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The real shame about the County Council’s loss of parking revenue is that OUR county will not reap the potential benefit.

It is a perfectly reasonable debate as to whether free parking increases companies’ business in affected areas – history shows that it does. But this does not feed through into an increase in rates receipts by the local authorities taking the reduction on parking meter income. Rather it goes straight to Whitehall for redistribution around the country, holding down council taxes elswhere!

Environmental concerns are also overstated. Most evenings many metered parking spaces are empty – the primary exception being St Giles itself. Check out Mansfield Road, Museum Road, Merton Street, Wellington Square, Great Clarendon Street and others. But I also know that to avoid meters people drive further, for example in Jericho’s residential streets, checking the few free non-residents’ spaces first.

Now that services like the Barton to Kidlington bus are gone, even getting from parts of east Oxford to Jericho, let alone from out of town, is a sufficiently awkward journey by bus as to be offputting, especially if you’re going to be late returning in the evening.

It's nice to know that I've attracted the attention of some in the corridors of power. After my post the other day about whether it was better to tax emissions or to give out emissions permits and allow companies to trade any surpluses with other corporations that need to buy more for whatever reason, I got an email from Chris Huhne tonight to let me know that he'd put something more about it up on his own website.

I presume he refers to his speech in response to the Stern Report which contains lots of good stuff. Though it doesn't (and nor would I have necessarily expected it to) factor in my personal philosophical bias towards viewing the air/atmosphere as a part of the commons, like land, which ought not to be enclosed if possible and which bias leans me towards taxing emissions rather than trading emissions.

I accept that they sort of emissions taxing I was thinking of is probably not possible at present - that we do not have a "carbon footprint" for every process and that just as it would be technologically difficult in the time frame required for action to introduce personal carbon allowances and trading it would be similarly difficult or impossible to produce a fair tax system without knowing that "carbon footprint" of every process in the economy.

Technorati Tags: climate change, lib dems

I find the story of Farepack's collapse heart-rending. Whilst I'm none too fond of the notion that Christmas is something that should put such a burden on families that they feel they have to save up for a whole year to give their families a decent time (I believe a decent time should depend on the people and the spirit of the festival not the material goods that go with it) those who have chosen a savings scheme, rather than a spend-now-pay-afterwards credit card Christmas, have been doing the really responsible thing. And they've been left completely in the lurch.

Not only that but Farepack also allowed people to become their "agents" and collect from friends and other family members, so there's bound to be a bit of resentment in some households.

Presumably Farepack would have to have been a licensed deposit taker? And regulated as such by the Financial Services Authority? Their collapse should I hope, be dealt with as firmly by those authorities as any - Barlow Clowes springs to mind. I know running a business can be a fine balance between keeping the confidence of your customers and dealing with what might have seemed at the time - in June or July when they knew they had some cash flow issues - like little mid-year difficulties that they were confident they could get over. But it's not as if we are talking about sophisticated investors here who might have been watching for signs of trouble, just people paying into a relatively simple conceptually savings scheme that would guarantee them some fun over Christmas.

So it seems to me that HBOS do have some responsibility here. They were issuing warnings months ago to Farepack, and must have known the nature of their business and their customers. To allow it to go on till mid-October, when there's really little chance of people being able either to get what payout from an insolvency they might end up with before it was needed for Christmas or rustling up the same amount of money to replace what they had paid in and now lost, seems almost callous.

Farepack and similar schemes started life seventy and more years ago as mutual savings schemes. Maybe they've got too big to have the kind of care about their customers and the local savings club did of its members. Would that we had more credit unions that conscientious savers could have used instead. After all, how difficult can it be - you collect money over a year, put it all on deposit, even make a little interest for the members in doing so, and then all club together and go shopping in bulk, and start again the following January.

I hope someone steps in and offers these hapless but responsible people some material comfort at what promises to be a pretty miserable time of year for them.

Maybe my blog reader is faltering, but I seem to be getting enough comment on the Irish EU Treaty vote from eurosceptic types. But very little from members of the most avowedly "pro-EU" political party in Britain. Are the Lib Dems collectively stunned by the result?

As that strangest of beasts a pretty anti-EU Lib Dem I'm personally kind of pleased.