Lengthening School Days

Don't like the sound of lengthening school days and shortening holidays. The government wants to make it easier for parents to work. Households with one worker might turn into two-worker households, and single non-working parents might be able to work. This will cause growth, more tax, and less welfare payments.

However, this is going to cost money to implement (i.e. people without kids are going to be subsidising people who do have kids some more), there's got to be a utility cost to children who are deprived of time to climb trees (think there's probably some kind of Laffer curve effect going on with education, the optimum is somewhere between zero hours and every waking hour). Single-earner households will be competing in the housing market with more dual-earners who can kick themselves in the balls that little bit harder when it comes to what they're prepared to pay.

There are probably easier gains to be made first. Like building lots of houses. Spent some time thinking about this today. How about relaxing planning laws for super-eco-low-impact-houses, maybe even on greenbelts? If the house isn't going to contribute to flooding, can pretty much generate its own electricity (so what if you've got to actually plan when to use the washing machine), composting toilet, etc? What about access roads? Well if that's a scarce resource, how about rationing it with a local congestion charge? This will encourage walking the kids to school, getting stuff delivered from the supermarket, working from home, etc. Also wonder whether modern manufacturing could make houses cheaper, it seems fairly strange that all new-builds look very similar, yet each requires a huge amount of labour to construct. Perhaps there's some red tape that ensures that has to happen?

Cinderella Law

You're a monster if you disagree with anything to do with the Cinderella law, right?

The problem is how you define cruelty, and how the law works in practice.

"You can look at a range of behaviours, from ignoring a child's presence, failing to stimulate a child, right through to acts of in fact terrorising a child where the child is frightened to disclose what is happening to them," Mr Buckland told BBC Radio 5 live.

What's a legal definition of any of that? 

He said the new law would not criminalise parents for being nasty, but for their criminal behaviour.

What's the legal definition of 'nasty'?

"This proposal is not about widening the net, it's about making the net stronger so that we catch those parents and carers who are quite clearly inflicting significant harm on their children, whereas they should be nurturing them and loving them," Mr Buckland said.

Can't imagine how this wouldn't widen the net, from a logical point of view. If it provides new powers, then more people will come under attention, and if it doesn't provide new powers, what's the point? What new powers are given that aren't in, say, the Children's Act of 1989? This from Wiki:

Each local authority has a duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of children who are assessed as being in ‘need’. A child is deemed as ‘in need’ if they are disabled or unlikely to achieve a reasonable standard of health or development unless services are provided.
...
A care or supervision order may be granted by the court if a child is or is likely to suffer significant harm if they are not placed into local authority care.

Fairly sure significant harm is already considered to include emotional harm. Set all this against a background of secret family courts, gagging orders, forced adoptions, etc, and is it really a good idea to give new powers before any of that's addressed? Back to the BBC article, and the likely implementation of the aims:

The Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 provides for the punishment of a person who treats a child "in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, or limb, or organ of the body, and any mental derangement)".


Mr Williams's bill would add a further category of harm for which the perpetrator could be punished: impairment of "physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development".

That's going to give a massive opportunity for lots of test cases (probably heard in secret) to figure out what all of that means. Wonder if he's got 'use cases' where social workers know what goes on in Family X, have the evidence, but can't do anything about it? Will parents voting UKIP or BNP constitute intellectual or social harm? Perhaps it should actually be teachers and social workers worried about a law that gives a sweeping definition of harming a child?

I worry the government is just pursuing ideas which superficially sound good to the electorate but which don't actually result in sensible laws.

40% tax rate

Glad to see this is becoming an issue.

Suppose someone just nudges into the 40% tax rate with a family to support on one income, and is paying their student loan off. If they earn £1 extra, they see just 48p of that*. That's ignoring employer's NI, the burden of which largely falls on the employee, and ignores council tax. The total probably leaves them about 40p in the pound. Our hypothetical wage slave is renting and trying to save for a deposit for a house, can barely think about contributing to a pension, and probably can't think about holidays or luxuries. No wonder they might be thinking about emigrating somewhere more sympathetic to the idea of getting established first and paying shitloads of tax second. Plus then they could aspire to live somewhere less cramped and expensive.

The stats are interesting. When the 40p rate was introduced, 1 in 20 paid it, now it's 1 in 6, because of the usual fiscal drag - thresholds not keeping up with inflation. Another interesting one is that a household with a single top fifth earner (as in 80% of individuals earn less), results in a household income that is in the bottom half! Households are reliant on multiple earners and the state is geared up to taxing on that basis.

* From listentotaxman.com, student loan deduction ticked, no pension. A figure of £42,500 used, then added £20 to work out marginal change.