Seems not. By an irony – the CBI, about which most of us have probably been oblivious about for the last 35 years –  suddenly had an opportunity to resume its ancestral role now that strikes have again become commonplace. Just when the CBI’s moment seemed to have again arrived, its CEO Tony Danker – I can’t imagine what his behind-the-back nickname might be – and, perhaps, others became involved in yet another sorry tale of inappropriate behaviour. These accusations now come at us about once a week. Who’s next?

• President Biden has been on a rapid tour of both parts of Ireland as part of his visit to co-incide with the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. The trip has included visiting “distant relatives” in Carlingford, which is just in the Republic. Has there ever been a US President who has not claimed to have Irish ancestry?

• You hear of some strange and pointless crimes but covering a recently-planted allotment in salt and so ruining the crops (as happened recently in Harlow) is off the scale in several ways. Doing things like nicking a traffic cone, keying a car or kicking over a dustbin on the way back from the pub are heat-of-the-moment things. Covering an allotment in salt is not something you just do. For a start, you need a lot of salt; then you have to get it there and break in to the garden (carrying the salt). All of these stages would surely have provided the chance for the person to pause and ask themselves “what the hell am I actually doing?”

There’s also something darkly, almost Biblically, portentous and symbolic about sowing the ground with salt – wasn’t that what the Romans did to Carthage after they’d razed it? If the person responsible is ever caught I’d be fascinated to learn their motives. It all appears to have ended well, however, for the article reports that the owner of the plot (which was used to help feed people in the area on low incomes) has been flooded with donations. The next thing is probably that she’s going to get disaster-trolled by people claiming that she did it herself.

• My attention was recently drawn to an article in the 6 January issue of Private Eye which took a look at the state of homelessness, housebuilding and social-home provision in the country. A few excerpts from this make grim reading for those who believe that there is not a problem here. 95,000 households (including 121,000 children) spent last Christmas in temporary accommodation. This is twice as many as in 2013. 1.2m families are on local authority waiting lists. 11,000 homes were sold under the Right to Buy scheme in 2021-22 but less than half of these were replaced. 

Moving on to affordable housing, the Eye says there is “better news” with 59,000 completed or acquired in 2021-22, an increase on the year before. Worryingly, however, only 7,500 of these were social-rent, the rest being the expensive “affordable rent” and shared ownership types. Wind back to 2011-12, Lord Gnome points out, and we had an almost identical number of total completions of this kind but 38,000 of these were for social rent. This was, the writer notes, before the government cut investment in this area.

“Investment” – that’s the key word. Over the last few decades there seems to have been a major change in how housebuilding is regarded. Once upon a time, it was seen as an investment, as creating assets which would provide a vital societal benefit in the same way that roads, hospitals and railways do. Now, however, pretty much the whole business is regarded as being much better dealt with by the private sector, as is duck tape, fish fingers, lager and all the rest of it. 

Just take a look at the figures (I’ve been looking at the ones on Statistica). The high-water mark for house building was in 1968 with about 425,000 completions, 226,000 of which were put up by local authorities. This is more than the number of homes built in total in any year since 1989. In 2020 there were about 160,000 completions – well down on the 300,000 which the House of Commons Library believes is needed, although an improvement on the early 2010s.

Above all, the number of homes that are built by local authorities is now vanishingly small. Only 2,630 were built this way in 2020, about the same number as were completed every five days in the year Sgt Pepper was released. Things don’t seem to be Getting Better: and, it’s had to know how, if She’s Leaving Home, she’ll be able to afford to find anywhere else to live. We need to be Fixing a Hole or two in the current system. Councils generally don’t have the expertise to build but they can partner with those that do – get by, in other words, With a Little Help from their Friends [That’s enough Sgt Pepper puns – Ed.]  As the article in the Eye concludes, “the housing prospects for 2023 look bleak.”

• Looking at the 59,000 affordable housing completions in 2020-21 made me wonder how well our district of West Berkshire was doing. West Berkshire has about 0.25% of the UK’s population so I reasoned – employing a piece of doubtless wobbly logic that would make a statistician or a planning officer beat their head on their desk in despair – that one might expect that the district would have built 0.25% of the affordable homes, ie about 148. In fact, as this report kindly provided by WBC’s Planning Department confirmed, 169 had been built. So, by this test we’re doing quite well. In terms of overall housing, I’m sure WBC would like me to add that its net completions exceeded its target of 525 homes in all but one municipal year since 2017-18.

• The planned ESA mission to Jupiter’s moons has recently been called off due to the risk of lightening. Apparently there is a one-second window for the take-off as the business of reaching Jupiter involves going round Venus. Even I know that’s in the other direction but it needs to do a sling-shot manoeuvre to take advantage of gravity and clever stuff like that, so all the planets need to be in the right places. One second? No pressure, then. It seems there’s one such window a day for the rest of April. If it doesn’t make it by then I don’t know what will happen. Maybe they should have got Wallace and Gromit to do it…