CB Saint

40% reduction in fires? - that genuinely surprises me. You would have thought that it would be proportional to population sizes.

I see Labour are going to allow Grandparents to share unpaid parental leave - that will easy to administer - six people sharing a finite amount of leave over an 18 year period across god knows how many employers. It is not actually a daft concept - just a logistical nightmare

Ahh balls

i had forgotten we signed him

32m32 minutes agoSorry Borini ‏@JosephPepper That tackle from Lovren was so late it was actually supposed to be on Welbeck in the Arsenal game.

i believe!

Come on the toon.

They will be like the agency workers regs which gave temps certain rights after 12 wks. They thought this would help the people at the unskilled end of the jobs market. What happened in reality was no temp ever got to keep their job longer than twelve weeks. this will be the same. great sound bite, but it will an adverse affect on the jobs of those that the government are trying to help. if they are going to do it, do it from day one otherwise companies will find a way around it usually at the workers expense.

We use 0 hours contracts in recruitment, but then it is in our interest to make sure the contractors are working as many hours as they can because when they work we earn. Totally agree with you re the restrictions - as usual a few firms will feck up a perfectly good means of employment through sharp practice, because when government legislate they tend to use a sledgehammer to crack the nut and feck it up for everyone.

this should be fun. Nolan is a persistent chap.

I am up for this - we are going to hump them

All this back and forth re IHT is a moot point anyway - you are going to have to use the bulk of the value of your houses to pay for your care home because medical science will have found a way of keeping you alive (but immobile) long into your 120's

In my experience that is just not true - there is a lot of cases that go to the employee because the employer has screwed up the process somehow or was ignorant of the process - but a tribunal does not actively disregard the facts. Many years ago our firm (when it was small) got caught out on not following process and the dismissal was deemed automatically unfair even though the judge said that the employee should have been sacked (this is where the system is truly daft). Since then we have engaged legal advice when going down the disciplinary process and have not come unstuck once when we have been challenged. If you follow the process and your reasons for dismissal are reasonable then it can be straightforward.

It is absolutely unfair that people cannot afford to bring a genuine case - it is also unfair that employers have to defend frivolous claims which they usually settle because it is cheaper to do that than defend them because an employer had the devils own job trying to recover costs. The current rules have swung the pendulum back into the employers favour. I am not sure how you strike a fair balance - maybe kill off this no win no fee culture? You can get rid of people who dont perform, you just have to follow a process and accept it might take you a few months.

Hi Jamie, give our love to Louise.

This is how moden politicians believe they should communicate with the media. Pick a sound bite / headline, choose a 5 minute interview slot, ignore the question and repeat sound bite ad nauseum. It doesn't matter if it is "long term economic plan" or "cost of living crisis", they all do it to the extent that it is barely worth watching any of these interviews.

Anyone going to be aggravating the natives in the new forest sportive this weekend?

Hmmm- if you get bitten by the bug, then within 6 months you will be plotting how to tell the missus that your new bike isn't up to the job, and that the only way to unlock your true potential is to spend out on a better bike. Either that or you will upgrade everything several times to the extent that your bike will be like Trigger's broom.

Almost????? - It was so expensive they went bust twice!!!

Good grief - Pickles is a pillock and that policy is just plain stupid - how about stop wasting time and effort on trivialities and tell us how you are going to fix the big issues In reality it just does not work - at work we can take two days off paid each year for charity work - to my knowledge not one person has taken advantage of it in the three years it has been in place.

Dear Harry Please will you crawl back under your rock. Yours in eternal loathing. CB

The reason I got started on this was to counter a post which seem to wholly plant the blame of the deficit onto falling tax receipts. I was pointing out that increased spending was as much to blame for the current predicament - I haven't "gushed" at all about Tory led recoveries. The unfortunately fact that we are faced with is that we still have a circa £100bn deficit. We cannot sustain that in the longer term. We can earn more or spend less. There is limited scope to earn more unless the economy really gets going (and I don't believe that we will ever see more that a couple of % growth pa in a good year). The corp tax receipt in the last 12 months were circa £40bn - even if you doubled the CT rate (assuming the large companies would stay) we would still be left with a £60bn shortfall. Mansion taxes, non doms etc, whilst it would contribute, will hardly make a dent in this. The only real way left to tackle to the deficit is to spend less - how we do this and what you spend less on, I don't know but something has to give.

Depends upon your view of what a slight deficit is We increased our tax take between 2001 and 2008 by 40% pa - in the same time we moved from a balanced budget (a surplus the year before) to borrowing around £40bn a year If we have kept spending at the 2001 level, then in 2008, before the crunch, we would have been delivering a surplus of way over £100 bn pa We were spending on the never never, hoping that next years Christmas bonus would be sufficient to pay off the credit card bill. Unfortunately for all of us, the tax take collapsed and we were left with pre-recession spending commitments. My irritation with the last governments economic policy was that there was more than enough in the pot to increase spending at a modest rate whilst putting some away for leaner days. they chose to spend what they didn't have because they believed that the boom and bust cycle had ended.

Definately one of your more daft lines of reasoning

We we running a deficit since 2001 and up until the crunch we were borrowing circa £40bn pa despite increasing the tax take year on year if we had not increased spending as much between 2001 and 2008 we would have run a surplus the fall in the tax take just brought the chickens home to roost