Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
Labour has a neat piece of crowdsourcing going on at the moment, under the banner of “Change we See”.
Party supporters are being asked to send photos of new hospitals, schools and sure start centres to help remind the public what Labour investment has achieved. It’s a nice idea, and it never hurts to be positive.
But - naturally - there’s a problem.
Take the photo selected for the first mailout to party members from general secretary Ray Collins:
The photo’s of the recently St Helens Hospital in Merseyside. The hospital was built as part of a £338m redevelopment of acute hospitals in the area. So far, so good.
The problem is, that £338m wasn’t investment. It was debt. St Helens Hospital was bought on the never-never, as part of the Government’s PFI scheme.
The repayments for the St Helens redevelopment, over the next 30 years, will total a huge £1.65bn. Repayments only started last year - at £30m a year. By the time of the next election, less than £65m will have been paid off, leaving future governments with over £1.5bn still to pay off.
And that’s just one of over 100 NHS PFI projects.
Yes, we have the shiny new hospital now. But it’s the next government - and the one after that, and the one after that (and so on for seven to eight government terms) that get the privelage of paying for it.
Is that really what Labour want to highlight as one of the triumphs of its time in office?
Update: See the data behind this story - and investigate your local hospital PFI - here.
Below are my thoughts on another recent Help Me Investigate project - this time looking at Birmingham Council’s use of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows covert surveillance powers for investigating misdemeanours.
Figures released in response to this FOI request by Paul Bradshaw reveal - I believe, at first glance - that Birmingham is compartively trigger happy, using powers granted by the act six times more than typical councils.
Update 3pm Friday 7th: Please see the comments section for a health warning over the 1,707 statistic and resulting conclusion thaty Birmingham is so prolific a user of RIPA. This investigation remains a work in progress!
Birmingham accounts for roughly a 60th of the UK’s population (pop c. 1 million). In 2007 (calendar year) there were 1,707 council applications to use RIPA powers nationwide.
Unfortunanately these totals are given in financial years. For 2006/7 there were 115 uses of RIPA in Birmingham, in 2007/8 there were 99.
So conservatively assuming there were 100 uses of RIPA in 2007, Birmingham accounted for just under 6% of all local council RIPA uses, despite only accounting for 1% of the population. So it’s surveilling roughly six times as many of its citizens as the typical council.
Other issues get more subjective. Home Office guidlines stress “very strict safeguards” on RIPA use, which should be in “exceptional circumstances” only. Does having 22 officials authorised to use RIPA match that? Does surveilling 575 people? Personally I have my doubts.
Take fly tipping. RIPA has been used 27 times in relation to fly tipping, despite “late bins” being one of the example issues used to reassure the public on RIPA safeguards.
Relevent extract from Home Office:
“Local authorities have a range of powers available to them to tackle littering and fly tipping. However it shouldn’t be necessary or appropriate to use RIPA directed surveillance powers to observe people putting their rubbish bins out early for collection. RIPA allows certain public authorities to authorise covert surveillance and covert human intelligence sources for the prevention and detection of crime and prevention of disorder – but only where it is necessary and proportionate to do so.
When councils use RIPA we expect them to use these laws proportionately and sensibly in the interest of investigating crimes and protecting their communities.”
As to next steps, the prosecution issues and so forth are clearly going to prove difficult to appeal. Is there any hope of persuading some local bloggers - or better - local papers to pick up what’s been got already and trying to encourage some people to come forward?
Identifying some people involved would both humanise this, and help get a subjective handle on how reasonable Birmingham’s RIPA use is.
Any thoughts?
