Another crook on incapacity benefit

A Lincolnshire man stole money from his girlfriend's mother's bank account to fund his gambling addiction, Skegness magistrates heard. Steven Troop, 25, had also spent money a fellow tenant had given him to pay her rent, the court was told.

He admitted stealing £1,120 from a Lloyds TSB bank account belonging to Jacqueline Lammiman. He also admitted stealing £300 cash from Crystal Bowness at Mablethorpe on April 30.

Troop was sentenced to a community order of 12 months supervision with a requirement to attend the enhanced thinking skills programme. He was also ordered to pay £1,420 compensation and £60 costs. Magistrates ordered the money be paid at £10 per week.

How likely is that?

Mr David Eager, representing Troop, said his client, who was on incapacity benefit, had made it clear he wished to repay the money as soon as he could.

Social housing policy

Deputy leadership candidate Alan Johnson (see next post) has accused Margaret Hodge of using "the language of the BNP" when she suggested a Britons-first policy for the allocation of council homes.

This is the instinctive reflex of the machine Labour politician. Now, the ineffable Lady Hodge is a nasty piece of work, but the BNP is making inroads in her constituency and she is relaying what her voters are telling her, rather than informing them what is good for them.

The scorpion had an interesting chat the other day with someone from Hatfield (in Hertfordshire). He has lived in Hatfield for decades, but his children have had to wait over 10 years to be allocated social housing. This is because they are not feckless and therefore cannot demonstrate "need".

Hatfield, he says, has been accepting Poles and other immigrants from the London Borough of Brent. He may or may not be right about the administrative background, but he's emphatic that Hatfield has changed a lot in the last few years, and in his view not for the better.

Labour is traditionally the party of the underdog. It's ironic that it should be a senior machine Labour politician who announces that expressing these concerns is unacceptable.

Welwyn Hatfield is a swing constituency, so the Tory member, Grant Shapps, is probably happy to hear Labour poopooing its voters' concerns.

Labour deputy leadership candidates

They're debating on Newsnight tonight. Surprisingly the bookies make Hilary Benn favourite (he had difficulty finding enough MPs to nominate him).

Just behind is traditional Labour Alan Johnson. He it was who caved into unions' demands on public sector pensions. He represents an unwelcome return to the traditional Labour stance of innumerate government by surrender.

Like Harriet Harman, "real labour" Jon Cruddas sent his child to a selective school. And we are subsidising him to do it, by paying for his so called second home - the more expensive of the two and actually his usual residence. It's a fiddle. To be ranked alongside Harriet and Ruth Kelly should dent anyone's self-esteem, even this hypocrite's.

Mr Hain is the least fancied by the bookmakers, so perhaps there is a god. The vain in Hain palls deeply in the brain.

Benefit fraud brings community service

A dance teacher who falsely claimed £8,000 in disability benefits was caught taking salsa classes. John Dennis of Aberystwyth admitted 17 cases of making false claims and was ordered to carry out 200 hours of community service. His lawyer said, "He appreciates the criminality of his actions and has shown remorse. He is trying to pay the money back".

A Daily Mail reader comments

He's 'trying' to pay the money back ...? Why isn't he being MADE to pay the money back ?

Another writes

I've got arthritis in my knee and drive 110 miles a day round trip to work every day to support my family - I've never even thought of stopping work and claiming disability allowance. It's nice to know my taxes over the last four years have funded this fraudster. I'd ban him and his kind for life from ever claiming benefits again and ensure he pays back (not just tries to!) every penny. In Blair and Brown's Britain unfortunately his behaviour is only encouraged.

An interesting line.

Meanwhile, a Swindon man who "plundered almost £30,000 in benefits he wasn't entitled to has walked free from court" (though he could have received about £16,000 in tax credits, making the notional loss to the public purse £12,222. Community service again.

No compensation order was made as the Department of Work and Pensions uses its civil powers to recover the money.

Is this regime a deterrent? You get some community service and you have to pay the money back if you can.

How much real disapproval do they get from their friends and colleagues? And what were their chances of being caught?

If the chances of being caught are low, this statistically represents a good gamble, like driving without a licence.

Yvette Cooper - dishonest and incompetent

Yvette Cooper pushed home information packs. As recently as April she stated that "Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly has made clear that HIPs including Energy Performance Certificates will be introduced on 1 June".

On GMTV she said around 3,000 energy inspectors would be fully trained by the time the Hips are introduced. Estimates showed that around 2,500 such people would be needed, she added."There will be plenty [of inspectors] in place by the beginning of June, and then there will be more coming through the training systems after that."

By May she was carefully saying that 2,000 inspectors had already passed their exams, with another 3,000 in training. (But that didn't mean they were available to start work, as they had to go through criminal records checks.) She told MPs that energy performance certificates could help cut carbon emissions by almost a million tonnes a year and cut fuel bills.

When the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said it would seek a judicial review of the introduction of HIPs on the ground that the government had not consulted properly on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), a government spokesman said:

This challenge is groundless, and we will proceed with the packs being introduced on June 1. This is a shocking example of a vested interest wanting to water down important environmental information.

Yvette Cooper hilariously commented that, "We do think that given the threat from climate change that we need to get on with this as fast as possible."

It would be tedious to recite the confusion that this Prescott legacy measure has now sunk to. There's no guarantee that buyers will act on these so called certificates, or even read them.

What seems to have happened is that the government became obsessed with its own righteousness. It's not as if they weren't warned repeatedly. But from their bunker, they came to regard all attacks as self-interested.

How can such an incompetent prig as Yvette Cooper become a minister at all? Current gossip is that she's unsackable as she's married to Ed Balls.

In the interest of all of us, Yvette Cooper should spend much more time with her family.

Meanwhile, Open Europe reminds us that this is the second major watering down of the Government’s HIPs proposal in a year.

The scheme would almost certainly have been completely pulled by now if it wasn’t for the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which requires the Government to bring in Energy Performance Certificates for all houses that are being sold or rented. The Government may delay their entry a little longer – but the EU directive remains and requires them to introduce the costly and ineffective EPCs by 2009 at the latest.

Odd how the press don't seem to mention that.

Tax credits waste

The Taxpayers' Alliance notes that the amount of overpayment in the tax credits system has fallen.

Reuters reports that the total has fallen by £100 million to a total of £1.7 billion this year. This is still a huge amount. A mistake is still made in almost half of tax credit payments. These mistakes mean families facing ruin thanks to overpayments being claimed back after having been spent and the British taxpayer funding criminal gangs that take advantage of the system’s flaws

With these huge costs to ongoing mistakes focussing attention on the problem some improvement was to be expected. What is remarkable is how slowly things are getting better. At this rate it will take 27 years, assuming that the same rate of improvement can be maintained, to create an error free system. This implies that it will take over a decade even to halve the number of errors.

They calculate that £1.9 billion of taxpayers’ money has been written off in overpayments. As they say, improvement at this pace just isn’t good enough.

New planning proposals

Included in the new proposals is the suggestion that planning should be easier for out of town shopping developments.

There's an arguable case for facilitating development of nuclear power stations (the country needs them but no nimby wants them), but what national need is served by another out of town shopping centre?

Why should local views about shopping centres not be paramount?

And how green is it to facilitate more out of town shopping anyway? Government greenery seems to extend to tax raising wheezes or making people pay more for services, but it is hardly at the core of policy-making.

CCTV and local democracy

Cheers from the right-on libertarians for the Chief Constable who decries installing CCTV in a small town where he says crime is low. This isn't the sort of society he wants to live in, he says.

Who installed this CCTV, then? The local authority. Probably there was local pressure. CCTV doesn't come cheap, so they wouldn't have put the CCTV in if the locals hadn't wanted it.

The Chief Constable is - er - unelected. How democratic is it of him to use his office to criticise electors?

Disability living allowance

According to the Telegraph, 2.85m people receive disability living allowance (DLA), costing nearly £10bn a year. The paper reports that

Criminals are estimated to defraud the DLA, which is intended to help the handicapped pay for care and remain mobile, of £1 billion a year - more than a third of all benefit fraud. Able-bodied criminals target the DLA because, in many cases, they only have to fill in one form before they start receiving payments.

Recent examples of fraud include -

• Jon Stentiford, a bodybuilder, had collected disability benefits while holding the title of Cornwall's Strongest Man. Despite being able to lift a half-ton Mini Metro for one minute, Stentiford, 35, of St Neot, claimed he had a bad back and pocketed £43,000.
  


• Keith Jones, a professional boxer, managed to claim £20,000 despite fighting in more than 100 contests, including some that were televised.


• Jay Somers, from Merseyside, received a suspended prison sentence after admitting giving dance lessons while receiving almost £23,000 in disability allowances.

In 2005, £1 billion in DLA was lost as a result of fraud or human error. The total amount of benefit lost through fraud or error that year was £2.7 billion.

The government says the cost of DLA is rising because of increased awareness of the benefit and the impact of an ageing population. They add that, "We have a strategy in place to reduce DLA fraud and run regular campaigns to raise awareness of our action in tracking down fraudsters".

You'd expect them to have a strategy to reduce fraud, but this tells you nothing. What are the targets and how cost effective is it? Perhaps long-suffering taxpayers should be told.

Incapacity in the sun

It's actually The People which has found a benefits cheat in Torremolinos.

He told benefits chiefs in the UK a serious back injury caused by a car crash has left him unable to work.

But he openly boasts that since he has been in Spain he has earned about £350 a week as a handyman and another £100 or so as a barman.

He has to make regular visits to Britain for medical checks to allow him to carry on claiming DLA, but he says, "They can't really tell if your back is bad or not."

The paper says that the Department for Work and Pensions (that's us) has had 12,000 incapacity benefit claims from more than 20 countries.

A quarter of them are from Brits living in Spain, 2,570 are from Ireland and another 1,600 are from France.

The rest are from as far a field as Australia and the Caribbean.

Why do we pay them?

Incapacity in Manchester

Karan Hobson in Manchester belatedly admitted cheating the benefits system of £15,000. (Actually she cheated taxpayers.) She claimed she struggled to get out of the bath, but she was snapped lifting a vacuum cleaner into her car on the way to one of her cleaning jobs, despite claiming that she could not walk more than 150 yards, and – because of a road accident – suffered severe pains in her back and had brain damage.

Who certified these false medical conditions?

One person commenting at the Manchester Evening News site excuses her because of the Iraq war. Another writes

As a cripple I am appalled by these benefit cheats. I worked all my life up to the age of 50 when I was brought down with an agressive form of muliple sclerosis two years ago. I only wish I could work as I have never claimed for anything and even now feel bad about claiming. Cheats give us all a bad name and should be made to pay back every penny they have been paid and then fined heavily on top of that. I would'nt be suprised if her car is a motability car complete with disabled badge. Yes I feel bitter, I don't like having to depend on others and find it hard to cope with being so helpless. Cheats are thieves.

Others say

It's getting absolutley ridiculous. Us hard working people should give it all up and live on benefits, they seem better of than us and we get a free makeover. The story does'nt even tell us if she has to pay it back or not. Fraud and theft and all she got is a curfew? What deterrant is that? Heavy hoover my ****.

More investigators need to be employed to stop these benefit cheats but as the prisons are full, where is the deterrant ? This scrounger should be forced to sell up to pay back what she fraudulently scrounged.

She stole £15,000 from taxpayers and has managed to avoid jail? This is a joke. She also dodged paying tax by failing to declare that she had a job.

This really send a great message to people who might consider swindling the system. I might do it myself - I woke up with a stiff neck this morning.

These brisk viewpoints deserve a hearing.

Manchester is one of 15 areas across Britain that will share in a £32m Deprived Areas Fund, set up by the DWP, says the paper. The latest figures show that nearly one in three working-age adults in the city (30.2 per cent) remain `economically inactive'. "And that means simply that, for whatever reason, they don't work."

Incapacity benefit again

More than 2,000 people in East Anglia are claiming benefits and unable to work because of alcohol-related sickness, reports the Norwich Evening News. Across the country there are 49,720 claimants of benefits because of alcohol-related sickness, at a cost of £1bn.

A DWP spokesman said:

We acknowledge that people are claiming incapacity benefits for different reasons from in the past.

Mental health problems have by and large replaced industrial injuries as the main reason why people are claiming incapacity benefits.

The latest figures show the number on incapacity benefits is 2.67 million.

The question is, can we support over two and a half million people on incapacity benefit?

Sorry, it's not that simple

NHS Blog Doctor has been doing an energetic job publicising the MTAS débacle. He wittily goes on to suggest that the Nationalised Health Service should have a fee at the point of use, and adds

We need to attract the best and to do that we need to pay an NHS chief executive a Tesco size salary and allow him autonomy to introduce proper business principles and efficiency into health care.

Sadly, it's not that simple.

1. The NHS is far larger than Tesco


2. The NHS is far more complex than Tesco


3. The medical profession has been spending our money badly (e.g. on statins rather than cancer drugs). The debate and accountability required don't sit comfortably with the crisp decision making which characterises an organisation like Tesco.

What's the first thing a good manager would do? Try to denationalise as much as possible of the Nationalised Health Service. And get fired by Brown.

It's not a matter of throwing more money at management in order to get the right answers. It's a matter of changing the question.

What took them so long?

So Prince Harry isn't going to Iraq.

He would obviously have been a target, it was the only sensible military decision, and you wonder why it took more than 10 seconds to make.

One must worry for the army when their senior people actually thought in the first place that it would be right to send him, and then it took a trip to Iraq to reverse that decision.

John Prescott's legacy

Down with home information packs

Open Europe comments that

As MPs debate the introduction of Home Information Packs (HIPs) today Open Europe has released a new study which describes them as “expensive and ineffective”. We calculate that the Energy Performance Certificate (EPCs) – an EU requirement which forms the major part of HIPs - will cost more than the Government has admitted, and that the benefits will be far smaller. The study reveals that the cost of the EPCs to UK households will now be around £337 million a year rather than the £112 million predicted in the Government’s Regulatory Impact Assessment. By 2020, EPCs will have cost the UK £4.7 billion. The study also calculates that over 12 million tonnes of carbon could be saved every year if the money being spent on EPCs were spent instead on real emissions reducing investments.

Yvette Cooper was trying to defend the indefensible in interviews yesterday. She was probably as dishonest as she could be, short of outright lying. But that's no excuse. She deserves to see her political credibility suffer permanent damage.

Those EU negotiations

Open Europe reports that Angela Merkel mentioned the principle of energy security and called for a European competence in this area.

This would be ironic. Germany has ruthlessly gone out on its own and negotiated direct with Russia on energy rather than on an EU basis, so this would represent an astonishing change of stance, if it's all that it seems.

Open Europe comments, "Given that the debate on the new treaty is now clearly in full swing, it’s ludicrous that the UK Government is simply stonewalling on what its policy is".

It's far worse than that. It's a contemptuous denial of democracy by a man about to surrender power - potentially one of the most blatant abuses of power in modern times.

In a democratic country, a government would have to get parliamentary agreement to its position before entering the negotiations. Not in the UK.

Will Sarkozy increase French heart disease?

In his interesting book The Great Cholesterol Con (£6.49 from Amazon or Tesco Direct), GP Malcolm Kendrick blames heart disease on stress rather than on cholesterol. (The cholesterol theory, of course, has led to huge spending on statins, which are not without their side effects.)

As part of his case, Kendrick analyses population groups with high incidences of heart disease. One country where heart disease is low is France.

Kendrick suggests that rises in heart disease can be traced back to periods of stress for those populaion groups some years previously. Should the French health system be clearing the decks for victims of Sarkozian rupture?

The fallacy of the Next Step

EU federalists of the Prodi persuasion argue that "Europe" (they mean the EU) has to keep "moving forward" or it will in some way collapse. Lord Owen has now argued that "The EU must stop the sense of 'perpetual motion', the feeling that all meetings must be followed by new initiatives; that the only form of progress is further integration. Attention needs to be focused on returning power away from Brussels and back to national capitals, less EU legislation, not more; creating more discipline in taking on new responsibilities."

Back in the UK, "senior road safety campaigners will ask the Department for Transport to consider outlawing cigarettes while driving in an attempt to cut the number of accidents", reports The Telegraph. One campaigner calls it "the obvious next step".

For the political and campaigning classes, more legislation, more rules, more regulations are a "next step". A next step to a less free, more regulated society.

But there is value in freedom.

Does global warming exist?

Or, to put it more fully, does the 2007 IPCC SPM accurately present the observations of recent global temperature trends?

The 2007 IPCC Statement for Policymakers (SPM) makes the following finding, "Eleven of the last twelve years (1995 -2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850)" [based on "The average of near surface air temperature over land, and sea surface temperature."]. and "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures..."

This claim, which is repeated throughout the media reports on the IPCC report, however, is disingenuous. Other analyses of global heat system changes do not support the claim of continued warming of the climate system. Climate Science has discussed ocean heat content changes and has reported on the recent correction which concluded that the upper ocean did not cool during this time period, although the upper ocean has not warmed either which is at variance to what is expected from the IPCC Statement of Policymakers.

A group of scientists conclude that -

1. Since about 2002 there has been NO statistically significant global average warming in the lower and middle troposphere

2. Since about 1995 there has been NO statistically significant cooling in the stratosphere.

They conclude -

Perhaps global warming will begin again. However, the neglect to include the recent lack of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling (both of which are predicted to continue quasi-linearly for the coming decades by the multi-decadal global climate models, except for major volcanic eruptions) results in a seriously biased report by the IPCC. It has been disappointing that the media so far has chosen to parrot the statements in the IPCC SPMs rather than do investigative reporting on these issues.

Hat tip - John Ray

Brown's New Deal an expensive failure

Frank Field disputes some recent claims by the Government that “youth unemployment has been virtually abolished”.

In fact, he says, on the latest figures there are 507,000 18-24 year-olds unemployed, 70,000 higher than in April 1998. The numbers of young people Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) are also higher than in 1998 and rising. As a result the central promise of New Labour’s welfare reforms – the end of the “fifth option” of a life on benefit without work, education or training – has not been fulfilled.

“The results show that even if the money was available, which it isn’t, more of the same won’t work and will be a betrayal of young unemployed people. As part of the Labour leadership contest it is important for the Chancellor, and the candidates for the deputy leadership, to tell the electorate how best to move the 505,000 unemployed young people into work, as the New Deal is failing to do so.”

We're told that this pamphlet, Welfare isn’t Working: the New Deal for Young People is the first of a series of reports by Frank Field on the outcomes of Labour’s welfare policies. The other reports will cover: child poverty; tax credits; the Child Support Agency; Sure Start; pension reform; the New Deal for Work; and the National Minimum Wage.

Worth watching!

Blair and Brown

Three points stand out for me in the heaps of print sludge over the past few days.

1. On Blair's economic record, Roger Bootle points out that Blair wanted to take the UK into the euro. This would have given us inappropriate interest rates and probably seesawing property prices. "So the very thing which, if he had achieved it, Tony Blair might well have trumpeted as his greatest triumph, would in fact have been a disaster."

2. Of all people, Rory Bremner puts his finger on a key moment. He records that Peter Hennessy was involved in secret training sessions with Labour figures and civil servants before the 1997 election.

With some honourable ... exceptions, he found them to be uninterested in how government worked, addicted to mobile phones and special advisers, with an attitude to the machinery of government that combined arrogance with a belief in the Yes, Minister caricature of Civil Service mandarins as pompous, obstructive and deeply conservative. Even now, I wonder if it's the Home Office that's not fit for purpose or merely Labour's management skills.

Why am I not surprised?

They never did the solid work, and Stalin Macavity Brown believed he could crack it with imposed central targets. Easy really - makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.

3. How likely is it that Gordon Brown will replace spin with humble government? Patience Wheatcroft wittily points out that he has a track record as evidence - a track record of meddlesome government, spin and repeated announcements.

Is the Earth still recovering from the “Little Ice Age”?

This paper reminds us of the "little ice age".

There are many documents that suggest that the period between 1500 and 1900 was relatively cool; the River Thames was frequently frozen in the later part of the 17th century. Stories of the exploration of the Northwest Passage also hint that sea ice conditions in northern Canada in the latter part of the 1800s were much worse than conditions today; it is now possible to cruise the passage without much assistance by icebreakers. Although there is some doubt about the exact timing of the “Little Ice Age,” it is possible to infer that the period between 1500 and 1900 was relatively cool in many parts of the world.

The paper proposes that -

(i) Natural components are important and significant, so that they should not be ignored;

(ii) Two natural changes are identified in this note: a linear increase of about +0.5°C/100 years and fluctuations superposed on the linear change;

(iii) It is insufficient to study climate change based on data from the last 100 years;

(iv) It is difficult to conclude about causes of the rise after 1975 until we can understand the rise from 1920 to 1940;

(v) Because of these deficiencies, the present GCM models cannot prove that the present warming (0.6°C - 0.7°C/100 years) is caused by the greenhouse effect; and thus,

(vi) Future prediction of warming by GCMs is uncertain.

If most of the present rise is caused by the recovery from the Little Ice Age (a natural component) and if the recovery rate does not change during the next 100 years, the rise expected from the year 2000 to 2100 would be 0.5°C. Multi-decadal changes would be either positive or negative in 2100. This rough estimate is based on the recovery rate of 0.5°C/100 years during the last few hundred years. It should be noted that the greenhouse effect shown by GCMs should be carefully re-evaluated, if the present rise (0.6°C - 0.7°C/100 years) is mostly due to natural components, such as those I suggest.

The effect of government

One of Blair's main claims to fame is the continuous economic growth of the last 10 years.

In former times, maintaining sterling's value against other currencies was a key determinant of economic policy. No longer. And interest rates are now in the hands of experts. So it would be much harder for government to mess up economic growth.

The world economy has been benign. The Telegraph remarks that over the last 10 years "in many respects life has changed dramatically, thanks to technology, globalisation and lower manufacturing costs", rather than thanks to government.

The really significant changes in our lives have been effected by computer geeks, adventurous CEOs and low-paid workers in Asia.

The Telegraph claims that the power of government to influence our lives is reducing and that

The proper response to the reduced power of government is not to carve out new territory, but to concentrate on the traditional responsibilities of the state: health, education, criminal justice and defence. Instead of doing many things badly, the new Prime Minister must do a few big things well - for a change.

But the paper hasn't made the case that the reach of government is reducing. Indeed, if government's influence were shrinking, making government better would matter less.

What may be true in the short term is that the economy is nearing its limit of taxable capacity - at any rate until after the next election. Then a Brown government would increase council tax. And then we'd see how limited the scope of government felt.

That incapacity benefit lifestyle

Here's another member of the underclass on incapacity benefit who doesn't seem to have an obvious handicap (well, physically anyway).

An Ipswich man has admitted to being a kerb crawler after being found with a prostitute in his car and his trousers around his knees.

He "told the court he was hoping to move back into his wife's home soon and that he currently claimed £175 a fortnight in incapacity benefit".

Maybe he should put off plans to move back. And it would be nice to think that someone might review his taxpayer-funded benefits.

At the time of being arrested for the soliciting, Earrey was also charged with driving a car not in accordance with his licence. The court heard he only had a provisional licence and was driving unaccompanied.

How do we define mental illness?

Commentators are starting to peer at the notion that the Nationalised Health Service may not be a bottomless pit.

Against that background, it's interesting to look at some headlines on mental health.

- At any given time nearly a sixth of all adults are experiencing depression or anxiety. Mental illness accounts for a third of all illness in Britain. More than 1.3 million older people have a mental illness such as depression and this figure will rise as the age of the population increases.

What is the threshold where we start to define anxiety as a mental illness? Or is all anxiety classified as mental illness?

- One sixth of the population suffers from a mental health problem every day.

This suggests to me that the net is being thrown far too wide, and much more widely than can be afforded.

- One million people on incapacity benefit suffer mental health problems.
- The total cost to the nation of mental ill-health is as high as £77bn
- 12 per cent of the NHS budget is spent on mental health.
- Mental health accounts for one third of all illness and 40 per cent of all disability in Britain.
- More than 1.3 million older people suffer from depression or other mental illness.
- One in ten mothers suffers from post-natal depression.

So is this increased provision woefully small or increasing worryingly? -
- Since 1997 the number of consultant psychiatrists has risen by 55 per cent (2,447 to 3,800).
- Since 1997 the number of psychologists has risen by 69 per cent (4,100 to 6,800)
- Since 1997 the number of psychiatric nurses has risen by 9,300 (39,109 to 48,400).

The news for most of these people said to have mental illness has to be that we can't afford to treat them.

If that is so, society may need to redefine what it means by "mental illness".

The state employee mindset

Maybe I'm not surprised that this story comes from the North east. A civil servant with 28 years' experience is threatening to sue her employers after being told she can't work from home.

Apparently she has a social phobia, which has affected her for the last 15 years and prevents her from leaving the house unaccompanied. She says

I first applied to work from home in August 2005, but did not receive an answer until November 2006, despite 15 letters to my employers.

When they eventually got back to me, they told me my job was not suitable for home working.

She doesn't address this point, but adds (my italics), "I could do any job from home that I do at work if they put the equipment in". She doesn't want much.

She has filed two grievances against her employers and is planning to take them to an employment tribunal.

The DWP is understood to have offered her a new job as a fortnightly review officer starting at three hours a week as she is gradually re-introduced to work.

They have also suggested a "travel buddy" to accompany her to and from work and have offered to pay her previous full-time wage for a transitional period if she returns on May 28.

At taxpayers' expense.

What incapacity?

A 41 year old Wiltshire man on incapacity benefit -

kicked his victim to the face as he lay on the ground before stamping on his head.

He can evidently afford a drink or two. And -

The court heard that he had a history of offending with previous convictions for affray, common assault, drunk and disorderly and possessing an offensive weapon.

And just 17 days before the attack he was put on a conditional discharge by magistrates for criminal damage to a door during a row with his wife.

He seems fit enough! Whatever is this man doing on incapacity benefit?

Douglas Alexander bang to rights

The hapless Douglas "the road pricing debate is over" Alexander is in the firing line again. The Scotsman reports

The Scottish Secretary was looking increasingly isolated last night after it emerged he did not read a Scotland Office research report containing evidence that the combined ballot paper he chose for last week's Holyrood election could confuse voters and cause them to spoil their ballots.

The revelation came as the Scottish National Party stepped up the pressure on Mr Alexander, calling for his resignation.

The line is that the research report was sent to one of his junior ministers.

Privately, one Labour minister last night told The Scotsman that Mr Alexander's behaviour was "outrageous and pathetic". He said: "Douglas is trying to make out David Cairns should carry the can for this when he took the final decision that led to this cock-up."

Alexander has refused to order an independent inquiry, making him an easy target for Alex Salmond, which is not a good place to be.

A strange headline

"Blair's secret plan to scrap the Treasury" - The Guardian thinks this tale from 2005 is worth a front page lead.

"The idea was fleshed out in a 200-page document prepared for Mr Blair by his strategy adviser, Lord Birt" among others. 200 pages! Someone had to read that. Isn't that cruel or inhuman treatment? "Had the plan gone ahead, Mr Brown may [he means "might"] have been asked to move to the Foreign Office."

What does this tell us about how government didn't work? One of those involved in the planning said:

"Self-evidently we had a tension with different decisions being taken on the same subjects in totally different places in Whitehall. Neither the Treasury or the No 10 strategy unit or the cabinet office could implement policy by themselves, nor could they do it together, so individual departments could divide and rule. The plans in part were designed to deal with this problem."

And one senior Blair aide said: "Lord Birt had a tendency to come up with ideas that looked good, but only on paper." Well everyone out in the real world knew that. 200 pages!

The article ends with the strange comment that

The chancellor would be aware that he would face charges of hypocrisy if he broke up the Treasury after 10 years developing its power base.

It wouldn't be surprising, though, would it. If anyone knows how effective the Treasury can be as a semi-indepenedent power base, it's Gordon Brown.

Rheumatoid arthritis

Can this be right?

Each year, the total cost of RA (health costs and lost working days) is estimated at £3.8 - £4.75 billion. Conditions such as RA also mean that many people are obliged to claim incapacity benefit, and indeed last year nearly 500,000 patients with musculoskeletal and connective tissues disease - including RA -- did so.

Glimpses into the underclass

Head teachers say schools are producing an "army of the unemployable" as tens of thousands of teenagers quit education at 16 with no qualifications, reports The Telegraph.

The NAHT's warning comes as a report claims tens of thousands of children disappear from school rolls every year. Last year, 15,000 pupils in their final year went missing and more than 70,000 did not show up for GCSEs, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has discovered that between 1998 and February 2007 some 127,579 licences had been revoked under the New Drivers Act. (The law automatically revokes the licences of those who run up six penalty points in their first two years on the road. They must retake their test after the ban.)

Only 64,078 drivers have retaken their test. The remaining 63,501 have not.

Elliott Griffiths, national council member of the 28,000-strong Magistrates' Association, said:

"The problem is that 1,000 motorists every month are having their licences revoked under this law.

"Yet only 500 a month are retaking and passing their test. Even if we are generous, it means that somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 new drivers who have had their licences revoked simply haven't retaken their test.

"It is inconceivable that they have all given up driving. Clearly the Act is not working the way it was designed to." The Department for Transport says it will review the law "with a view to making it more effective".

With the present resources and policies the government do not have a snowball's chance in hell of enforcing this law. Why pass a law you can't enforce?

The DfT is under the charge of the hapless Douglas "the road pricing debate is over" Alexander. As Secretary of State for Scotland he welcomed the new electoral arrangements which have led to so many disqualified votes.

Putting patients first

Some doctors claim the Nationalised Health Service cannot carry on providing as many treatments as it does now, due to the growing elderly population. So if patients can get better treatment outside the Nationalised Health Service, should their doctor tell them?

Professor Karol Sikora, a leading cancer specialist and member of Doctors for Reform, said: "Does withholding of information about treatments that might be in a patient's best interest but are available only either in the private sector or abroad constitute a contravening of GMC guidance?

"We understand that this is a very difficult issue with far-reaching consequences for the NHS."

Never mind about the taxpayer-funded Nationalised Health Service, what about the patients? It's not "a very difficult issue" at all, and shame on Doctors for Reform for suggesting that it is.

Of course doctors must give patients the full picture about treatments available.

So was this the GMC's answer? Er ... no. A GMC spokeswoman said

We are reviewing our guidance on consent.

As part of that process we are considering the question as to whether doctors should provide information about 'any treatment that you believe will be more effective for the patient than those that the organisation offers, but which is not available in the organisation providing care'.

We pay doctors through our taxes to do the best for us. And that's it.

The government doesn't think things through

The Magistrate's Blog points out that

The policies that have filled up the prisons were all introduced by this Government, but that the same government has not just failed to provide the required resources, but refuses to take any action at all, for fear of the tabloids.

Driving towards a crash

The government seems hell bent on bringing the property market to a screaming halt.

With less than four weeks to go before Home Information Packs are introduced, The Sunday Telegraph discovered that fewer than 2,000 people have been trained as "Domestic Energy Assessors" (DEAs), against Labour's initial target of 7,400.

The figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) also showed that not a single assessor has been officially "accredited". This can take up to four weeks. Critics described the situation as "deeply worrying" and called on the Government to delay the scheme or risk "killing the housing market altogether".

A DCLG spokesman said that it had reduced its target of DEAs to 2,500 [why?].

"We remain on track in delivering HIPs and making sure the necessary assessors are in place to deliver our long-established timetable."

We'll see. It looks like dictatorial, head in the sand government to me.

Running government badly

It's almost frivolous. Just before we get a new prime minister, Blair shuffles the Home Office and the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

We have no public statement of costs by which to judge this.

And the two ministers in charge? Lord Falconer, Blair's flatmate, is expected to go. Reid has publicly said he will.

So this reorganisation is being rushed through without regard to cost or effectiveness.

Brown to inherit Blair's surrender to Brussels

This is the main story in the print edition of the Sunday Telegraph. We are told that

Mr Blair's plan to forge closer links with France and Germany - something he has wanted to do since coming to power in 1997 - are (sic) causing consternation in Whitehall and the Chancellor's camp.

The press are representing this as a personal bequest to Brown by Blair, a one man putsch against the government and civil service by a man whose time is nearly done.

So are we to assume that the Cabinet disapprove but are powerless to stop one man in his last weeks? Or that they just don't care?

The authoritative report reminds us that -

Two years ago, a formal EU constitution, signed by all member states, was scrapped after "No" votes in referendums in France and Germany.

That will be a surprise to the Germans, and to the Dutch, who thought it was them. It remains uncorrected on The Telegraph's website. So what credence are we to give to the report's conclusion? -

Civil servants fear Mr Blair will sign up to moves extending the 48-hour maximum working week to more people, which business believes could cost £9 billion, and plans to give European judges greater say over Britain's criminal law.

The proposals would also lead to a permanent and powerful EU president and a "foreign minister" with a seat on the UN Security Council.

BBC reporter brings her agenda to Saudi Arabia

Making a public splash in Saudi

Is she a reporter or an activist?