So what? Balls and Cooper rake it in

Husband-and-wife ministerial team Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper inspire particular loathing for several reasons, not all of them instantly obvious. Why do we hate New Labour’s “Golden Couple” so much?

It is partly that the credit they get for being “able” is inconsistent with their respective track records – Balls gave us Tax Credits and an endless stream of expensive “initiatives” aimed more at promoting him in tomorrow’s newspapers than in achieving anything useful. Cooper was responsible for Home Information Packs. These apparently unconnected innovations have in common that they were complex, expensive, botched in their implementation, and representative of New Labour’s claim to take control of our lives for our own good. Cooper’s apparently uninformed defence of the Northern Rock fiasco during the debate on the nationalisation would have condemned anyone who was not the Prime Minister’s favourite.

Few no smoking signs in New York

Why do we need all the no smoking signs? Is it because Caroline Flint was herself too dim to manage without signs everywhere, or is it just corrupt government spreading its patronage to buy votes?

New York is famously not short of signs and notices. I cannot put my finger on why, but they do not offend in the same way as they do over here. That may in part be that the context suits them better, but somehow they generally seem more useful. A high proportion of them actually convey information which people need.

New York has much the same laws about smoking in public places as we have. What it does not have is screaming notices to tell you about it. Those places which had such signs anyway – food shops for example – still have them, but there is no equivalent of the statutory obligation to display a sign in every doorway.

Scraping the New Labour Ministerial Barrel

Dim Totty Caroline Flint becomes Minister for Housing in the reshuffle made necessary as disgraced minister Peter Hain’s fingertips are prised from his two posts. Yvette Cooper’s reward for screwing up the implementation of Home Information Packs is promotion to be Chief Secretary of the Treasury.

The Select Committee didn’t put it quite like that, of course when they condemned Yvette Cooper’s performance over HIPs. They referred to another failure of delivery, poor preparation and a retreat, decisions..taken on political rather than economic grounds and a failure of nerve. As the wheel comes off the Brown economic chariot – as Brown and Darling dither and back-track over Northern Rock and CGT – all we need is another Treasury minister with a track record of poor preparation and failure of nerve.

Labour rushes to extend HIPs

As HIPs providers put pressure on the Government to roll out HIPs to three-bedroom houses, we wonder if they should carry tobacco advertising on their cars, and suggest saving on fuel bills by burning the paperwork.

Within days of the first roll-out of Home Information Packs, the Government has rushed to extend the HIPs requirement to properties of 3 bedrooms or more. You would have thought that having cocked up the implementation of their scheme and got egg on their collective face anyway, they might have waited to see how phase one went before extending the burden to 3 bedroom houses.

The HIPs requirement was due to take effect on 1 June for all residential properties. That deadline was pushed back to 1 August, but only for properties with four or more bedrooms. The problem was the usual New Labour one – no grasp of the practical implications of their decisions or even (in this case) the practical requirement to train some people as home inspectors and energy assessors.

Searching for Ministers’ body parts

Regular readers will know that there is someone out there who makes regular searches for the name of the nagging Health Minister, Caroline Flint, plus some word suggestive of anatomy or mutual pleasure. I discovered this by accident after referring in passing to the wretched woman’s teeth, only to find that someone actually wanted to find such a reference.

To pander (in the literary sense) to this person, I have written a post replete with such terms, and the result Caroline Flint – an object of someone’s desires? now comes at or near the top of Google searches for her name plus breast, bottom, cock or whatever (the article itself, I hasten to say, has no hint of prurience in it; it just so happens that most such words have secondary and perfectly decent meanings).

Another HIPs U-Turn

It seems a bit unfair that it was little Ruth Kelly who had to stand up and announce the latest retreat over Home Information Packs.

It was Two-Planks Prescott who first promoted them (or at least, who read out the briefing which his advisers had written for him – I doubt he actually understood them) and Yvette Cooper who has run with them in the face of their obvious defects

But Prescott is off to enjoy his large pension, with more ridicule on his shoulders already than he can bear. Cooper is a Brownite groupie, destined for a bigger role in Gordon Brown’s Ministry of All the Yes-Men (and Women), so she is not going to carry the can for this climb-down.

Little Ruth is dispensible – senior enough today to make the announcement, but shortly to be slipped sideways and downwards – Junior Minister for Black Disabled Welsh Lesbian Single Mothers from Romania or something equally token.

Brown would do well just to axe them.

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More attacks on Home Information Packs

The Government today beat off a Tory attempt to scrap Home Information Packs, defeating by 306 votes to 234 a motion to withdraw the law.

Next week the House of Lords will have a go, following a select committee’s strong recommendation that the Government should take note of the criticism. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has said that it will launch a legal action.

The basis for these attacks is not simply that HIPs are a waste of time and money, another tax on moving house, and an unwarranted interference in private contracts. HIPs are all of these things, but the real complaint is that the implementation is a complete shambles. There are not enough inspectors, the RICS says, to meet demand – unless, of course, the HIPs requirement on top of rising interest rates kills the market anyway.

A use for Home Information Packs

Home Information Packs (HIPS – the model of Labour legislation), which become compulsory on 1 June, will be an expensive but valueless burden – so very New Labour. With a little imagination, however, the concept could have produced something truly useful.

I have written before about Home Information Packs, which I saw as the offspring of civil servants keen to make undemanding work for themselves and New Labour’s zeal to interfere as much as possible in peoples’ private lives and contracts.

It seems unlikely that John Prescott understood what he was promulgating – he would have announced the nationalisation of the newspapers and the Second Coming with as much comprehension if his minders had put it on his cue-sheet – and he was anyway too busy putting his little cocktail sausage round the typing pool to focus on what HIPs included. The junior minister in charge of HIPs, Yvette Cooper, is able by the standard of the Blair Babes (or Tone’s Crones as they have become), but interfering in other peoples’ lives is her mission in life, so she has embraced HIPs with enthusiasm.

HIPs – the very model of Labour legislation

I had to read up on Home Information Packs last week and then write about them. The context, a law firm clients’ web site and Blog, was such that I could not be too rude about HIPs, so I simply described them as a useless waste of time and money and copied the requirements from the Government’s web site.

It set me wondering, though, how such stupidity originates and moves from being the spawn of under-nourished brain and under-employed hand to become legislation passed by a majority of the Mother of Parliaments.