Happy Families Help Cut the Deficit

It's National Family Week in Britain next week, which is good timing because the new government has pledged to make Britain much more family-friendly.

The appropriately-named Relationships Foundation has calculated that family breakdown is costly not only in human but also in financial terms. The Foundation puts the financial cost of what it terms "family failure" at a staggering £41.7billion, or £1,340 per taxpayer per year.

Strengthening families, therefore, makes sense in terms of public finances, quite apart from its inherent merit.

The Foundation's breakdown of the cost of family failure last year is as follows:

• Tax and Benefits (tax credits and lone parent benefits) - £12.38 bn
• Housing and Council Tax Benefit - £4.27 bn
• Health and Social Care - £13.68 bn
• Civil and Criminal Justice - £8.03 bn
• Education - £3.31 bn

Divorced men and women are also significantly more likely to suffer a range of health problems than married people. These include heart conditions, respiratory problems, injury and poisoning and mental health problems, all of which affect divorced people in greater measure than married.

By contrast, the Foundation has calculated that families provide social care and support worth £73 billion per year in the UK. Family businesses, meanwhile, produce a total turnover of £1 trillion, paying £73 billion each year in tax.

National Family Week are running over 5,000 events across the country aimed at helping families relax, enjoy themselves and build their relationships.

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Reflecting on Copenhagan

“In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who had read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds. And what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.

At the forefront of the future: we cannot leave it to the politicians to figure it out and take the lead. Never before is there a need to re-think and re-engineer the way things get done, in the UK. Low carbon community groups have a tremendous role to play but will need to think much wider and more deeply than simply emission reduction and renewables. We need to think about how and from where we obtain our food, how we manage waste, where our water comes from, our approach to “work”, how we deal with the need to travel, how we manage health care, education and welfare and much more. One thing which is clear is that we do not have the time to gently bring every last person on board as nice as that would be: we cannot wait until the yawning chasm appears and for the final few to look into it ... and understand."

Richard Pagett, Low Carbon Communities Network

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Does CCTV Reduce Crime?

In 2005 the Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate published an extensive review, ‘Assessing the impact of CCTV’. It set out to evaluate 13 of the 352 CCTV projects set up under the 1999-2003 round of the Prevention Budget, and it found that CCTV had a negligible effect on crime rates in the areas they monitored.



In August 2009, in an internal report written by [Detective Chief Inspector] Neville and released by the Metropolitan Police under a Freedom of Information request, it was revealed that for every 1,000 cameras in London, less than one crime is solved per year.

source



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Smoking Outdoors: the Next Ban?

I've observed over the years that trends which take root in California usually arrive in the UK a year or two later.

If that is true, British people may want to take note of a law being passed through the California state senate this week banning smoking on public beaches and state parks. Senator Jenny Oropeza, one of the bill's sponsors, claims that 1/3 of debris on America's breaches comes from cigarettes.

I predict it is a matter of time before similar legislation is proposed in the UK Parliament - probably via the national assemblies in Wales and Scotland first.

Remember where you heard it!

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