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How gallant of them!

Tories advocate watchdog to monitor aid impact

Larry Elliott
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian

The Conservatives last night called for this week's G8 summit in Germany to create a new international body to measure the effectiveness of aid spending as they warned that much of the west's development budget was being badly used.

Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary said Tony Blair should used Britain's position as the most effective aid spender in the G8 to put pressure on other rich countries to make better use of the resources earmarked for tackling global poverty.
...
The Conservatives have already announced plans for an independent aid watchdog to scrutinise British aid, and Mr Mitchell believes that, if successful, it could be used as the template for an international monitoring body.

He added that there would be a built-in international dimension to his new body for assessing UK spending, since so much of British aid went through multilateral channels such as the World Bank, or was used in partnership with other bilateral donors.

All those trips to aid recipient nations - wouldn't they just love it!

I'm just sitting listening to the Any Questions Lib Dem leadership contest special and I just heard Chris Huhne, in response to a question about whether they were more afraid of Gordon Brown or David Cameron, say that one thing that scares people about Gordon Brown is that he cannot keep his hands out of other departments' business.

How timely an answer, because it has just been announced today that Kate Barker, she of the housing market report that was commissioned a couple of years ago (and who said herself that she didn't know much about housing economics at the time!) has now been asked to do a review of the Land Use Planning system...by...The Treasury:

The terms of reference of the review are:

To consider how, in the context of globalisation, and building on the reforms already put in place in England, planning policy and procedures can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside other sustainable development goals.

In particular to assess:

• ways of further improving the efficiency and speed of the system;
• ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires;
• the relationship between planning and productivity, and how the outcomes of the planning system can better deliver its sustainable economic objectives; and
• the relationship between economic and other sustainable development goals in the delivery of sustainable communities.

I wonder how much Ms Barker knows about planning. She's turning into the economist's version of Louise Casey methinks.

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

News reaches me of moves at long last by Lib Dem led Oxford City Council to get more private sector landlords' properties licensed to ensure a basic decent standard:

BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | Licence plan for more landlords:

There is a "widespread" problem of sub-standard conditions in rental properties across Oxford city, a councillor claims.

With more than 1,000 complaints last year Councillor Patrick Murray wants more residences licensed.

This is something I fought for not far shy of ten years ago now when I was on the council. In some predominantly student areas of other cities quality has been driven up by voluntary schemes run by organizations such as UNIPOL housing which we tried to whip up some enthusiasm for in Oxford ten years ago. But to little avail. And why should they - in some cities, students have a choice, and the difference between being licensed and not being licensed could be the ability to let your property at all. Here in Oxford the market is so tight it's nearly always a landlord's market.

Patrick knows, and I know, that there are some scummy shitholes out there that get in under the wire of compulsory licensing. If you want to provide boarding kennels for animals you've got to get them licensed. If you want to feed us kebabs at three in the morning you've got to get licensed. Yet if you want to house people, you can more or less do as you please. I've seen bare wires, broken bogs, even still some outside privies. And as to what passes as "furnished" the thought even for me, slob as I am, of sitting let alone sleeping on some of the fleabitten stuff turns my stomach. And in Oxford students often end up taking whatever they can get.

However, there is a market mechanism for achieving a similar outcome. Let's use Land Value Tax instead of Council Tax. Council Tax falls on the occupier. Land Value Tax on the owner. Council Tax combines the value of the location and the property to produce a taxable value, Land Value Tax just acknowledges the value of the location.

So a landlord offering a scuzzy shithole in an in demand location is going to have most of his income taken from him in tax unless he bucks his ideas up and produces a property which people are actually going to pay a premium over location value to rent. It would also prevent those landlords not renting out part of their properties to avoid the current compulsory system as they'd be losing out on income from the bit that is theirs, the property value, whilst still having to pay the tax on the location value.

Oh, and of course, it would promote the redevelopment of some sub-standard housing into dedicated single person housing more appropriate for the student and young professional market, taking some of the heat off family housing.