies to profit from, or build a set of useless bloody windmills that benefit no one except the landowner I am VERY interested indeed.
Or more positively, if instead of 150 houses that no one who wants could afford ( unless it was paid on the 'sosh'), they were, say, to propose a light industrial estate to provide local work..I would ALSO be very interested.
The noise regulations are being subverted by fraudulently falsifying data gathering & lying under oath by expert witnesses in court by a civil servant at BAA (just so you know, it is intentional). Additionally, it is used to protect BA from competition in critical routes to avoid the taxpayer (eventually) being stuck with the cost of BA failing.
well Linton has just turned theirs down as well and we are working to make it so awkward for several more that they dont even GET to application.
The way it seems to be going ta the moment is teh MPs are leaning on the council, and all we have to do is to show the mass objections and the 'valid legal reasons' so the council has the get out clause they need. That is, whilst the council can't say 'we cant have this because 80% of the parish don't want it',. if 80% of the parish write in, and just one gives them the excuse, they know who is paying the piper and it ain't the developer.
Well that's not true of course. There are some ugly rumours..BUT if it costs you your career to take the bribe, its a tougher call and needs a bigger bribe. And at some point market forces rule that they try somewhere cheaper instead..
Noise data at every BAA sites. Put another way, it is going to get a lot noisier over the next 30yrs as revenue & secondary revenue from air travel is more important than NIMBY.
Whilst BA is a publicly listed company, if it were to go bust the gov't underwrites 90% pension. That is one reason it privatised BA and likewise Royal Mail which has a simply huge pension liability. The problem with BA is premium costs, premium debt, and premium pension plans - Walsh will bring it inline with competitors although hopefully better managed than T5. A long term problem is oil could as easily go
180$ as 40$.
BA is essentially the modern day white-star line, which they do not want turning into a titanic. The price will be noise.
All a consequence of companies dabbling in pensions, when pensions are not their core business. They are then in a position to be bullied by the unions into making promises which are not sustainable in the long term.
The provision of pension schemes should be restricted BY LAW to pension companies. Everybody then has a personal pension that the employer can choose to contribute to *also*, or not - their choice. That way they have no ongoing liability.
Sort of the way it is here, save that employers (including mine, Greentram Software) have to contribute 9% of salary to a fund of the employee's choice. If you have enough capital to justify the admin costs you can have a self administered fund. The employer has no liability beyond current contributions.
The problem is that too much money goes out in fees - I know it was bad timing (but with the collapse of the pound v. Aussie dollar it could have been even worse) but when I moved my personal pension over here the amount was roughly equal to what I'd paid in over twenty years.
That's just ignorant of the way people are. Every community consist of people who are gregarious, people who like to keep themselves to themselves, and people who are very busy. In a democracy each gets a vote so they can't be bulldozed or shouted down by their noisier neighbours.
Local action will not able to vote these "community groups" out, because the groups will not be elected.
But not the local groups proposed by the government. I'd have thouht you'd have grasped that.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the facts, above. Possibly you might want to argue that an unelected body is accountable, but you'd have to show how, and to whom it was accountable.
No, that's just naive. A carefully crafted local plan will include enough titbits for enough voters that the stuff the vested interests want gets nodded through. "Oo look, they want me to be able to put an extension of any size on the back of my detached house, I'll vote for that", and nobody notices that the agricultural provisions end up landing them with a chicken factory at the end of the garden.
As I've said before, I'd rather have these issues discussed by elected councillors who have an obligation to respond to constituents, and can ultimately be voted out. By all means try it with Parish Councillors; however, Pickles isn't proposing to give these powers to PCs, but to self-appointed community groups. They may turn out to be the same people who sit on the Parish Council, but they won't be doing it as Parish Councillors, they'll have a free hand, and some power (I notice also from recent PC meinutes that the members of the PC are in favour of these proposals, though they haven't consulted anyone before writing to say so).
I'm all for localisation (which Conservative administrations during the 1980s did their best to stamp out), but it should be democratic localisation. In a democracy, everyone gets a vote regardless of status, wealth or temperament.
No, it's not their right, because we also beloing to wider communities, with wider commmunity rules and laws. Otherwise eventually you'll have the local bullies deciding not only that you can't extend your home or put up a wind turbine, but determining the kind of people allowed to live there - after all, what business does big government have in making race equality laws, if a local cumminity decides it doesn't want black people living there? That's where this fake localism leads.
If its done by an elected body, then you have to accept that in a democratic system your voice may not be heard if your view is in the minority. However with a system as suggested here, you could at least join the local "neighbourhood" and inject your own input.
Much will hinge on who they are accountable to, and what checks and controls are in place.
Pensions work fine when there is direct competition to essentially cripple fees.
The problem is the UK system is based around fees, fees & more fees. It is assets under management that count, and not rolling return. The actual return of UK pension funds is quite simply atrocious. The next problem is funds held in ISA count against benefits, so whilst it is possible to create a very globally multi-asset aggressive pension fund (or balanced as age dictates) there is little point in doing so.
We need to adopt the USA system of IRA & Roth wrappers, you can only contribute 2k/yr, on one you pay tax up front & none on withdrawal, on the other you pay no tax up front but tax on withdrawal, they do not count against benefits. It was and remains the best system in the world. People can own individual stocks to commodities to funds. The only downside is people do occasionally end up with their entire portfolio in a single employer company stock - the classic being PG (Proctor & Gamble), which turned out to be a gamble one day when it went 115-105$ with large block sales as someone knew something, then
105$ to 50$ overnight. Those with 500k$ in the fund got a rather big pension hair-cut close to retirement. Sadly the worst they could then do is sell (which some did), just as Joseph Nelson (Chester) did in
1987 right at the bottom to thus grossly underperform the market and future bull market to boot.
The existing pension system is welfare for the city, nothing more, nothing less. We must adopt a Roth/IRA style system - but make it pay tax up front and make it not count against benefits, you could have a massive injection of tax to resolve a lot of problems in the short-medium term. That of course really empowers people, something the shit that are all parties will never do, the philosophy from the nutters of RAND, Princeton & Cambridge is a dependency culture which until broken will break the western economies. All countries are defaulting on debt, just some are doing it by sky high real inflation. Cash is earning 6.5% less than inflation, the average pension is underperforming likewise to fund a BMW lifestyle for their sellers.
Oddly, I believe its peoples' right to try to do even that.
I've been across the USA. certain places you don't even want to have long hair. You certainly wouldn't want to be gay.
If that's the way they want it that's fine. The you go to san franscisco, you don't want to go there unless you ARE gay.
in short localism means that whilst overall country policy overrides local issues, you should as much as possible keep out as a government.
Issues of race etc are national issues, and although it goes against te grain, that's an area that C Gov probably needs to keep sane. But where local industry goes and the restrictions on it are no business of C gov unless its part some nationally relevant issue.
So motorways get built across peoples land. BUT they should receive more than fair recompense.
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