• Resiling

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will be different as MPs will have a free vote and can say what they want on the matter, before and during the debate. Well, sort of. The Cabinet Secretary Simon Case wrote to Ministers last month saying that as this is “an issue of conscience”, the Government will therefore remain neutral.

“Outside of Parliament,” his letter continues, “all ministers should take the same approach in all forms of media, including social media. Though ministers need not resile from previously stated views when directly asked about them, they should exercise discretion and should not take part in the public debate.”

I had to look up “resile”, as I hadn’t seen this word before. It means, as the context suggests, to abandon or retreat from a course of action or a position. It’s not a particularly attractive word and I won’t be struggling to find a way of slipping it into everyday conversation, not least because I’m not sure how to pronounce it.

I’m also not I sure what Mr Case’s admonition is meant to accomplish, nor if it’s clear to all the ministers what they should or shouldn’t do. It also appears to contain a logical flaw. The government may be neutral, but surely neutrality doesn’t extend to telling the ministers that they must be neutral as well. Either it’s a free vote or it isn’t. As for the question of their not needing to resile – a rather weasel phrase, now I come to re-read it – we seem to be some way beyond that as a number of ministers seem to have changed their minds.

Simon Case’s letter was referred to on a programme on R4 this week, I forget which. One outraged MP suggested that Case was “out of order” in placing such a restriction on minsters, adding that she felt the public had a right to know what the Health and the Justice Secretaries thought about the matter as they’d be responsible for what ensued.

I don’t agree, for two reasons. First, I would hope that a minister’s behaviour with regard to a bill that’s been passed should be unrelated to their personal views. Second, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Since 2019 cabinet ministers have remained in their jobs for an average of only about eight months, so the odds of either of these still being in post were the bill to become law are not high. However, I agree that their constituents may be interested to know what they think beyond merely which lobby they go through.

Not that there will be much time for a debate, with only five hours allocated for this. The Express claims that four MPs have tabled an amendment saying that the timetable “does not allow for sufficient debate on and scrutiny of a Bill on a matter of this importance”. They are right. However, their real purpose seems to be to use a parliamentary divide to derail the bill.

For all its equivocation, Simon Case’s remark does tell me something very interesting. That is, a minister’s responsibility to the government trumps their responsibility to their conscience or their constituents. This seems to be another undermining of the fictional ideas – on which the nonsense of our first-past-the-post electoral system is based – that MPs are elected to represent local residents. The further up the Westminster gum tree you go, the less this matters.

At least, that’s one construction you can put on his letter. Others exist. However, so increasingly disenchanted am I by the dysfunctional way we’re governed and legislated upon that to take the most cynical view of any statement of action from government seems an increasingly rational reaction. It’s also often the most accurate one.

• Farming news

Last week I did my best to summarise what seem to be the three main views about how the Budget might affect farmers (see “Starmer’s farmers”). I’ve recently had my attention drawn to something that seems – and I use the word with care – to cut through some of the sound and fury.

This is from Dan Niedle of Tax Policy Associates. “New data suggests,” the report begins, “that one third of the farm estates affected by the Budget changes aren’t owned by farmers – they’re held by investors for tax-planning purposes. This suggests the Budget proposal doesn’t go far enough to stop avoidance, but goes too far in how it applies to actual farms.”

The report goes on to suggest that, were the Budget changes to have been in place in 2021-22, fewer than 250 “actual farm estates” would have paid IHT that year. It goes on to comment that “given the planning that’s likely to be put in place, we wonder quite how much tax the Budget measure will raise”. There are also, it continues, a “surprisingly large” number of farm estates which are held for IHT purposes. These would still pay IHT but at a lower rate than would a “normal” person.

The conclusion is that the Budget risks missing the point, the main one being that “people who aren’t farmers will keep using farmland as an IHT planning vehicle [and will remain] comparatively unaffected by the Budget”.

There are, it’s suggested, two easy ways these problems could be fixed: protect real farmers with a complete exemption from inheritance tax (subject to a very large cap, say £20m); and deal with avoidance by clawing-back the exemption if a farmer’s heirs sell the farm.

Legislation in general, and perhaps budgets in particular, are full of missed targets or operations of the law of unintended consequences. One problem seems to be that our tax system is so complex and in many ways so irrational that anyone with enough money can find a way of circumventing almost any regulation. The richer you are, the more you can afford this and the more incentive you have to do so.

Many farmers who’re short of cash, frazzled to the point of exhaustion by dealing with problems ranging from climatic changes to the buying departments of supermarkets, may find themselves less able to do the necessary tax planning than will their plutocratic neighbours who are, perhaps, the intended targets of this measure.

• A winning ticket

It seems that a UK ticket-holder has this week won £177m on the EuroMillions jackpot. This is an insane amount of money and is highly unlikely to make the winner 170 million times happier than they would be if they found a pound coin on the street.

This will, as the BBC article points out, make the winner richer than the singer Adele. She’s been working hard for 20 years at her chosen profession, which is arranged in a way that, if matters worked out, will make her wealthy. Doubtless the winner has worked hard at theirs, perhaps for twice as long and probably with no expectation of getting even remotely rich.

Why then do I feel uneasy about this jackpot, whereas I can cope with the idea of millionaire entertainment and sports stars without flinching?

Perhaps it’s to do with it all coming at once. This must produce a seismic shock to your domestic and social life which will leave nothing unchanged. You are suddenly not Jane or John but a multi-millionaire. Few will say anything but many will expect something. Many of the normal balances of your relationships will be disturbed, even if they previously had no financial component to them.

These changes may not be welcome. About three-quarters of winners move house, perhaps not to a swanky palace, but none the less perhaps to a place that seemed ideal from a distance but is less so in reality and which represents less a fulfilment of a long-held dream than an escape from an untenable reality.

Or perhaps it’s the extent to which it’s earned. Are the millions belonging to Adele, Cristiano Ronaldo or Julia Roberts deserved? Well, perhaps they are. They are all paid the going rate by the standards of industries which have an amazingly high failure rate.

Although in some of these the lottery of physical beauty plays a big part, there are plenty of beautiful people out there. These celebrities are incredibly good at what they do and have honed their skills with thousands of hours of practice and rehearsal towards this one goal. Many fall by the wayside.

Should success be rewarded to the extent that it is? If we’re prepared to play to watch or listen to the results, as we are, then the answer is “yes”.

I think that £5m is the maximum sum that anyone should expect to win by chance. For the government, that’s also likely to be a winner. A massive cheque may result in a lot of the money going offshore. Thirty-five smaller ones might not. £5m would be a life-changing sum but not a life-destroying one.

It’s certainly good news for UK charities, which will realise about £100m from this latest win. Perhaps that’s what we should focus on.

• Remote meetings

The government is asking for our views on the subject of once again allowing councils to conduct meetings remotely, as briefly prevailed during the pandemic. I completed it recently and it took me about seven minutes and would have taken less time were I to have had less to say. The consultation closes on 19 December.

The thing that really pisses me off about the current restrictions on how meetings have to happen is that the government seems to think that the archaic system that prevails at Westminster should have to apply to everyone else. The respective reactions to the pandemic – dither and over-complexity for the centre, focused response from the localities – showed that the central model is not one to follow. The introduction of the extra flexibility was a matter of necessity. Its removal was a matter of spite.

 • And finally…

• I haven’t been following the Lucy Letby public inquiry very closely, being merely thankful that my eldest son, who spent the first 10 days of his life being looked after by nurses in a hospital, emerged healthily from the experience. The immediate impression I’ve got from a brief scan of the reports including this one is that it bears an uncomfortable similarity to the Post Office scandal, with the bosses of a large national monopoly abusing their powers.

The difference is that while the PO is just something we take for granted and have no particular affection for unless a local branch is about to close, the NHS is a national treasure in support of which we were a few years ago applauding in public.

• The threat of a massive cyber attack on the west that Putin has promised “may eventually prompt Nato to consider invoking the alliance’s Article 5 [you attack one of us, you attack all of us] mutual defence clause, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has warned,” as reported in The Guardian. God knows how cyber attack will be defined. Don’t these happen every day?

• What has gone wrong with Manchester City? The last month or so has seen the team turn from serial winners to abject losers. Perhaps it’s the fear of the retributions that might be handed down for its alleged breach of the financial fair-play rules. Either the consequences of these, or their plummeting league form, might see them relegated. It will be of small comfort to the club that one of its former players,  Mikheil Kavelashvili, is set to become the President of Georgia.

• We have three cats, one (Marmite) a lot older than the others. Last year I was starting to worry about his sanity. Three recent events have reassured us that he’s OK. The first was making a fluent leap, via the top of the new TV, to the top of a cupboard and then, like an eel, back down again when feeding-time was announced. The second was managing to open the bathroom window the other day and escape, a trick I found very difficult to pull off when forced to do this in reverse last year.

The third was opening a cupboard, extracting one of the sachets of cat food we’d been given by someone who’s recently lost their cats, opening it, eating it and trying to push the evidence under the fridge – at least, this last bit was all I saw. None of this represents senility. Rather the opposite, if anything…

Across the area

• For want of a nail: the Eagle Quarter non-decision

Last week I wrote about the recent eventful but ultimately inconclusive meeting of West Berkshire Council’s (WBC) District Planning Committee (DPC) on 13 November. This failed to make a decision on the Eagle Quarter application, as the Western Area Planning Committee (WAPC) had also failed to do on 3 October. This placed WBC in an avoidable, awkward and potentially expensive position.

Most of the points I’d asked were addressed and there was even, with regard to the sudden ending of the livestream, what amounted to an apology. Most of these points were, however, dependant on one thing not having happened. This was ensuring that the meeting could run for long enough to reach a verdict. There are two aspects to this: when it started, and when it finished.

The start point was addressed in the response I received: “The DPC meeting started earlier than normal to provide additional time for a decision to be reached.” However, as I’d predicted might happen, it wasn’t reached. I get it that 10.30pm is the deadline. So, what arrangements were made to see if the meeting could be continued the following evening for the members’ debate? Was this even possible?

It was: “The meeting could have been adjourned until the next day,” I was told. That’s good. So, why wasn’t it? 

“This would only be possible if councillors were available. It was not possible, in the time available on the night, to make this decision.”

Indeed. As I pointed out last week, if you ask attendees that question at the end of the meeting, it’s likely some will say no. Worse still, it’s then too late for them to appoint substitutes. They should all have been asked as soon as the need for the DPC meeting was known (six weeks beforehand) if they could make a possible over-run meeting the following evening and that, if this wasn’t possible, to arrange for a substitute who could. Was this question asked at that time?

“Members were not asked to provide their availability for another day as it was not considered at that time to be necessary,” I was told. “We correctly anticipated this was going to be a busier meeting than normal and that additional time would be required for the debate.

“For this reason, rather than plan for a second session, we had an agenda that was limited to one substantive item, and we started the meeting earlier than usual to provide time for a decision to be reached. We feel this was a reasonable course of action based on the information that we had.”

It’s hard to know what the reference to “limited to one substantive item” means as the agendas for the WAPC and the DPC meetings were in this regard identical. As for “the information that we had”, this was that, even with an earlier start, the two meetings would have to go over exactly the same ground and with two additional members.

In addition, five of the DPC members hadn’t sat on WAPC and so might be expected to ask fresh questions or raise fresh points, perhaps at considerable length. As I suggested following the first meeting, all in all there was nothing to suggest that the re-run wouldn’t hit the buffers in the same way as the first one had: as indeed happened.

There was also the question of the legal advice. My reading of the final stages of the DPC meeting was that there was not someone with a sufficient knowledge of the constitution present. The statement I received last week said that “the Council does not agree” with that. However, why take the risk? Why was the Senior Legal Officer Sarah Clarke not present?

If ever there was a time to show that a top-level attendance was needed, this was it. Turning up at the WAPC meeting on 20 November, which was considering three much more minor matters, was too little and too late.

All in all, WBC’s insouciance in this regard is staggering. Why does this matter? There are four reasons.

• Any delay is likely to increase the risk of an appeal on grounds of non-determination. If this is opposed (perhaps unlikely given the officers’ views) and if WBC lost, this could be very expensive.
• Assuming that the matter is approved, WBC and the developers will have to co-operate together during the possible four-year build time. The resultant delay is not the ideal precursor to this. Nor is a court case.
• It made WBC look ridiculous. The new government has already intervened in a planning issue elsewhere (in Swayle) where it was felt the planning authority might be dragging its heels. This non-decision might make Angela Rayner add WBC to her list of such authorities. She might already have done so.
• Think of the councillors. OK, they get allowances but they’re not that much. How many hours did they spend on each of these two meetings? Say two hours for each site meeting, five or so hours for each committee meeting, plus travel time. Plus all the time reading the papers. These people also have lives to lead and other tasks to do as WBC members, including the all-important matter of their ward work and dealing with the concerns of their residents.

All of these circumstances have or possibly will come to pass as a result of one simple question not being asked to each of the DPC members shortly after 3 October. “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost”, as the old rhyme goes. We all know how that ended…

• Football scrutiny

There are always things that need looking into with any council’s work. Here in West Berkshire, the long-running saga of the Faraday Road football ground in Newbury and its proposed replacement (or non-replacement, or partial replacement, depending on what documents you read) at Monks Lane provide an almost inexhaustible supply of material.

The Scrutiny Commission this month looked at the recent spending on Faraday Road to return it to a condition where football can be played. This was in response to a question from Paul Morgan, a long-time member of the Newbury Community Football Group and an opponent of the closure of the ground in 2018. You can see this part of the meeting by clicking here (from about 15′).

The costs of these were about £230,000 as phase one (to February) and £395,000 (to November), as reported by WBC’s Leader Jeff Brooks at the Executive meeting on 7 November. Paul Morgan claimed that the true costs were closer to £430,000. Time will tell.

Some of his points referred to the project-management of the work since May 2023, and he suggested that the project was unambitious and could have been better planned and executed. Much of what followed were justifications from the officer and portfolio-holder as to why certain courses of action had been chosen or suppliers selected.

This was brought right up-to-date with a discussion about the confusion over the size of the changing rooms. These turned on a disagreement between WBC and the League as whether these were new or a replacement, different sizes being required in each case.

Those who have followed this story will know that this is not the first time the word “replacement” has featured in the saga. The entire Monks Lane sports hub proposal has been described variously as a “replacement” and “not a replacement” for the ground at Faraday Road. This is not just a semantic quibble, but one that has legal, procedural and financial implications.

Indeed, one can’t look at Faraday Road for very long without the proposed Monks Lane sports hub shouldering its way into the discussion – which was itself entirely a product of the closure of the football ground. The project-management of the sports hub is the subject of a task and finish group (a sub-committee of the Scrutiny Commission), which will report in the early spring. Another one will then start work, looking at project-management in other areas of WBC’s work. The phrase keeps on cropping up, doesn’t it?

Project-management competence is vital for any organisation that has capital projects which may take years to accomplish. It has been suggested that, with these football-related schemes, this could have been better. That is what the Scrutiny Commission is looking at, though it will be some months before we have the answer.

If the projects have been indifferently managed over the last six years, this is none the less an improvement on how the whole business started. The closure of the Faraday Road ground in June 2018 was a horrible blunder, performed to propitiate a development partner who was subsequently forced to pull out, and in pursuit of a long-term goal for the wider London Road Industrial Estate area which was, it’s now clear, built on very shaky foundations.

Everything that has happened since has been either a reaction to the increasing problems that this decision caused or, since May 2023, the result of a political promise to turn the clock back to 2018. This has proved more complicated than expected. All in all, this was a project that started badly and has never managed to get off the back foot thereafter.

As the work at Faraday Road is still continuing, the costs will continue to rise. So too will further questions about how this work is done, which will doubtless lead to further questions about the past. To add to the complexity, the planning permission for the sports hub at Monks Lane remains in place, as does the budget line to pay for it: does this mean that this may be built after all in some form?

This might need to wait until the new playing-pitch strategy is done. However this, like everything else with this project, has got delayed. And so it goes on…

• Beaver news

A friend who lives near Devizes sent me a WhatsApp message this week saying simply “We’ve got beavers”. I wasn’t sure if this was a boast about some new pets or news about a skin condition I’d never heard of, until some photos arrived showing gnawed-down tree trunks with pointed stumps – a classic sign of beavers at work.

Hunted almost to extinction in this country, they’ve since been re-introduced in selected areas, including (confusingly) the River Otter in Devon, though not this immediate area, so they may well be escapees or migrants from another scheme. (There are already some – Choppy and Hazel and family – at an enclosed reserve in Ewhurst Park near Tadley).

Efforts to restrict them once they’ve been released seemed doomed to fail as they are apparently as adept as cats at escaping from places. It would have been better, I was told, to have trained officers keeping an eye on populations wherever they sprung up and doing their best to mitigate their work.

For work is what they do. They are compulsive dam-makers and repairers, obsessed with creating and managing the ideal environment for their river-side lodges. The sound of running water or the suspicion of a leak in the dam forces them into immediate action. If trees need felling to accomplish this, they have just the tools, being able to gnaw through a 15cm trunk in less than an hour.

It’s hard to think of an animal apart from humans which have so great a desire to reshape their environment. Much of the work they do is beneficial – slowing water flows, debris clearance, filtration, biodiversity, vegetation renewal and carbon storage. They can also cause less positive results like bank erosion and short-term flooding. Their re-introduction is putting these pros and cons to the test in different areas. The final verdict will vary from place to place and may take some time to become clear.

When you have two species, us and them, each believing it knows best about how waterways should be managed, there’s bound to be conflict. Landowners have for generations been used to dealing with the complaints or suggestions of the government, councils, environmentalists, anglers and riparian charities. Beavers, though, are a new one. Their re-introduction does, however, jive with a general (and, to many, welcome) move towards more sustainable solutions to the problems of water management.

Beavers are an interesting new part of this. They should perhaps be regarded as highly effective, completely free but totally un-regulateable contract workers for the Environment Agency. Their work needs to be monitored, but in the process we might learn something from them. All in all, it’s probably better to see beavers as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Aside from their specific riparian skills, the creatures certainly get high marks for their “foresight, constructiveness and industrious behaviour”. It was for this reason that a beaver was in 1922 chosen to appear on the coat of arms of the London School of Economics, where it remains to this day.

One thing seems certain: now they’re out and about again they’ll almost certainly be spreading: Devizes today and perhaps points east along the Kennet and the Lambourn tomorrow. Anything or anyone that’s pre-programmed to repair leaks and deal with running water is probably more to be welcomed than feared. It would, for instance, be great if Thames Water could coax them into helping to fix its pipes…