The Government’s new Vetting & Barring Scheme comes into effect next year. As a Youth Football Coach, I will have to register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority or face a £5,000 fine. This is over and above my current CRB-checked status (x2 so far…).

So this has to be A Good Thing, doesn’t it, as it will no doubt protect the boys I coach. Well … no, not according to the ISA themselves:

Q21. What does being ‘ISA-registered’ mean?

• ISA-registered means:

- No information is held that demonstrates the person poses a risk of harm to children or vulnerable adults.

- A person’s registration status is continuously monitored and if any new information such as a relevant caution or conviction, or information from employers comes to light, the ISA is informed, they will re-assess the person’s potential risk to vulnerable groups and they may chose to bar the individual.

• ISA-registered does not mean:

- That someone is “safe” or has been “cleared to work”

- That the ISA has scrutinised all information held on them, not least because new information may be coming in all the time.

[emphasis added]

So yet another complete and utter waste of time from yet another quango, especially as this new ISA Registration will not be replacing CRB checks!

ORLY?

So it cost £8M for 43 days. Or £186,000 a day. For what?

Looking more closely at the report, they claim that:

“About half of the total spent policing the demonstration – £3.72 million – was from additional policing costs, including overtime, the Met said.”

So that’s  £86,500 a day on overtime. Nice litttle earner, eh? I mean, how many policemen are on duty there every day? 100? 200? That’s a lot of overtime or a disproportionate number of policemen.

And that leaves a balance of £100,000 a day for … er … um … doughnuts? Bacon rolls? Who knows? The policemen are already employed, the vans are already bought and will just be parked up there most of the day. So what – precisely – is this claimed additional expenditure on? Mind you, when they closed off Weston Street after a stabbing for a day or two, one of the few police vehicles on the scene was a Met. Police burger van. I kid you not!

Sounds like bollocks to me…

According to the Office for National Statistics, inflation is running at 2.2%. Clearly no-one told South Norfolk District Council about this as our new council tax demand is up 4.0% on last year.

Talking of last year, do you remember how last year Norfolk Police Authority couldn’t keep to any sort of budgeting and raised their bill by 6.9%?

Well this year, they’ve surpassed themselves and increased it by 8.3%! Clearly proper business governance is anathema to Norfolk Police Authority/Norfolk Constabulary. They say:

“Budget Issues
Norfolk Constabulary has suffered from successive years of under-funding by Government to the point where we regularly had to dip into our reserves. We can no longer afford to keep doing that.”

Erm, isn’t that what reserves are for? And yes, we know you claim to have suffered in previous years: you’ve been more than happy to share your pain with us by never living within inflation-matching rises and instead passing it on to us.

Oh and they also say that they are “Performing Well”:

“…our detection rate rose to 32% – the highest we have ever achieved…”

Which means they didn’t detect 68% of reported crime. Still, as long as they detect those heinous speeding motorists on the main trunk roads, eh… Yes, they’ve decided to increase transport costs from £3.33M to £4.03M this year, that’s a 21% increase!

Then when you look at South Norfolk Council’s budget, it’s good to see that they intend spending over £28M (out of £50M) on “Finance, Staffing and Property, including Revenues & Benefits, Human Resources, IT Services”. That’s not housing by the way. Nice little earner and a cushy job if you can get it.

No-one is taking responsibility for shooting dead an innocent man. No individual has been convicted of any wrongdoing. No individual has been sacked. Who will be paying that fine? The Council Tax payers in London, of course. So all those involved from the bottom to the top get off scot-free. As usual.

Why not take a look at the comedy of errors that lead to the death of an innocent man. No laughing matter, eh?

I wonder how the police would be reacting if they’d shot one of their own, like “Ivor” who was dragged out of the carriage with guns to his head and chest. Maybe there would have been repercussions then?

Daily Mail readers and others who are ‘hard-of-understanding’ are already defending these incompetents saying things like “the police thought he was a terrorist!” No, they didn’t. They thought he looked a bit like someone who they thought might have been a terrorist, despite his having “Mongolian eyes”, whatever that means. This man was innocent and was slaughtered!

Still, at least when our civil liberties are being further eroded and the ‘hard-of-understanding’ bleat out their usual “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear” crap, we can remind them that Jean Charles de Menezes had done nothing wrong but as he was about to die he had everything to fear…

How stupid are they? At least the Conservatives can see the tiny flaw in the plan: it was bollocks:

“The shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles said: “What we should be doing is increasing recycling. We can do that without doing it through a bin tax.” The scheme would lead to a surge in fly-tipping, people dumping their waste in neighbours’ gardens and more back garden bonfires, he said.”

Exactly. And don’t we pay Council Tax in the first place to pay for recycling schemes? Just because the money we pay gets wasted on focus groups and committees discussing committees shouldn’t mean they charge us even more.

We had a week away on holiday in the south-east recently and decided to go and be all touristy in London. Rather than drive into London and pay petrol, congestion charge and expensive car parking, we decided instead to drive to Tunbridge Wells and take the train from there.

After struggling to find anywhere to park at the railway station, we were directed to the council’s Torrington car park where we bought a pay and display ticket, parked up and went on our way. On our return, we found a penalty charge notice stuck on our windscreen demanding £60 (reduced to £30 if paid within 14 days). Here’s our appeal:

“Dear Sirs,

Following my telephone call to your office this morning, I would like to appeal against a penalty notice I received on 15 August 2007 whilst parked legally (as far as we were concerned) in your Torrington car park. We were holidaymakers staying locally and had decided to have a day trip to London.

We drove to the station to park, but could only find “premier permit” (if I recall correctly) parking spaces and we had no idea what that meant so we asked a station worker who directed us to the Torrington car park.

On our arrival there, we were confronted by a sign and two ticket machines. The sign says this:

As you can see, the sign says that railway day tickets can only be purchased for the machines at “the south eastern trains entrance” and we did not want to drive back out and head around to the station to buy a ticket from their machines.

Instead, we used one of the blue machines on the ramp and put in the maximum sum it would accept. As I explained to your staff this morning, the ticket machines on the ramp to your car park are not marked in any way to differentiate them from other pay and display machines and indeed they were the only ticket machines on the entry ramp, so we naturally assumed they were valid machines for this car park:

We did notice the section about a £2 rebate for rail users but did not avail ourselves of this rebate.

Having bought a ticket which was valid until 4.00am on 16 August 2007, we then drove into the largely empty car park and parked in a bay.

On our return, we found a penalty notice fixed to the windscreen. On enquiry this morning, we were told following your staff member looking at the parking attendant’s photograph of our ticket, that the ticket was a rail user ticket so we should have known and parked in a red bay. Looking at the ticket and also the machine which says “Central Parking System”, how were we supposed to know this?

We were always prepared to pay the full price for parking and had assumed from the information clearly visible to us that that was exactly what we had done. We are not local residents and therefore unaware of the peculiarities of your parking systems: our local car park at Norwich next to the station has two ticket machines per entrance lane and you simply validate your ticket at the railway station for a reduced rate and pay as you return to your vehicle. The system is simple and works faultlessly.

Accordingly, we wish to appeal against the penalty charge notice and await your reply.

Yours faithfully”

I copied this to Southeastern for their comment and reply using the e-mail address they gave me over the telephone. It bounced. I rang them again and was told they do not have an e-mail address any more for customers to contact them through. Maybe they were fed up with having to handle customer complaints?

4.8% despite inflation being higher than targetted but still only 2.8%.

But as is always the case in our area, the stand-out percentage increase comes from Norfolk Police Authority who will be increasing our tax bill by 6.9%. Yes, every year it seems this bunch of jokers demand – and receive – increases at far more than the rate of inflation. Why? I can only assume it’s mismanagement of their funds. After all, their wonderful PFI-financed Norfolk Constabulary Headquarters (complete with inadequate parking…) involved a land swap with the contractors so that the 12 (I think) locations in and around Norwich were given to the developers as part of this fabulous money-saving scheme. Except we’ve had to endure rises well above inflation which were sometimes blamed on premises costs…