David Cameron wants to award the wrong sort of married couple

One thing I've learnt from looking through my family history is that even when there was the so-called married for life example that David Cameron so insists on not all families fit into the model he is advocating for a tax break. Not every family is quite so clear cut as he makes out.

Indeed I don't have to go all that far back to find a family that doesn't fit into the remit of one breadwinner and one stay at home parent. My paternal grandmother was widowed with children of 14 and 9, she never remarried but went out to become the breadwinner and went without much that others took for granted. Both my paternal great grandfathers were widowed one with seven surviving children under 16, the other with two, both remarried and produced even more children.

But the fact that the prime minster wants to "send a signal" that marriage is better than any other type of relationship ignores those that have no choice:

• Those who are widowed
• Those whose partners are abusive and flee with the children
• Those who are single parent families because one of the partners doesn't want that "better type" of relationship (or any relationship) when it brings them children
•  families where even this tax break isn't enough to encourage one partner not to work as they need to make ends meet
• families where neither parent is able to find work

It may only apply to one third of all married couples, but as I pointed out it is not necessarily the married couples with families that need such support, especially not when the caveat is that one of the parents is a stay at home parent. My own mother went back to work part time when I was 8 and my brother 6, and full time 3 years later as the family couldn't continue to maintain the Edwardian ideal of the mother staying at home.

Times have moved on and it is time that out tax code recognised that, not take a step back into the past.

See also check out the Don't Judge My Family website

Why the clocks needed to go back

As with every time the clocks clock back this morning I have seen friends (mainly from down south) say we should have kept them as they were to have an extra hour of darkness in the evening.

Yesterday here in Belfast the sun rose at 8:17am, today it rose at 7:19am. Without the clocks going back it would rise after 8:30am by the end of this week and 9am on the 18th November, it would next rise before 9am on the 8th February without the clocks going back to GMT. That would over 3 months.

In Cardiff the sun would rise at 9am for the first time on 4 December until 25 January only 7 weeks, or in London 15th December until 14 January or only 1 month. Only of course if the clocks were not to go back.

In London people never have to arrive for a 9am start in the dark. The latest sunrise there is 8:06am GMT in Belfast it is 8:46, Glasgow 8:48 and Inverness 8:59.

There is of course the journey to work time to be considered. Which takes us even further apart into how much darkness different parts of the country have to face. Now let us not forget that GMT is actually the time that the sun is overhead at noon rather than an hour later as in BST.

Now the argument is put that we need an extra hour in the evening for a healthier lifestyle. Of course keeping BST will only provide that extra hour from when the sun sets. If you are working 9-5 that extra hour will still be within the hour of you leaving work no matter where you are in the country. But add in the winter weather and it likely to get darker earlier as a result of cloud cover anyway, again this may be more prevalent in the north than the south. So while there may be an extra hour of light in the south often in the north where the sun is lower in the sky at this time of year the clouds may mean lights come on earlier.

So those that want to take away a chance of getting to work in daylight for a few weeks more in the north will only make negligible gains for what they want and again probably not be of benefit to those in the north.

The earth rotates on an axis, the sun is overhead at different times. If you want to work with Europe you can do so for most of the hours of yours and their working day. And lets be honest how much work do most people want to do with others in the last hour of their working day anyway. As someone who has worked in a global position I'm used to arranging calls when most people are available. That may include when the Americans are at their desks so early afternoon. It can include the Chinese so first thing in the morning. When doing business you adjust to the times of work going on elsewhere to get the job done, you don't disadvantage everyone else around you for the sake of it.



Let's bin the idea of keeping the extra summer time hour through the winter. The reason it works then is that there is more daylight to benefit from outside the working day, it doesn't apply in the winter months.

Tesco find a conscience via their complaints folder?

According to the Grauniad Tesco want the Department of Work and Pensions to change the nature of the scheme in which people will work in private sector firms for up to 8 weeks, with only the offer of an interview at the end of that time.

In comes after a week that the company who takes one pound out of every SEVEN £8.50 spent in the UK faced accusations of further profiting from slave labour. Having worked in retail  I know that someone can be trained to restack shelves in a morning. They can learn to operate a till in a similar period of time. The additional time that is required to get people up to speed is spent on knowledge of stock and gaining that.

Of course I started in retail as a Christmas temp, less than 8 weeks before Christmas. I was up to speed in a couple of days, I was then offered full time work after Christmas and have trained up many people to work in a retail environment since. It didn't take eight weeks for the manager of my branch of H. Samuel to offer me a full time position. I rose to have areas of responsibility in the chains then largest store on Shaftesbury Avenue when the chain was cutting back on staff I was moved to another branch, retained and given new responsibility because the Area Manager had also learnt that I had potential.

Yes we should be giving people the chance to experience work, but like Waterstones who have now withdrawn from the scheme it should be with the end goal of there being a job on offer. Therefore it should be a short apprenticeship to prove you are ready and able to work for that company. Not a means by which the government is forcing you to take action, and may remove the meagre Job Seekers Allowance you are on if after the first week but before the maximum eight you leave the position. That is the enslavement element. That is what Tesco now do not want to be associated with.

However, the telling part in the Grauniad article is this:

Supermarket group Tesco said it has asked DWP officials to make the work experience scheme voluntary after thousands of angry customers wrote in and posted messages on Twitter and the company's Facebook site accusing the multinational of profiting from hundreds of thousands of hours of forced unpaid work.

So it appears that the sudden outpouring of compassion may only have come with one eye of the profit margins.


The Lib Dems stood for Parliament saying:

• Scrap the arbitrary target of 50 per cent of young people attending  university, focussing effort instead on a balance of college education, vocational training and apprenticeships.
• As part of our immediate job creation package, fund 15,000 new places on Foundation Degree courses and fully fund the off-the-job costs of adult apprenticeships, which currently have to be met by employers, for one year.

We were talking about apprenticeships as ways to get people back into work. This scheme is not an apprenticeship it is work experience which can result in you losing benefit if you drop out of it (probably because you don't like that particular experience or possibly for health reasons).

We need to create jobs, whether that is via apprenticeships or whatever route, not merely give people the experience of work without anything at the end of it for them.

Forth Bridge Worker Dies in Fall

Sixty three men had been killed in its construction, but you rarely in these days of health and safety hear of the number who die maintaining the Forth Bridge being added to. Last night a construction worker fell 150ft unto scaffolding at about 2100 and despite the efforts of police, paramedics and lifeboat crews he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Maintaining the Bridges across the Forth is an important, year round role in keeping the communication channels open. Us mere passengers or car users (on the Road Bridge) forget how potentially dangerous such upkeep can be if something goes wrong. This is the first recorded death of a worker on the Forth Bridge for 32 years.

My thoughts are with the family, co-workers and friends of the construction worker who died on the bridge last night.

UPDATE: A second worker has been reported to have fallen from the Tay Rail Bridge also to his death.

UPDATE 2: The names of the men have now been revealed as Robert MacDonald, 52 of Harthill in the Forth incident and David Rodger, 44 of Cowdenbeath in the Tay incident. My thoughts are before are with their respective families.

Still Fearing Paperless Working Ten Years On....Come On

I was shocked to read that Alex Foster of all people seems to fear paperless committees. In essence I'm quite disappointed how little has changed since I worked on the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment's 'Leapfrog to the Information Age Initiative' (1999). Has it really been 10 years since we published that?

One of the reasons that Alex gives is that 'many of the councillors are not very happy with IT' which I honestly cannot believe is still an issue. Ten years ago when we were looking at the issue we were aware that there was a great lack of IT knowledge for a knowledge based economy. These days there is a lot less knowledge required by most end users to be fully functional than 10 years ago, yet we still have the argument that councillors aren't happy with IT.

What are they not happy about? Screens are a lot more easily read now than before. Even if a councillor has difficulty with a screen on his laptop as with the guys I work with, at their permanent work station a docking port and larger screen are readily available.


Alex also says that 'the email system isn't too good' well in this day and age that is a ridiculous state of affairs and something that needs to be resolved with either an improved server or a better system put into place. I know that when I return to my private sector desk in a couple of hours time and open my inbox that there will be so much data and information pushed into my inbox first thing when I log on; more indeed than I suspect a councillor will have to get on a daily basis. It doesn't hinder my day I'll be off and running within a minute of opening outlook.

The final argument may have some merit 'laptops for everyone will cost a small fortune'. Yes the initial capital investment is required in the technology. Laptops, docking stations, screens for permanent stations etc. but it can be phased in. First it starts with those that have mobile work positions, not everyone in our office has a laptop. Those that attend regular meetings, work from different locations, mix home working with visits to the office, these are the people with laptops. Must of the people doing the actual work who don't move around much still have desktop computers on their desks, these are the people less likely to attend any sort of 'committee' meeting. Walking the corridors you are often likely to walk past a co-worker carrying their laptop to some meeting room or other. Indeed sitting next to the hot desk stations I often see two colleagues from close but not adjacent desks move over to the space for an impromptu meeting to hash out a particular issue.

Maybe it is because I work in a global environment and not located in one office that working paperlessly seems to be a natural progression. My direct line manager is actually based in Ireland, the client I work for in New York State, the head office of my company is in Florida and I work with 12 sites globally. We are often having conference call meetings, often with shared worktop technology to discuss issues. Communication takes place by phone, messenger and email I don't see much paper in my day to day working, and I don't need it.

The IAI said that one of the barriers to moving with technology was merely a fear of change, but that is not a good enough reason to object to going paperless. The world is largely moving to a paperless way of working out of necessity due to the changing structure of how things work. It may seem easier to keep things as they are, but they are not necessarily best practice. Besides when I am leading a call a little prompt by IM of a point I have missed is often a good way to seamlessly move on to another topic. So there's plenty of reasons that I support Cllr Kristian Smith and West Lindsey DC's bold steps towards paperless committees.

Facebook Ban at Work

At work in the staff restroom areas we have a couple of PCs not linked up through the server but straight to an outside line. It is from here that the agents and other staff can access the websites that are blocked from their networked machines with the proviso that they do not breach other company guidelines regarding legality and decency.

Well it appears that as of some point since this morning that these machines are now blocking Facebook. Something that they had already blocked from desktop machines early last year. Now many of us use that site to make our arrangements for the evening weekend. Guess the agents will just be making good old-fashioned outbound calls to do any arranging just now.

I can't be bothered going back to pick up 'my' laptop just to log on to check my Facebook updates just now so I'll just have to catch up with all your goings on later folks. Once I head to the guitar shop to acquire some new strings so I can meme this.

A Proud Place of Work or Several

The police force, banks and management consultants top the Stonewall equality index ahead of the public sector, the media and education.

The index which for the fifth year has ranked employers based on their impact of workplace culture on gay, lesbian and bisexual employees is as a key barometer of diversity practices across the UK. The index looks at how employees diversity policies and how they impact on recruitment applications comparing it with information of experiences gathered from the employees.

This year the study has grown to more than twice the size when it started surveying 7,000 lesbian and gay employees of 371 employers over 23 sectors. Seventeen separate police forces feature in the top 100, three in the top ten. While sectors like law and housing have improved considerably, the construction industry along with media and the NHS do particularly poorly. Indeed only one NHS Trust, Tower Hamlets, appears in the top 100.

However, for this fifth incarnation of the index the standard was made tougher than in the past as Stonewall also required proof of long-term effectiveness from entrants.

One encouraging statistic from the index is that 97% of the top 100 were organisations that had an organisation-wide equality and diversity strategy linking Lesbian Gay Bisexual equality into their wider organisational aims.

The Count Down of the Top 10

10. Home Office*
8. = Merseyside Police
8. = Manchester City Council
7. London Borough of Tower Hamlets
5. = Transport for London
5. = Nacro (last years no. 1)
4. Kent Police
3. Brighton and Hove City Council
2. Hampshire Police
1. Lloyds TSB

*I will reserve comment about other issues for now. (Will right a balance piece later)

All Quiet on the Northern Front

As some of my regular readers may know I work in a call centre and last night I got called upon to cover the shift that finished at 7 o'clock. Fortunately work very kindly has TV sets so we can at least watch the action while continuing to take calls during the World Cup.

However, from 5pm to 7pm last night while we were constantly taking calls I only had two from male customers, every other customer was female. Of those two one was similarily still at work calling on behalf of a customer and the other was also located North of the Border in Scotland.

Maybe somebody could enlighten me to the derth of English males between 17:00 and 19:00 last night?

The One That Almost Got Away

Ever got that feeling that the world is ganging up on you? I had earlier today.

Applied for a job closing date was yesterday. The interviews were scheduled for tomorrow. I get a call for an interview. Of course working in a call centre I don't get to actually take the call in real time as I am dealing with a customer so have to call back.

Interview slots are in the middle of the day. I work in Edinburgh interview is over in the West of Scotland. I'm currently acting up in my stand in role. Know this will be awkward but brazenly ask the boss for time off. Get turned turn, ask what would be acceptable.

Redial the prospective employer. They will talk to the boss and see what they can do. I ask if possible first thing or last thing. They call back: I'm again on a call. They offer a compromise first thing in the morning on Thursday. My boss still turns me down. But her boss is beside me when this happens. So before I can send an email of complaint I've been told they will manage.

I just hope the interview goes well after all these problems.