My hope is that the reform is in the form of more early intervention at a community level (which is kinda what we had before the Great Gutting over the last decade).
Though going by the mood in this thread, I should be emigrating to Sweden…
This would be great news. Imho, council run buses are a great public good.
When you have a large town/city, it’s really important to have a way to get around that’s not expensive.
You only have to visit somewhere with a properly run network to see the difference.
As a municipally owned bus service, the council says Reading Buses can invest an additional £3m a year in the bus network, around 12-15% of its annual turnover, because it does not pay out dividends to private shareholders.
Money from commuter services also subsidises smaller less well-used routes.
Edit: Another place it helps councils: Old people bus passes.
In June 2023 the LGA said there was a £452 million gap in the funding councils receive from government compared to the actual number of ENCTS journeys made in 2022. This meant that councils were having to plug the financial gap from their “own stretched budgets”, which was “completely unsustainable
So a LA owned bus company with lower fares means the council doesn’t end up making up the shortfall between what the government pays for free journeys and what the bus company decides to charge.
Because there won’t be any more after you state-own it all, right?
Right?
ML summary:
Jas Athwal, the Labour Party MP for Ilford South, is a landlord with properties that tenants say have poor living conditions.
In the selection process for the Ilford South seat, Athwal won a higher percentage of votes from the party’s online “Anonyvoter” system compared to in-person votes, despite his opponent Sam Tarry winning more of the in-person votes.
There are concerns about a lack of transparency and potential for fraud in the Anonyvoter system, which has also been used in other Labour candidate selection processes with similar results favoring more centrist candidates.
Former Labour MPs Sam Tarry and Beth Winter have raised legal concerns about the use of Anonyvoter, and several Labour-affiliated unions have expressed doubts about the system.
That’s the gist to be honest.
RTB gives people the right after a certain amount of time, but lack of funding meant that councils weren’t able to replace the stock.
The discount is up to 70% too. So while each person who can exercise RTB gets an impressive leg up into the housing market, it’s contributed to even longer waiting lists for council housing.
It also creates a bit of an ethical dilemma if you are in council housing.
As if you start doing better financially, and are able to afford regular accommodation, you have an incentive to hold until you can RTB instead. (Though there are apparently now re-assessments at tenancy renewal time)
Really, the answer is way, way, way more council housing. But the money just isn’t available.
I wouldn’t lump Corbyn and Dahl together.
Dahl was a beloved children’s author, but he really did make some shit takes.
Friends had to replace a gas heater for their water radiator system and were told that there wasn’t a heat pump unit hot enough for the retrofit.
This generally means that they’d need to upgrade their radiators to accommodate a heat pump at normal temperatures.
And so long as the heat pump and radiators are appropriately sized to dump heat into the house, that shouldn’t matter.
The main issue is people with badly designed heating systems running at 70 degrees flow temperature.
When you swap over to a heat pump, the flow temperature is only supposed to be 40.
So you either need to get more water in the loop (bigger radiators) or less heat leaving the building (better insulation). And an understanding that the heat pump is supposed to heat gradually.
As for the installation cowboys…yea, it’s an absolute farce. £2k unit somehow costing £20k to install.
Oh no! If they continue down this path, nobody will want to privatise anything!
I get the feeling that in the past, the effort required to cycle self-selected people a bit.
Now with cheap assisted bikes, it’s easier than ever to become a 100KG object travelling at 20mph.
So maybe it should have more requirements, in a “greater good” kinda way.
Kinda like when drones took off (heh). The rules for how to use model aircraft needed refining, because the barrier to flying a 2KG object near an airport became much lower.
But what if the CEO is a five-star-man?
If you give people a reasonable, legal way to do things, people will generally do them.
And the odd twat doing 30mph on the pavement is much more obvious, rather than blending in with people who would otherwise be following the laws.
Honestly, I might even extend it to push bikes.
And make it so inexpensive to get the insurance that there is no excuse.
This seems like a good first step.
Move them out of the “technically illegal, but lots of people use them anyway” area, and into the “legal to use, but you have to register and carry some form of insurance”.
At least they didn’t get sent to Australia!
I look at the fees charged nowadays, and I’m convinced that if I had just finished my A-levels, I’d just go and train as a paramedic.
You still get a degree, except as it’s also an apprenticeship you get paid.
To me when someone says groomers, it puts my mind to tackling the child abusers, or anti-lgbt people accusing people of the same.
Jesus, Reach Media comment sections are a dumpster fire.
I have been tagged, after promising Emperor that I’d answer this several days ago 😅
Simple terms: 4 cores, 8 threads, 64GB RAM, >500GB storage.
At the moment, we use about 1/4 of that.
Which is great, because when things do spike, there is headroom before things slow down.
The reason we’re over-specced, is that the our current dedicated box costs the same as a “correctly” sized non-shared cloud instance. So for the sake of a couple of euros a month, we also doubled the ram.
Don’t worry, we’re quite good at censorship here too 😇
(Actually the policy is that genuinely awful content gets removed, other things get left so that the community can respond/vote up/vote down)