Armchair Auditing - Slight Disappointment

So, today was the first day that I could expect any information back from any of the Councils that I've contacted so far.  I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting anything back yet at all.

I've had a number of acknowledgement letters, and one refusal.  It's the refusal that disappoints me.  Any Housing Benefits system is going to be based on a database.  That database, if its up tot he job, should be searchable.  Ashford Council have told me that their system cannot provide the information that I have requested.  The have said that this is because a "new program" would need to be written to get the information, and the cost of this would exceed the £450 limit.  I very much doubt that this is the case.  It should be a fairly simple database query, See http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_regarding_housing_be_10/new for my request, and their response.  Before I request an internal review of this decision, I've asked them who their Benefits assessment software is provided by.  There are only a handful of firms that provide this software, and I know of most of them.  I would be hugely surprised if any of them can't provide this data.

I shall be watching this request quite closely.

Armchair Auditing - 1st letters sent, and I hit a snag...

So, today I sent out the first requests for data.  I decided that using WhatDoTheyKnow would give me the best method of tracking the requests.  I started going through the big list of councils that administer Housing Benefits (taken from a DWP document giving their average times to deal with claims).

Pretty soon I hit a minor snag.  WhatDoTheyKnow only lets you send 10 Freedom of Information Requests per day.  You can ask them to increase this number if you feel that you have a good case to do so, and I'm considering doing this.  I don't feel that my requests are vexatious, and as far as I know, this information isn't gathered centrally.  Even if it is, I may well get data that goes further back by requesting it from the council directly.  I think that I'll hold off asking them until I've got the information back from the first responses, to see if anything in my letter needs tweaking.  I don't think that it does, but then again, I would think that, wouldn't I!

I've created a google docs spreadsheet to keep track of the requests that I make, and when I get responses to them.  I'll keep updating this as I go along.  I'm still pondering how to deal with the data that I get back.

Armchair Auditing

Having been getting more and more fed up with the Government lines that the Private Sector is far more efficient than the Public sector, and that Benefit Claimants (and in particular Housing Benefit Claimants) are the reason that the government is in the mess that it is in, I started to wonder how much the State is subsidizing big business.  Well, in fact, business of any kind really.

The main method in which business is subsidised by us, the tax payers, it by topping up workers wages to a fair amount.  What's that I hear you cry, that can't be true! It is. Housing Benefit is paid to employed people too, as is Council Tax benefit.  Why do those people need to claim Housing and Council Tax benefit? Because those uber-efficient businesses have twigged that if they can pay below the amount that people need to live on (as determined, let us not forget, buy the government) their profits will be higher.  Since they have a legal obligation to maximise shareholder value, businesses have little interest in actually paying their staff enough to live on, especially when the State will cover it for them, and its not them that get condemned for it, its their greedy scrounging benefit claiming staff!

How can the Government claim that business is more efficient than the state, if the state is paying half of the costs of employing people?

I decided to do a bit of digging around the Housing Benefit Stats.  I wanted to find out to what extent is the state supporting business by paying for the housing costs of their staff.  Fortunately for me, previous governments have seen fit to let me get at some of the data that I need to get at least an outline picture of how big the issue might be. I'm sending the letter below to each of the local authorities that assess Housing Benefit.

To: $Council
Subject: Freedom of Information request - Information regarding Housing Benefit claim numbers and amounts

Dear $Council,

I would like to recieve the following information:

1. Number of active Housing Benefit Claims on the first Monday of
April each year for as far back as your records allow.
2. Number of active Housing Benefit Claims on the first Monday of
April each year where either (or both of) the Claimant or their
Partner is recorded as having had "Earned Income" on that date, for
as far back as your records allow.
3. The Total amount of Housing Benefit paid for the week starting
on the first Monday of April each year for as far back as your
records allow.
4. The Total amount of Housing Benefit paid for the week starting
on the first Monday of April each year where either (or both of)
the Claimant or their Partner is recorded as having had "Earned
Income" on the first Monday of April, for as far back as your
records allow.

I would like to make it clear that I would consider income from
Self Employment to be "Earned Income"

For your convenience, the dates of the first Monday of April for
the last 15 years are below:
04/04/2011
05/04/2010
06/04/2009
07/04/2008
02/04/2007
03/04/2006
04/04/2005
05/04/2004
07/04/2003
01/04/2002
02/04/2001
03/04/2000
05/04/1999
06/04/1998
07/04/1997

Many thanks for your help.

Yours faithfully,
Mr J Chandler

Now, one of the problems with this approach is that I cannot tell how many hours the people that are Earned Income Claimants (or partners) that I get told about are working.  This means that I catch all part time people who are also entitled to claim Benefits.  I have no problem with that at all, but I doubt that any Local Authority keeps that data, and in fact I would be more worried if they did.


I'll try to keep updating this as I get along, I'm hoping to get all of the letters sent out tomorrow. 

Thoughts on the first Fortnum and Mason protesters trial

This is a subject that I've been thinking about for a while.  Whether UKUncut are correct about their reasoning for occupying Fortnum and Mason, today's sentencing of the protesters for doing little more than standing about in a shop seems wrong to me.


One of the things that interested me in the reporting was that in an article from the Morning Star, the Metropolitan Police Chief Inspector in charge of the operation confirmed that the only people he had not arrested "were women and children carrying shopping bags."  


This raised two questions for me:

1. Where any men carrying shopping bags amongst those arrested?
2. What would have happened if the protesters had all bought something?

To be fair, I'm not that interested in pursuing the first line of enquiry, although it might be something that the next group of people arrested might like to ask Chief Inspector Graham Dean when/if they have him in the stand.


The second question is the one that I'm far more interested in.  


It sounds like a silly idea, you're in a shop, which you believe has failed to pay the appropriate level of tax, why on earth would you want to buy something, and thus support the very shop that you're protesting against?


I have a hunch that it may be possible that small value transactions may actually cost a shop money.  My quick workings are set out below.  Please feel free to have a look and try to pick holes in my reasoning, and let me know where I've gone wrong!


So, let us imagine that you've picked a small piece of fruit or veg from the lower ground floor of Fortnum and Masons.  It's cost per weight is likely to be high, compared to a normal supermarket, but remember, that bit of fruit ins't like any other supermarket piece of fruit, its got to be better than one from M&S at that price right?  So, we'll assume you've picked a banana, I can't find a price for M&S banana's, but a Sainsbury's Fairtrade Organic Banana will set you back £1.50 for 5, that's 30p per banana.  I'll assume for the purposes of this calculation that Fortnum and Masons bananas are twice as expensive as Sainsbury's ones, which would make them £0.60 per banana.


Fortnum's will have to pay to buy in the banana's, and get them to the stores, and to put them on the shelves. Given that they are unlikely to pay more than Sainsbury's per banana (they're the same product remember, just more expensive in F&M due to their name), from a bit of digging about on the web, it seems that Organic Fair Trade bananas cost about £0.37 per kilo when bought from the farmer, there will be some shipping charges, and other fees in there too, so if we round that up to a price of £0.50 per kilo to F&M, we might not be that far off.  If each banana weighs in at around 125g, that's 8 bananas per kilo, so each banana costs them a bit more than £0.06 each.  Their profit margin having just paid for the banana to be at their store is now only £0.54.


They then have to pay a member of staff to put those bananas out onto the shelves, lets assume that they are quick at this, and it only takes them 30 minutes to unbox all of the bananas, say 600 bananas.  If that staff member is on minimum wage, the cost to employ them is £6.86 per hour.  So, each banana put on the shelf takes off about a penny of the stores profit, leaving them with £0.53 per banana.


Now comes the fun bit, if each protester can tie up a member of staff for a minute or two, with a serious question or two, e.g. where is this banana from, what percentage of the price goes back to the grower, do you only sell fairtrade/organic fruit? etc. that has a cost for the store.  Per minute you spend with an employee, you cost the store £0.11.  Lets assume you only manage to tie them up for a minute, that's the stores profit down to £0.42, and that's before you've even got to the till to pay.


Once you get to the till, be polite, make small talk, ask the cashier how their day's been, etc.  Talking to people slows their reactions, makes the transaction take longer, and that's what we're interested in.  Make sure that you're not ready to pay.  Your wallet's at the bottom of your rucksack, and you've got to dig it out? Oh dear, that takes time, time is money.  How much money? The same £0.11 per minute we established earlier.  It shouldn't be too hard to drag the time that you spend paying for your banana out to a couple of minutes, that costs £0.22 for 2 minutes of staff time remember?  Now they're down to £0.20 profit on that banana.


Now we need to pay for the banana.  We're not looking to make things easy for the shop here, but we do want to give ourselves options.  


For highest cost impact, pay on a card.  Card transaction fees are apparently the second highest cost a business has, after staff costs.  The most expensive way for you to pay is to use the magnetic swipe part of your card, it takes longest, and costs them most, chip and pin is the next most expensive, with cash the cheapest.  Typical costs are about 2% for credit cards and a set fee debit cards.  For small transactions pay on debit cards, that fee can be as high as £0.20 per transaction.  If we assume that its half of that cost, that makes the profit on the banana £0.10.


If you'd rather not be tracked, you can pay with cash.  For this, you want to pay the wrong amount in the oddest set of coins you can, pull out a handful of change, root through it, hand over shrapnel in batches so the cashier has to count to check your maths are right.  Pay slightly too much, so that they have to work out the change, and you should be able to waste a bit more time.


Now, remember what our friend Chief Inspector Graham Dean said?  He released people with Fortnum and Mason bags.  Don't forget to ask for yours!  Yes you have a rucksack, but you want a souvenir of your time there don't you? That bag also costs Fortnum and Mason money to give to you, they're pretty shiny bags, and whilst Fortnum and Mason can buy them in bulk, they are unlikely to get the cost down below about £0.05 per bag I suspect.  If we go down our card route, we are now left with only giving the shop £0.05 for your transaction.


In return for this, you've got a banana, a nice paper bag, caused the police problems with wanting to charge you, as are you a protester or a shopper, or both?  you;ve also blocked the till for a genuine customer who was going to spend far more than you were, all in all, not too bad for £0.05.


If you can now have a chat with another staff member, maybe ask a question about the building, or enquire about the cost of the teas in the restaurant, or how far in advance you need to book... That took you another minute? Now you've stolen that last £0.05 back from them, costing them money, just by being there.


Now I know that a lot of this is factored into the prices, but it's worth a thought for future demonstrations.  Can you be a customer and cost a shop money to serve you? Of course you can, if you think about it.  Shops like Fortnum and Mason rely on customers having a high value per transaction.  If the opposite is true, they start to feel the pain quite fast.


Would UKUncut have been better off doing things this way?  I think that they might have been, it would certainly have made the court case more interesting.  Aggravated Trespass charges against customers? What shop is going to want that?  And how would the police deal with it?

Does TFL really have it in for cyclists?

This is written as a response to a fantastic post at the Over the Hills and Far Away blog.  "Cycle Superdeathway" is her term, but I like it so much, I'm going to use it here.

TFL's cycle route planner likes to push people to the Cycle Superdeathway route where ever it can.  The route that it suggests from my house to Clapham gives a great example of this

Prior to CS7 being put in, TFL would suggest that from my home, I cycled to Tooting Broadway, and then along what is now the "Cycle Superdeathway".  This is part of the route that I normally use to get to work, so I know it quite well.

This route is great, on the way to Tooting Broadway, most of it has a bus lane that, although time limited, cars are wary of going into as they can never manage to read the tiny signs that tell them when they can go in it, so I get a full bus lane to myself nearly all the way to Tooting Broadway.

TFL's Cycle Planner never even thinks of this as a route.

Instead it sends  me via Colliers Wood, to the start of the Cycle Superdeathway 7 for both the easy and fast routes, but on some wierd twisty offroad route for the mid option.  The mid option has changed since I looked last, and not for the better.

The easy/fast routes that they use are the same, except that the easy route adds two very dangerous right turns, that are there to avoid a single light controled right turn with an ASL on it.  I know which I think is easier!  Compared to the route I use (linked above), this route adds about an extra quarter of a mile along a narrow fast road that is used by rat running motorists, and has to have flashing signs that warn them to slow down as they are over the limit, before dropping you onto the end of the Cycle Superdeathway, which, to be fair, is better than the nothing that was there before.  This route however leaves a lot to be desired, either as a fast or an easy route. It's certainly not one that I'd want either an 8 or an 80 year old cycling to get the the Superhighway.

The mid route is so obsure that I think that I'd get lost on it, winding as it does round back streets, through a housing estate, crossing a main road, and then across Tooting Common, across another main road, over the railway on a footbridge...  Like I said, obscure.

I think that given the increased focus on TFL's approach to cycling in London, this is an issue that need to be raised with a higher priority.  Good cycling routing can be done.  Google have it for some places that they have the data for (sadly not yet in London), CycleStreets have generally done a fantastic job with theirs although for this journey they sadly fail too.

Whats the answer?  As so often is the case, better data.  Route planning is important but, as ever, very tricky, even with good data.  Without it, its impossiable.  Can cylists like myself help TFL collect this sort of data?  Would TFL accept it?  This is one more area in which the crowd can help, but can't do it all.  I'd love to hear how we can get this sort of data out of peoples heads, and into a central location that other people can benefit from it.  Thats something that the internet should be good at, but how do we do it?

Is it better for TFL to offer a poor service than none at all? I think so.

Is it better for them to offer a service that actively puts cyclist who follow their advice at risk? I'd argue not.

Drivers with more than 12 points on their licence

I know that this has been a contentious issue that has been floating around some of the cycling blogs for a while, but I found 2 sets of numbers that were just over a week apart that quite interested me today.  I did a tiny bit of analysis on them, and then sent a FOI request to the DVLA.  The analysis that I did on the initial data from other people is below.

Points	16/05/2011	24/05/2011	Diffrence
12	7014	6983	-31
13	804	809	+5
14	881	870	-11
15	1093	1075	-18
16	296	297	+1
17	147	144	-3
18	245	233	-12
19	38	37	-1
20	49	46	-3
21	38	39	+1
22	13	10	-3
23	16	15	-1
24	24	24	0
25	3	3	0
26	0	0	0
27	3	3	0
28	1	1	0
29	0	0	0
30	4	4	0
31	0	0	0
32	0	0	0
33	1	1	0
34	0	0	0
35	0	0	0
36	1	2	+1
Total:	10671	10596	-75

Is that one extra driver with 36 points the one that has gone from the 23 point place? or is it someone new, or have more than one person jumped about or what. I find this puzzling, but suspect that the simplest answer is the best; that it is simply a mistake on the part of the DVLA.

I would like to thank both Freewheeler (his blog post with the data from 16/05/2011 is here) and Amoeba (his comments on this blog post have the data from 24/05/2011) for asking this question ahead of me.

I'll post more on this once I've had a response from the DVLA.

That promised post on Local Housing Allowance, from November 2008, with additional comments to bring it up to date.

The post below was written shortly after LHA had been rolled out nationally:
Taken from posts on the HBInfo forums, an amalgamation of points from two posts, to give some context to my reply...

So, six months into LHA and what do we find:-
-LHA rates at a level that even those with above average salaries would struggle to afford.
-Landlords looking up the lha/direct website and pushing rents for even sub-standard property up to the median.
-Landlords beginning to report increased incidences of rent arrears and apparently bumping up the level of deposits to try and cover losses (and all this before the Christmas and winter fuel bills start to compete with payment of rent for LHA recipients)
-BRMAs that have been set too broadly causing people to be priced out of their own communities.
-Localities and LRRs only introduced in the past year or so likely to be reviewed as a result of the post-Hefferenan guidance from the Rent Service, creating a fresh round of winners and losers (guidance which is readily available to all on the Rent Service website).
-Apparently national LHA expenditure levels in the first six months so high that Treasury is beginning to lean on DWP for an explanation and probably demanding that they be reined in, and quickly.
The main point is though that LHA appears to be causing a surge in expenditure well beyond DWP projections and will continue to increase as landlords bump rents up to and beyond the LHA level.  The DWP consistently said this would not happen and that it did not feature as a problem in their evaluation of the pathfinders.

---------------------------------
My reply.

I would suggest that this would be because it didn't happen in the Pathfinders...

Remember, the biggest change between the pathfinder scheme and the final scheme was that the excess that was paid to the claimant was capped at £15. This removed the incentive for claimants to find a property that was more than £15 below the LHA cap. This in turn removes the incentive for landlords to charge less than £15 below the cap per week to encourage tenants to move into their property, rather than the property next door.

So, the two situations outlined above would theoretically work like this:

Pathfinder scheme:

LHA set at £120 pw

Property A, rent £100 pw, V. nice condition
Property B, rent £90 pw, V. good condition
Property C, rent £80 pw, OK condition

Claimant takes property C, other landlords find their property is harder to rent, drop prices slightly, rents drop, LHA figures drop, cost of HB goes down, everyone is happy, (except the landlords).

Final Scheme:

LHA set at £120 pw

Property A, rent £100 pw, V. nice condition
Property B, rent £90 pw, V. good condition
Property C, rent £80 pw, OK condition

Claimant will now take property A in preference, other landlords find that low cost of property is not an incentive to rent their property, increase prices, LHA figures rise, cost of HB goes up, only landlords are happy.

Of course this is all very simplified, but I believe is a reasonable estimation of what is/was happening on the ground.

---------------------------------
My Solution to the Problem

The largest problem with the Pathfinder scheme was that it could be seen to encourage deliberate overcrowding of smaller properties so that the amount of excess that the claimant received was disproportionately high, thus stopping them from looking for larger properties that were a more suitable size.

If the government had really wanted to produce a properly functioning Housing Benefit scheme that had the desired effect of allowing claimants the security of knowing how much Housing Benefit they would receive, whilst encouraging Landlords to keep rents low, the following approach would have got results much closer to those desired than either of the two schemes tried thus far.

The amount of benefit to be paid would be the lower of either the rate for the number of bedrooms needed for the family size or the number of bedrooms in the property and also remove the cap on the LHA excess. 

This would solve a number of problems with one stroke, by help to lower the Housing Benefit bill, provide claimants with the stability of a known maximum amount of benefit and a genuine choice of properties, provide Landlords with a known rent level, and keep the scheme easy to administer.

---------------------------------
An update on the situation at LHA is now (May 2011)

Relatively recently, the Government decided that the Housing Benefit bill was still far to high, and that Housing Benefit could be used as a tool to haelp lower rental prices.

This lead to two main changes from April this year.  The first was to remove the remaining £15 excess.  This will have saved an awful lot of money.  If a council had 5000 LHA claims, all paying out the maximum excess, this measure alone will have saved £7500 instantly.  I still feel that the points above stand, and that leaving the uncapped LHA excess would help to drive down rental prices.  This will still not have had as fast an effect as the second measure implemented by the government.

The second measure implemented was the change from using the median rent level as the figure for LHA, to using the third quartile figure.  This measure in itself more than wiped out most excess payments, and so the cost of rewarding claiminants for finding cheaper property would be reduced anway.