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There has been a bit of a spat at the Euro-parl about whether some amendments to the "Telecoms Packet" (how romantic, is that like the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Packet Company's packet?) that I encouraged readers to respond to a couple of days ago.

One of the movers of one of the offending amendments has, according to the BBC, said...

What a fuckwit. I doubt there has ever been any piece of legislation in any legislature which was claimed not to have "innocent intentions". But in a month when his own party has been moaning about, amongst other things the use of RIPA in ways for which it was not intended, surely the extension of "innocent intentions" into overbearing surveillance and so on should be obvious.

If there are drafting issues that permit an interpretation of a law that increases surveillance then the lawmakers should protect against it. The world is littered with "innocent" laws that have been interpreted to allow more sinister applications. A Tory, if committed to small government, should know this and not continue to protect his corporate sponsors.

Can anyone point me to a Euro-parl equivalent of "Public Whip" so I can determine if any of my supposedly liberal Euro-reps agreed with this Tory tosspot?

I got an email late today from an LVT supporter saying that Nick Clegg had spoken about the role of LVT/SVR in enabling more affordable housing in a BBC panel discussion after the Queen's Speech today.

I've not been able to find it via the BBC website (it doesn't help not actually knowing what the program might have been - I'm guessing it was Daily Politics). So did anyone happen to see it and either point me to a "watch again" URL or explain what he said, specifically about LVT and housing. Because it would be quite significant since even LVT supporters in the higher echelons of the party have so far not been keen to discuss it as anything other than a taxation base and this could be the first time that someone has shown they understand it's got a whole greater relevance than that.

Last weekend my mother was down visiting me in Oxford. On Sunday, for lunch, we wandered into town and went to the Castle/Prison site. Apart from anything else I haven't been up the castle mound to see what the view is like. These days, I thought there was a promise to make publicly funded museums free to access. I was surprised therefore to find that the little museum at St George's Tower was apparently charging to get in, and that you had to pay to get up the castle mound itself.

This whole development, resulting in a posh hotel that few in the city can afford to stay in, some apartments that few in the city can afford to buy, a bunch of brand name eateries and some open space, cost the tax payer some £6 million in the form of a SEEDA grant and the lottery player some £3.8 million - getting on therefore for nearly £10 million of "public" money.

I'd like to see the books on this development. I was on the planning committee when it got permission. Nno thanks to me - I thought the Jeremy Dixon building jutting out in front of the castle mound was hideous on plan, and it has turned out mediocre at best in my opinion - but the then doyen of planning committee had fallen in love with Dixon's work and couldn't be persuaded otherwise. We were told the SEEDA money for the commercial development itself, some £4.5 million, was part of a scheme intended to help make developments viable in "failed land markets". Indeed those of us against it were bullied with threats that the grant money would be withdrawn if we delayed even a few weks to try to get a better design. The threat was quite real though because the whole "failed markets" scheme had already proven so contentious that it was abruptly ended.

To suggest that a site adjacent to what will become a £200 million plus redevelopment of Oxford's main shopping centre, right next to County Hall, really slap bang in the centre of one of the hottest property spots in the country, was a "failed land market" was, frankly, laughable, even at the time. Indeed, on the SEEDA web page for the project it describes it as a "Prime City Centre Location"! "Prime" has specific connotations in describing commercial land.

Yes, it had taken several years to find someone to take it on. Since the prison had closed in 1996 (the last prisoner if I recall correctly was, at the time quite infamous, Jamie Blandford) and the whole site was handed to the County Council they had tried several schemes until Trevor Osborne's Osborne Group and SEEDA got involved and the rest is now history. But four years to get a plan for such a site was not out of the ordinary. Capital Shopping Centres next door has been trying to put together an acceptable plan for well over six years now - at their own financial risk of course.

And we can't even climb the castle mound for free. Oxford Preservation Trust is a great organisation and does have to make ends meet. But really, could not a scheme have been organised to make these spaces, in public hands for a thousand years, free to access? Perhaps by charging sufficient rent to the other tenants who would surely benefit from drawing crowds into the prison and castle site. "Brunch" at the "Living Room" restaurant alone was expensive enough to have included a contribution to my access to the castle.

How much did the County Council receive for the 200 year lease granted Mr Osborne? Presumably nothing - it was, after all a "failed land market", or so they persuaded SEEDA, and all the county appears to have wanted out of it was to remove all risk from the council tax payer, which in itself was laudable, but not necessarily the best they could have got for it. Would the development, now that it's complete, tenancies let and apartments sold, have been profitable without that grant? I know a few land agents locally. Not one of them believes that public subsidy was necessary (at least for the commercial part of the development).

So, was it necessary? And if not, who is going to apologise for wasting all that public money? Or is Osborne Group going to pay it back?

And I still, therefore, have not been up my castle mound - okay, that bit's only a quid, but I'm buggered if as a citizen of this fine city I am going to pay to access what has been public land for a millennium.

...let alone enforceable?

A row that has so far been played out in the pages of the august British Medical Journal has suddenly burst out onto the public stage as MPs have found constituents being told they will have to pay for their NHS treatment because they've paid for additional drugs or treatments, for example that the NHS doctor tells them may help but cannot be prescribed by them.

But is the notion that you can be barred from receiving the treatment your tax already pays for even legal? Apply the same argument to education, for example, and parents who pay for a few weeks extra tuition for their child would be forced to pay for the whole of their state school provided main stream education.

And even if it is legal, how is it enforceable? Should someone who buys some nutritional supplement that a friend recommends in addition to prescription drugs for their illness be forced to pay the full costs of their NHS treatment? Or is there some (arbitrarily?) set level - is it okay to buy an extra packet of over the counter drug but not a cancer drug that NICE won't allow you to have on the NHS even if your NHS doctor says it will possibly help over and above what they can do for you? And how do they know? Is it basically down to whether or not a private consultant requests your medical records from the NHS and the person receiving that request has to snitch on you?

Of course I can see there may be cases where it might be legitimate for the NHS to wash their hands of a patient who has paid for some additional or alternative treatment that actually compromises the care the NHS is trying to give that patient. But if it's complimentary to the treatment the NHS are giving, and only unavailable through them because of NICE, or budgets, or rules, that doesn't apply. Indeed, it would probably be saving the NHS money in the longer run - the quicker you are cured, or the more independent you are, because you have supplemented your treatment, the more resources they have to spend on people who cannot pay the extra, surely?

Again, the comparison with private education is interesting - if someone's additional private tutoring has made them better able to cope with their mainstream school classes in some way, the classroom teacher, surely, has more time to spend on others.

And if it's indeed just if it goes against the advice of the NHS,
should anyone who does not apply government sanctioned wisdom on
healthy living be made to pay for all NHS treatment because their
lifestyle is prejudicial to their health in some way? 

Or, perhaps, could it all be a case of corporate welfare - the NHS has "exclusive" deals maybe with drug companies that, say, give them discounts or some other kind of soft benefit even if only their treatment is used for a particular condition and if people opt to go for a competitor's supposedly better treatment the deals all fall apart. The NHS is riddled with protectionism, particularly in its procurement policies. And yes this itself locks out competition and keeps prices high.

The only real answer is that clinicians themselves should be allowed to select and prescribe their own choice of treatment that they think will help that patient get off their hands as soon as possible and let them get on with curing someone else. Surely that's the whole point of the NHS?