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A friend, and former council colleague then defector, some of you will know who I mean but I won't name him, got the news early this week that his mother, in Glasgow, had been taken into hospital having been lain at home for the best part of a month not feeling well but doing little about it. Anyway, without going into too many details said friend is not really working full time at the moment and not claiming benefit - because of the irregular work he does for the local TA and ACF. THis is about enough to keep him in bed and board but without anything left over for "shocks" like having to travel to Glasgow from Oxford in a hurry.

Last night I booked him a train ticket for next Wednesday after his next ACF session, paid for with my debit card, and to be collected at Oxford station. At that far off it was £95 return. But this morning he got a call to say she might not last the weekend so we had to try and make some rearrangements for today. So first, trying to cancel the original ticket I found it wasn't possible online because it was an overnight service and had a reservation automatically applied. The cancellation has cost me a tenner as well. Then looking for a new ticket for today we concluded the only deal was to take a standard single, which was itself £85 (because he did not know precisely now when he was going to come back and so an open return was going to be pretty expensive.

Still, again, since I was the one booking it, I had to accompany him to the station to collect the ticket so that I could insert my debit card. And we had to wait for two hours to be able to collect it after the booking was made. So, getting to the station too early to be out before the time limit on the short stay car park I had to park in the long stay. The fee is £4.50 if you use something called "RingGo" and £6.00 if you only have cash. The process of paying via RingGo was quite stressfulm even for a techie like me, requiring some code off the platform (so I was lucky the man let me, the non-passenger, onto the platform to get the code which changes every hour. The instructions on how to pay seemed only to be back at the car park so having collected that code number I had to return to find out how to do it and then go through a most complicated automated system which has now, with no specific authority from me, got my mobile number linked to my car registration number. There was nobody at the car park checking, and no ticket either for the car window or the exit from the car park, so I presume it is monitored by ANPR.

So, it seems that if you are not very well off, don't have a credit or debit card, and need to travel quite quickly, you must be faced with a ticket that would be about 50% higher than even the extortionate "supasava" online and 50% extra on the car park. And this is supposed to be encouraging use of public transport? What a joke!

He texted me after about ten minutes on the train to say that it was like sardines in a tin.

And all that for ninety quid and it would take eight hours if everything went smoothly. I know all about the fixed, annual costs of driving, like my tax and so on, and actually I don't do much mileage a year anyway, so driving up there would have been cheaper at the point of use (I would have got there on two tanks at the most and with two of us in the car that would have been less than half the train price) and helped me justify my annual fixed costs in any case. And when I went looking for a plane ticket for him yesteray I gave up because I could not find a single ticket under £93.

Bonkers. Bonkers and discriminatory. Oh, and why on earth do two type of first class ticket vary by as much as £200 quid for the same (single!) journey - one was £250 or something and another £450. Just what is that about?

To the Most Revd Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham:

You upset me last year when you took on the government over their very just idea that some of the people who actually pay a majority of the cost of your schools (non-Catholic tax payers) should have the right to have their children go to those schools but I kept schtum.

Now you're banging on about wanting an exemption to laws designed to eradicate discrimination against gay people. Need I quote from your Catechism, section 2358, that "every sign of unjust discrimination should be avoided".

Indeed, adoption is an ironic one. After all, if you have an heterosexual couple who offer to adopt because they are unable to conceive for themselves, they too are unable to fulfill naturally the great commission of marriage, to share in "the creative power and fatherhood of God". So you are happy to discriminate against one form of "imperfection" (as you teach it) whilst rewarding another. Does that not sound "unjust" to you? Incidentally, are you allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religious belief or is it only gay people you are targetting? If you do not, how can you be sure that people not in full communion with Rome do not hold beliefs with which you would not agree also?

The historical reputation of the Catholic church in putting people in positions of care and influence over children is not, shall we say, something to be envied. Maybe we are better out of the adoption game altogether anyway.

The Register reports that Lambeth Borough Council is to use lie detectors to finger benefit cheats. And apparently it can all be done on the phone...

By John Oates
Published Tuesday 11th September 2007 13:15 GMT

Lambeth Council has done a deal with KPMG to use voice recognition software to finger cheats contacting call centres to sort out benefits.
Everyone contacting the centre will be told they are being scanned and will then be asked 19 questions. KPMG's "Voice Risk Analysis" will then finger voices it considers suspicious. The pilot is being paid for by the Department of Work and Pensions.

Call centres - stressful enough!
Originally uploaded by Mark Pugh

The technology supposedly works by detecting "micro-tremors" which, we are told, indicate not only stress but also "when stress is generated by an attempt to deceive".

The trouble is, as the Register also points out, calling a call centre is also stressful in itself. And when it's probably got something to do with your imminent eviction from home because someone at the council has not processed your Housing Benefit claim, or a threat about court proceedings because they've not registered your Council Tax Benefit status or something, it's hard to see how one type of "micro-tremor" will be differentiated from another.

Also, there are lies, little white ones, and great big cheating whoppers.  Is a claimant committing the venial sin of claiming to have sent all the documentation "last week" when really they mean yesterday, in a panic, when they realised the urgency, going to be "cuaght" alongside the outright bare faced liar claiming something they've no right to?

Nobody likes a benefit cheat. One way of preventing benefit cheats entirely is to adopt a universal benefit - the Citizen's Income - that wont require all this bureaucratic paper chasing. But this seems to be more than anything the creep of technology driven surveillance. Will callers be informed when the council officer they are speaking to is, in fact, lying, stalling or otherwise palming the genuine claimants off with a "story"?

In the shadow of Crewe and Nantwich but much closer to home we have an Oxford City Council by-election. And we have the apparently imminent prospect of a by-election for Boris's Westminster seat of Henley. The Henley headquarters is now open for business in Thame and, in a departure for me (!), I have been to offer my help. I'm not doing that phone thing - I'm sorry, canvassing is traumatic enough for me when I can see the colour of the front door before I knock! But there is lots of delivery to do (or was when I was there mid-afternoon on Friday) and I've got a bundle to do in Benson over the weekend.

So if anyone in Oxford without transport wants to help before things get into full swing for the city council by-election, let me know and I can pick up more, drop you off at the HQ, take a (small!) gang out delivering or something.