Indeed so, whither society?

The Guardian asks us to ponder the nature of society:

According to the Reagan-Thatcher worldview, there is no such thing as society. There are only families, who look after one another, and individuals, who participate in markets. The idea that government is the solution to people’s problems rests on a mistaken belief in the existence of society. This mistaken belief….

On the same day The Guardian praises a certain part of society:

The group was originally focused on providing necessities during the early months of the pandemic, such as help with shopping, collecting prescriptions or providing reliable Covid information. Its remit has since expanded – members now share food and festivals, pool DIY tools, brainstorm measures to tackle unscrupulous landlords and speeding cars, and tend to a community garden. When I met some of the group recently, one member, Helene, 50, told me: “It’s a gazillion unplanned micro-miracles that happen when neighbours talk to each other.”

There’s a certain echo of Burke’s little platoons there. The Guardian also gives us earlier that famed Margaret Thatcher quote but in full, not as it is normally truncated:

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

Or, to quote another Tory PM, of course there’s such a thing as society it’s just not the government.

As we’ve been known to point out the British state has difficulty in handing out free money - lucky we’ve got each other to rely upon then, no? You know, society?

The DHSC is a Lovesome Thing, God Wot

If the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had been around at the time, the Victorian poet Tom Browne would surely have described its structure as “a lovesome thing”.  He would have recognised the tangles, the plots and the “fern’d grot”.  He might have struggled, however, to connect its re-structuring gyrations, which we are witnessing this week, with seeing “more patients benefit from the best possible care, with the right staff in place to meet patients’ needs.”  You and I might have been thinking that was a question of getting more doctors and nurses, if not now, then sometime. It seems Hancock’s MBPR (management by press release) is still with us. We are not hiring the doctors and nurses we need, but merging quangos which is, in fairness, also something we need.  My grumble is that the two are being confused. 

When Hancock was trying to ease Dido Harding into the NHS CEO job, he put her at the helm of the quango “NHS Improvement” and, in 2019, semi-merged the two.  They are now, supposedly, a single organisation, NSE/I, but they still have separate boards, each with executive and non-executive directors and objectives.  One may wonder why the business of improving NHS (England) was ever seen as distinct from the management of NHS (England) but we are getting there.  NHS England is simultaneously part of government and independent from government (it is a “non-departmental public body”).  It does not have charge of primary health care (GPs own and run their own practices as contractors to the NHS) nor of secondary care (hospitals are answerable and not answerable, see below, to NHS Improvement) and since it does not yet have charge of its staff development, IT, business or legal services (NHS Litigation Authority), not to mention half a dozen other quangos which are regulatory in nature. Nor most of health which almost every other government department, local and national, deals with. Not to mention the Health Foundation, which is independent of government, but, in 2020, spent £50M on promoting health and has plenty to say on the subject.  Parliament may approve this integration in 2022 so, technically, the status quo remains until then. 

Then again, the major hospitals are supposedly independent trusts and only voluntary members of “NHS Providers”, the “organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services that treat patients and service users in the NHS. We help those NHS trusts and foundation trusts to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate.”  With all of her main responsibilities farmed out, it is amazing that Amanda Pritchard, the new CEO of NHS England, finds anything to do. 

The good news this week is the announcement that three of these quangos, that should never have been outside the control of NHS England, are now being integrated with it. One is Health Education England (HEE) which “exists for one reason only: to support the delivery of excellent healthcare and health improvement to the patients and public of England by ensuring that the workforce of today and tomorrow has the right numbers, skills, values and behaviours, at the right time and in the right place.” It refers to itself as “part of the NHS” but is actually an independent executive non-departmental public body which is why it now needs an Act of Parliament to merge it with NHS England. According to its 2020/21 Annual Report, 2,432 staff were employed at a cost of £187M and the whole caboodle cost £4.4bn. Never mind merging it with NHS England, with no savings, since HEE’s function manifestly duplicates that of NHS England itself, would it not have been better simply to abolish it? It appears to add no value.  

NHS England’s IT operations are provided by NHS Digital and NHSX.  The former “is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care.”  In other words, it is not answerable to anyone, and certainly not to the CEO of NHS England, but it is jolly good that it has a sponsor. Ironically perhaps, it has not had time to publish a 2020/21 annual report but the 2019/20 one (published July 2020) showed a cost of £180M.

NHSX is also now being merged with NHS England although it was only created two years ago. In theory, it sets “the strategic, policy, and delivery objectives for digital transformation throughout the NHS and adult social care sectors” but as adult social care does not have any overall digital transformation, the Cinderella of the DHSC will not be affected. It did, however, deliver 11,000 iPads to care homes.  NHSX cost a mere £1bn in the last financial year. 

Amanda Pritchard is probably right to absorb just the quangos discussed above and leave business services, litigation and health matters to another day. The NHS Business Services Authority is “independent of the DHSC but can [sic] be subject to Ministerial direction.” It does not appear to have lodged an annual report since 2018/19 and, since that reported the disbursement of £36.4bn of taxpayer money, it might be good to know what they have been up to since. Most of the expenditure (£22.3bn.) went to NHS pensions which one would have expected to have been included in the NHS accounts. £11.6bn. went on prescriptions for GP surgeries (presumably the elderly and those on income support) and only £2.4bn. on the Authority’s projects including £200M operating costs. 

NHS Resolution is, like its sibling Business Services Authority, a “special health authority” and thus both independent and, in the manner of this sector of government, not independent of the DHSC. The transfer of liabilities from two medical defence firms caused staff numbers to rise from 328 to 400 (£26M) over the 2020/21 year. NHS Resolution is, in effect, an insurance company for the NHS and should therefore not be part of it.  The pandemic brought new challenges, e.g. “state cover for employer’s liability and public liability to fill gaps where Covid-19 positive patients have been discharged from the NHS into designated care home settings which have been unable to secure sufficient private insurance cover.” Like any private insurance, the annual charges to hospital trusts take claims history “into account meaning that members with fewer, less costly claims pay less in contributions.” The value for money of NHS Resolution should be tested every 10 years or so by inviting private sector insurance companies to tender.  Beyond that, no structural change is recommended here. 

Finally, we come to the issue of whether the NHS should focus just on treatment and cure or whether it should also address general health, i.e. prevention. Ministers like to proclaim that marketing health saves the NHS money, e.g. reducing obesity, but there is no evidence for that.  Furthermore, other public bodies, both national and local, have those responsibilities.  It makes little sense to the writer of this blog to have waiting lists at record lengths and yet divert doctors to lecturing their patients about their (the patients’, that is) poor health habits. The NHS should focus exclusively on treatment and cure until its waiting lists cease to exist and ambulances are no longer queued outside A&E. 

To summarise, the Secretary of State and Amanda Pritchard are right to complete the NHE/I merger and integrate Digital, NHSX and HEE but they should be more radical and look for greater savings.  NHS Providers should be integrated too. The extensive anomalies of arm’s length bodies being both independent and not independent, should be sorted out one way or the other.  The NHS should be focused on patient treatment and cure but let us not pretend, please, that rearranging the furniture on the upper decks will bring that about.

Exploiting a tragedy is not on and yet...

Even without exploitation it’s still possible to draw lessons:

Married couple Stephen Chapple, 34, and wife Jennifer, 33, were found dead at their home in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, Somerset, on Sunday night while their two sons, aged five and six, slept upstairs.

Mrs Chapple was stabbed to death, police confirmed on Tuesday. Post mortem examinations are still being carried out on her husband.

Mr Chapple taught computing at West Somerset College and his wife worked at Otter Garden Centre at Pen Elm, near Taunton. The couple's youngest son had just started primary school.

The killings are rumoured to be linked to a parking dispute between neighbours in the Taylor Wimpey development, where it is believed that residents are allocated at least one parking space each.

Sharon Sedgbeer, 50, a resident of Dragon Rise, said parking has been a problem because there simply “isn’t enough of it”.

She said: “It’s horrendous. People park at bad angles, on corners, blocking driveways because the spaces are so limited.”

Another resident, Melissa, said “everyone has an issue with parking around here,” adding: "Some people have multiple cars there isn't space for and it has caused a lot of upset."

The planning system currently insists upon 30 or more dwellings per hectare of land. We already produce the smallest new builds in Europe at something like 75, 76 square metres each. Even at that shoebox level there’s not enough room for how people actually live their lives - this parking being only part of that.

The country has no shortage of land that could be built upon, only a shortage of what may be built upon. The aim of our having an economy, a civilisation even, is that we all get to maximise our own utility, not conform to whatever it is that others think we should be forced into.

Yes, of course, killings are the responsibility of the killer. And yet this fractious nature of the lived environment is due to that planning system. The insistence that everyone must only be allowed a rabbit hutch and without the room to live life as it is desired.

We are aware that the legal system doesn’t in fact work this way but there would be a certain satisfaction in seeing that planning system indicted here for, say, conspiracy to cause violent affray. Then when found guilty, as it obviously would be, we could do away with it.

Do note that this is also about to get very much worse. At the moment this is just about parking - what’s it going to be like when every vehicle needs to be charged overnight as well?

The only reason we have this absurdity of a planning system is that the upper middle classes fear allowing the proles room for a house, garden, and couple of parking spaces might spoil the view. Our opinion on this is that there should be a little more pitchfork and burning brand action outside the Manor Houses. Or possibly the Guido Fawkes solution, blow up The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

There really is no good reason why a country as rich as this forces the people into development density that would shame medieval peasantry. So, we should stop doing so.

We agree with The Guardian entirely here

It is true that folks, we humans, value agency. We prefer to have what we decide we’d like to have rather than what some other person thinks we should have that is:

Giving people cash rather than food parcels would empower them

Well, yes:

Which would you prefer: a shopping bag of items you didn’t choose, or the money to buy what you need?

Quite so.

We do praise food banks often enough but that’s not because they are a perfect solution. Rather, the British government is so staffed with those Rolls Royce minds that it is incapable of handing out free money in a timely and useful manner. The major reason for the use of food banks is, after all, that the benefits haven’t turned up.

This proof that we live in a second best world doesn’t change that value of agency though. As the Census Bureau over in the US has been pointing out for decades much of the American welfare state is valued, by the recipients, at less than it costs to provide. The system of food stamps for example, leads to a black market (of arguable size). The standard rates being $1 of restricted money on a debit card being worth 50 cents of unrestricted money that can be spent upon anything. The major purchase, or at least the modal, with the 50 cents being diapers (nappies to us Brits).

This is also why supermarkets work better than ration shops, why the car is more highly desired than the integrated public transport system and so on. Humans like choice because, as is the great insistence of the liberal idea, we all have slightly different ideas about what constitutes the good life.

In fact, we agree with The Guardian so much here that we insist this should be expanded across all of life. There should be no council housing nor social - pay housing benefit instead so the poor can choose their own housing. The NHS must be entirely reformed in the sense of abolished. The access should be to the medical treatment of our choice, not what someone thinks we should get. Schooling needs to be, at the very least, a voucher system so that again it is we out here who make the choices.

For, as is said, agency has value. So, the entire system must be reformed so as to maximise that value, that agency. Government might well end up financing things for some to all of the population but it shouldn’t be providing any of it. Because, as with food, agency has value.

That this isn’t what The Guardian means at all doesn’t change the basic point now, does it?

Gove’s New Planning Bill

Britain’s planning system, which mostly dates from 1947, needs reform. Robert Jenrick’s 2020 Bill had worthy ambition: more houses, clearer rules, less paperwork and faster process.  The average development currently takes five years to get to a final decision.  It had support from many, including this Institute, but a number of local authorities, who deal with the lion’s share of this business, and Tory MPs took against it. The new Secretary of State, Michael Gove, dumped it, consulted widely and we can expect to see his version early next year. 

The central error, a not unfamiliar one, was Whitehall’s attempt to interfere in local matters.  Local councils were seen as the bad guys, blocking new housebuilding, and the developers, who incidentally contribute to Tory party funds, were the good guys who should be allowed to build wherever they liked. 

Let us hope that Mr Gove has learned three lessons: local councils are the good guys who should be helped collectively to deliver what the country needs, local decisions should be made locally and, thirdly, the fewer the tiers of government involved, the faster, cheaper and more democratic the decisions will be.  

In my parish, a farmer suddenly decided a public footpath was not a right of way and blocked it off.  The Parish Council objected and the District Council agreed.  The farmer appealed to the County Council and the appeal was denied.  The farmer, who has more money than sense, then appealed to the Planning Inspectorate which, remarkably, has a whole department dealing with trivia of this sort. The inspectors are based 200 miles from the footpath and were not keen to do any inspecting.  Finally, one did and after a three day hearing. and a few months for mature consideration, sort of rejected the appeal, except it is not a final decision. Due to some legal, and trivial, technicalities, the door has to be left open for the farmer to appeal further. The whole process has taken more than seven years so far.  

One swallow does not, of course, make a summer and 90% of footpath appeals are dealt with by the Planning Inspectorate (when they get that far) in 18 months or so, as are 90% of tree preservation orders, high hedge and hedgerow appeals (p.47).  Planning decisions would be quicker and more certain if no more than two tiers of the hierarchy were involved, using a clearer set of rules. Footpaths, trees and hedges should be decided by Parish Councils, with appeal to the District Council.  Developments, up to a developed value of, say, £10M, should be decided by District Councils with appeal to the County. Some higher level would be needed for County and unitary authorities with appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. 

It is ridiculous that 42% of all major housing development appeals, and 36% of minor ones (house extensions), to the Planning Inspectorate are successful. Either the rules for approval/disapproval are insufficiently clear, or the District Councils are incompetent or the Planning Inspectorate is making up the rules as it goes along. The Planning Inspectorate’s “official statistics” are pre-occupied by the time taken to reach decisions, with no analysis of the reasons for allowing the appeals or rejecting them which is precisely what we need to know if the local authorities’ performance is to be improved.  The Jenrick Bill was supposed to address the first of those but failed to do so.  Monitoring local authority performance is a matter for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC, previously known as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government). It is not the job of the Planning Inspectorate. 

The Planning Inspectorate costs £64M p.a. (Annual Report p.68) with 759 people employed (p.94) but there is no analysis by department nor any analysis of decisions reached or the reasons.  It is therefore not possible to estimate, from the Annual Report, the savings that would follow from trimming the Planning Inspectorate’s responsibilities as outlined above, namely removing local issues. 

While developers claim that they are slowed down by the planning bureaucracy, many of the delays are caused by the developers themselves.  Four tricks of the trade should be removed by the new Planning Bill: 

The first is the “shadow application”.  Here the developer knows what he wants and what will be approved.  His application is for the latter but, instead of starting work, the applicant submits a stream of further applications, with real and bogus rationales, until the approval is close enough to his original intention.  A local builder in North Norfolk kept submitting applications for the same site until the Council forgot to include the affordable housing requirement in the approval. 

The second is the “fork in the ground”.  The permission usually states the date by which building work must start.  But putting a fork in the ground is enough to qualify, so the applicant does just that and then waits for inflation to make the applicant’s investment more attractive. The fork in the ground, and land banking are sensible responses to the uncertainties of the current planning system where the rules are simply not clear enough.  Government needs to address both sets of uncertainties, delayed starts and planning risks, together. 

The third is “everlasting applications”.  Here the applicant ignores the approved plans and builds what he wants.  Eventually the District Council will lose patience and issue a demolition order.  First the applicant appeals on the grounds that, if the plans for what was built had been submitted, they should have been approved so all that is now needed is to rubber stamp the plans of the actual building.  If that fails, a fresh (marginally different) application can be made every few months, each of which the Local Authority legally has to consider.  That can continue indefinitely. 

The fourth is the “money game”.  District Councils have limited budgets for contesting appeals and lawyers are expensive. If the District Council looks likely to be low on the money or appetite for appeals, the applicant can outbid it, and some do.  It’s a bit like poker; if you have a poor hand but your opponent cannot afford to “see” you, you will win. 

And of course, all those ploys delay building the actual houses. 

Finally, we have the conundrum of how the DLUHC can achieve its goals for the right numbers and types of new housing in the right places. The primary estimates should be bottom up, not top down.  Volunteering is preferable to imposition. Districts should propose to Counties and counties to the DLUHC.  In the probable event the totals are less than needed, some negotiation will be required. Given the amount of local authority funding that comes from central government, that influence might be enough but more may be needed.  The new Bill should include a “self-balancing housing planning fund” administered by the DLUHC. 

Local authority proposals would fall into three categories: acceptable, those from authorities persuadable with incentives and those from the obdurate.  The last category should fund the incentives needed for the second category. NIMBYism should have a cost. 

In summary, government should be sceptical of developers’ claims that bureaucracy should be blamed for building delays and that they should be given more help. Of course, building market price, affordable and social housing has to be economically attractive to developers or they just won’t get built. On the other hand, planning rules should be streamlined and clarified, and local authorities armed with better sticks to ensure prompt compliance.  If more than 10% of appeals succeed, DLUHC should discover whether the rules are insufficiently clear or the original authorities were incompetent (or worse). The numbers and types of housing needed should be achieved by the DLUHC using a self balancing housing planning fund.  

We've said before that planning doesn't really work

In fact we’ve said twice, just recently, that detailed planning of a society doesn’t work. Now we’ve that thrice:

The energy sector has derided the EPC system – which rates homes from A to G – as “not fit for purpose”. The grading is based on bills, not on carbon output, meaning it can punish people for installing heat pumps and incentivises the use of gas over electricity. Inconsistencies in the system mean that homeowners can pay thousands of pounds for work that they later find actually lowered their EPC rating.

Tom Spurrier, of the UK Green Building Council, an industry body, said: “We have currently got a metric that incentivises gas because it is cheaper.” If you install a heat pump, which is powered by electricity, your EPC rating may fall.

If you spend - substantial amounts - of money to make a dwelling less polluting, less likely to broil Flipper in the fumes of that last ice floe, the government’s measurement system records that dwelling as being more polluting, more likely to broil Flipper in the fumes of that last ice floe.

Why?

When the EPC system was designed in 2007, electric generation was very different. Ten years ago, using electricity produced more than twice as much carbon as gas; now, it is half that of gas.

“In terms of overall net zero, we need to switch as much as we can to electricity,” said Mr Spurrier. But because the EPC system has not changed, it incentivises homeowners to do the opposite.

The measurement system is 14 years out of date at a time of vast technological change. Well, it’s either that or our rulers are drooling incompetents, a sad state of affairs that would be but one that does have to be considered.

Note what this does not mean, that there is nothing that could - to leave aside the should for a moment - be done to deal with climate change. This crafting of glaringly stupid and detailed rules is clearly beyond state capacity. But we do have other tools available. Like, say, just the one simple switch for the entire economy, the carbon tax. Levy that Pigou Tax at the social cost of carbon and allow our one great economic calculating machine, the market economy itself, to chew through the implications.

This being why Bill Nordhaus has his Nobel, because this is what he said we should do. Why Nick Stern is the Right Hon for telling us so in his Review, why 93% of surveyed economists insisted this was the solution. True, they didn’t all recommend this because they thought that the British civil service were too stupid to handle anything else but the recommendation does cover that possibility.

If - if! - anything needs to be done about climate change it needs to be the one, simple, thing. On the basis that the taxeaters just aren’t capable of managing anything more complex than the one simple thing.

It’s long been said that the British civil service is a concentration of Rolls Royce minds. Which could even be true but then there is always that horses for courses thing. We’d not use the similarly named car to negotiate tricky chicanes or a back country road at speed, however comfortable they are on a wide straight highway. Best to limit both of them to where things are simple, eh?

Detailed planning leads to a certain amount of cross purposeness

We’ve mentioned before that detailed planning leads to certain problems. Another little example here.

Wet wipes and ketchup sachets could be banned in England under plans to tackle plastic pollution, the Government will announce today.

Well, yes, sachets for sauces, vile things. Stick a multiuse bottle of something on the table, a far better idea. Except:

The European Commission is to ban the use of refillable bottles and dipping bowls of olive oil at restaurant tables from next year.

From 1 January 2014, restaurants may only serve olive oil in tamper-proof packaging, labelled to EU standards.

Tamper proof is a synonym, of course it is, for single use and single portion servings.

We could mutter something about it only being olive oil that the EU is talking about but no, that’s not in fact true. Or perhaps that this is the glory of Brexit, that we can switch from one insistence to another.

But we’d point to that problem with detailed rule making. The material of choice for a small single serving of sauce is going to be a plastic of some sort. By definition it’s single use. Insistence upon single portion serving is insistence upon plastic. That detailed planning then leaves us with this problem - how do we have single serving sauces without the only rational packaging for single serving sauces?

Or perhaps clipboard wielders in comfy offices should stop trying to determine how society ketchups its chips and get on with something useful? Like, perhaps, not being clipboard wielders in comfy offices?

We hear that there are hungry who need feeding, homeless requiring shelter, even the naked who need clothing. All tasks where human labour could more usefully be directed perhaps? Although, given our own opinions on the usefulness of those who currently govern from their comfy offices this will leave all of us starving, freezing and out in the open.

Stasis isn't a good look for an economy - nor a civilisation

The Public Accounts Committee tells us that losses on lending to Greensill could have been avoided:

Taxpayer losses linked to the collapse of Greensill Capital could have been avoided if the state-owned British Business Bank had not conducted "woefully inadequate" due diligence and the Treasury had shared more information, a damning report has found.

The Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinises public sector spending, has said the bank was "insufficiently curious" about where the money it lent was going and accepted too much information provided by Greensill in its application for Covid support scheme cash at face value.

It’s entirely possible to avoid direct losses by the simple expedient of never doing anything. That does then raise the risk of suffering significant losses from not having done anything. The balance between an economy, or civilisation, in complete stasis and one where everything done is an entire and whole mistake and waste being one that has to be struck. For that stasis isn’t a good place to be.

So, we’re willing to cut a certain amount of slack here. The entire point of those covid loans schemes was that they were being done in an emergency. So, doing it right now was more important than making sure that every pound was being sent to entirely and wholly the right place. As with, say, sending out food in a famine. We’d all far prefer that some greedy guts got two portions of beans, everyone got one, than a more careful approach where most got one and some none. Sometimes just flooding the zone is the right answer.

At which point, to return to our more general view of governance. The British civil service, the British government, has proven itself incompetent at the task of handing out free money. We’d better, therefore, stop asking them to do the difficult things like planning how to save the planet, planning how the economy should work, planning the type of cars we should use, planning, in short, how to bring peace and light to the Earth. Because if they can’t get the first line of the cheque right, the bit just after the “Pay to the order of” then why would we trust them with anything else? Or even ask them to do anything else?

Unkind, perhaps, but drivel's not a good starting point for a policy decision

We must, apparently, do much more recycling:

The UK must scale up recycling of materials for low carbon industries or risk facing a critical shortage of key metals, a new report warns.

The projected use of lithium, cobalt, silver and rare earth elements by the UK’s low carbon industries over the coming decades is set to soar. China controls 60% of global mine production and 40% of rare earth metal reserves, raising fears of a significant threat to the supply chain for businesses.

But the thinktank Green Alliance said the UK could limit the threat by building up domestic recycling of valuable materials and reducing energy use.

Why, yes, by “reducing energy use” they do mean that you’ll have to walk and if you can’t get there by walking then you’ll not get there. Why do you ask if they do?

The problem with this, as with all other such claims about how we’re all about to run out of everything, is that it’s based upon drivel. The purest, most wholesome, drivel. As detailed in this free and usefully short book of ours.

The story is that if we go green then:

UK demand for certain critical raw materials is set to soar as a result of the move to a net zero carbon economy. Under its current transition strategy, it is likely to use up double its fair global share of known reserves of some critical raw materials by 2035, and this could increase to as much as five times its fair share by 2050. We have assessed ‘fair share’ based on the amount of known reserves available, divided per head of population.

Those who pay attention will know that reserves aren’t a useful measure of anything other than reserves. In their background paper - yes, we checked - they define their counting as:

UK critical raw material demand is calculated cumulatively from 2021 and compared to known global reserves (the amount estimated to be economically and technically recoverable), based on United States Geological Survey data.

Yes, drivel.

Mineral reserves are not what there is out there to use. There’s no even connection between those two things, what can be used and reserves. Reserves are what has been proven to be there, to a high legal standard, and can be extracted using current technology, at current prices, and a profit made from doing so. It costs a lot of money to prove all of this so people only do it for deposits they are, or about to, mining. The useful definition of reserves is therefore the stock at mines.

This bears no relationship at all to how many other mines we might be able to have, other minerals we might extract from, what happens when prices change or how much is actually out there. There’s just no connection at all.

So, the claim here is that the UK must start doing lots of very expensive recycling - for if it were cheaper than digging holes we’d already be doing that, as we do with many other metals - because, well, apparently because the Green Alliance know jack about the subject under discussion.

Ignorance and drivel not being the way to decide upon public policy to our mind. But then perhaps we’re just picky on that point.

The GA say to us that:

We conducted the analysis based on known global reserves and understood the definition we were using, including discussing it with our Circular Economy Task Force member Colin Church who is CEO of IoM3. Nowhere in the report do we claim that it is not possible to find further reserves. Rather, we are using this analysis to indicate that by failing to limit rises in future demand, the UK will either use more than its share or drive up new mining. Both scenarios lead to us causing detriment to other countries, including lower-income mineral exporting countries, in terms of environment & social impacts as well as potentially making it harder for other countries to scale up green techs.

We tend to think that’s been cobbled together. At least we hope it has been. For look what is actually being said there. If we buy something from foreigners then that’s bad for foreigners.

Just to twist the knife a little, from their report:

Some processes also exacerbate water scarcity. Brine‑based lithium extraction in South America requires 500,000 gallons of water per tonne of lithium, in a region already suffering water stress.

Brine is salty water, those South American brines are much saltier than seawater. They cannot be and are not used for other things - largely because they kill any plants or animals they are applied to. One of the salts in that salty water is a lithium salt (salt can be the stuff we put on our food, but also a large number of chemical compounds). The way that 500,000 gallons of water is used to process the lithium is that we take the lithium out of the salt water.

That is, we don’t use 500,000 gallons of water to get a tonne of lithium, we clean 500,000 gallons of water to get a tonne of lithium.

Basing public policy on this sort of drivel just isn’t going to make us a richer and happier nation. Who knows, perhaps we could start basing what we do on some knowledge of reality? Or is that too much to ask?

Never, ever, forget the tax wedge

The famed Laffer Curve is an observation about reactions to changes in the income that can be acquired through offering labour out into the market. It’s only a subsidiary use of that observation that some strive toward a target income, others more affected by marginal gains, which concerns taxation rates. The tax is a trigger for those income changes, but the observations would be true if there were some other factor changing income due from that labour.

That we use it to talk about the tax wedge - the difference between pre-tax and post-tax prices and reactions to them - just shows how important the tax wedge is when considering reactions to prices.

At which point something which we don’t think is true:

Currently at $150 per kilowatt hour, once battery storage falls to $100 per kilowatt hour, petrol and diesel cars will become uneconomic.

The untruth here is ignoring that tax wedge. As we’ve pointed out before the IMF claims that petrol and diesel are correctly - to within pennies a litre - taxed in the UK currently. Electric cars are, using the same calculation, distinctly undertaxed. For the correct taxation is not just about CO2 but congestion, VAT, accidents and so on.

This before we get to the political reality that government currently loves that £35 billion -ish a year from fuel duty and is going to replace it with another tax on the same activity if and when all is electric.

That is, the $100 claim is for untaxed electric as opposed to heavily - even if by one calculation correctly - taxed ICE. The correct comparison should be between electric as it will be taxed and ICE as it is taxed. Our estimation here - admittedly, using the ASI calculator of a wettened thumb held up into a following wind - is that it’s unlikely that electric vehicles ever will be cost competitive with internal combustion engines. Not when we include the tax wedge, which is the only way to properly evaluate such things in the real world.

Batteries plus £35 billion a year in tax are not going to be cost competitive with ICEs plus £35 billion, nor batteries without tax against ICEs without tax.

Given the estimation method here we do welcome more accurate calculations and if the facts do change we’re entirely willing to change our minds on this. We think it unlikely we’ll have to.