OneGuyFromBarlick

That point about communication also helps explain what began to go wrong when computers came on the scene. In the factory office the computer shows all the right numbers, so everything must be OK down on the shopfloor...musn't it? Meanwhile down on the shopfloor there is mayhem with finished product failing QC and piling up at the door. But the office insists there can't be a problem, the computer says everything is running fine. The funniest thing I've heard of this type was an Environment Agency man up to his knees in muddy water in a field in South Somerset and speaking to his colleagues in Bristol HQ saying "I don't care what your computer says, tell it it's wrong, there really is a flood here!"

I like it! Add in the pernicious effect of McKinsey and there mantra "if it can be measured it can be managed" which was the launch point for them advocating that much middle management and shop floor supervision like foremen could be done away with, they were 'dead wood'. Remember the advent of 'time and motion study' whereby the workers were demoted to cyphers, jobs broken down into single tasks and initiative and skill on the shop floor discarded as superfluous. All that mattered was speed and productivity. I read a very good book once about innovation and the well researched conclusion was that true innovation and improvement wasn't a product of the 'inventor' in the attic but came mostly from the shop floor. 'Management by walking round' went out of fashion. The linkages between the shop floor and the management were dissolved and there are some of us who think that these mistaken policies based on arrogance did a tremendous amount of damage to skills and satisfaction levels on the shop floor. Someone once said that the best manure was the farmer's foot, I think that describes it precisely. I remember that when my dad was works manager at General Gas I used to go with him when he walked round the works talking to the operatives. That was the basis of his idea of management and it seemed to work. This feedback went back through him to a firm called Incandescent Heat who made furnaces and resulted in an entirely ne furnace for fusing enamel to cooker parts, the Roller Hearth Furnace. Later they produced an even more efficient model which worked on a 'U' track whereby the finished parts warmed the incoming parts as they passed each other on the conveyor. It was feedback from the shop floor that enabled this. I think I'd better stop...... (I went and had a furtle, the book is 'The Patent System and Inventive Activity. 1750-1852', MUP 1984. By Harry Dutton, one of my tutors at Lancaster who died young.)

PS. I thought about you Peter yesterday when I heard someone talking about current pension conversion. I must have got mine sorted at exactly the right time in 2000. Commiserations Mate!

" 'Management by walking round' "
You mention Lord Sieff above - I saw him once in the late eighties when he had been retired a few years, but still inspecting the Marble Arch branch of M&S and examining the stock closely. They say "retail is detail". He certainly thought so.

All true Stanley, spot on. David, Lord Sieff became honorary lifetime president and died in 2001 so he probably kept an unofficial eye on them all that time! M&S is in the news today with an announcement of the launch of an in-store banking service. It sounds good but be careful if you think you might open an account. In the 1990s M&S had started offering personal pensions and I took one out when I became self-employed, thinking if it's M&S then it should be good. Not so. It soon started losing money and I had to stop putting funds into it. Then it was revealed by the press that the pension fund wasn't run by M&S but by HSBC. We'd ditched HSBC some years earlier for our banking (after being with Midland/HSBC since student days) after bad treatment and gone to Nationwide. Guess who's behind this new M&S banking service....HSBC!

My dad used to say that there is a providence that looks after drunken men and idiots and the older I get the more certain I am that he was right! When i was forced to take my pension a year early by the Dep of Work and Pensions to avoid them having to pay me Income Support I was livid and fought against it to the extent I got Gordon Prentice to ask a question in the House for me, it was all 'legal' but unfair. At that point I just gave up, filled the forms in and took the 3% increase option. As it turned out, in comparison to what you are facing I got what turned out to be a good deal. If I can live long enough I will be a pain in the bum for Pearl Assurance! I wish you could have the same outcome. Who knows, in ten years you may be looking at current returns then and saying the same thing. One thing seems certain, returns are not going to improve. So cheer up, bite the bullet and get on with your life, at least you'll have a quiet mind.....

Very interesting to hear the BoE talking up peer-2-peer lending instead of the banks

Maybe someone has decided to come out and start telling some home truths

Peer to peer lending might be responsible for a lot of debt that doesn't get flagged up in the usual way and thus confounds the published figures on debt, and then leads to policy decisions founded on insufficient data (rather like the problem M&S has with reporting its failed deliveries as returns).

Stanley, you're kind to be concerned but don't worry, Mrs Tiz and I are OK. She will have her pension from teaching and I've got my occupational pension. Also, when we gave up putting money in the M&S pension we saved instead and then bought a small house for my parents and that has proved a good move, it knocks M&S/HSBC pensions into a cocked hat. Best of all, we are thrifty and don't spend much money, which is why we are now able to attempt building a new house.

Back to the banks...Here is a lady who was known in local shops to be suffering from dementia and had to be regularly ejected for violent behaviour.
Lloyds TSB pays compensation after lending dementia patient £18,000
By Paul Lewis, Radio 4's Money Box (9 June 2012, BBC news web site)
"Lloyds TSB lent a dementia patient £18,000 in 2010 which remained in a bank account, unspent
Lloyds TSB has agreed to pay compensation after lending a woman with dementia £18,000 for home improvements. The bank allowed pensioner Jean Hyde to borrow the money in 2010, even though the repayments took almost half her income. Her family told Radio 4's Money Box programme she would not have understood what she was agreeing to when signing-up for the loan. After Mrs Hyde died in 2011 the £18,000 was found, unspent, in her account.

"Lloyds Banking Group told the BBC it did not realise Mrs Hyde had dementia but admitted it should not have lent her such a sum considering her total income was only around £15,500 a year, including her state pension. However, when she went into the Cirencester branch of Lloyds TSB in January 2010 her request for an £18,000 loan for home improvements was agreed, even though she was a tenant not a homeowner. Lloyds told Mrs Hyde's family it does incentivise staff to sell products but would not disclose how much this particular loan earned the employee who sold it to her."
More here: LINK

I listened to that story as well and the thing that struck me was that if the son had gone to the bank, alerted them to the situation, and asked for them to monitor his mother's account he would have been regarded with great suspicion and perhaps even suspected of fraud. I can't help thinking about the old days when a quiet word in a friendly bank manager's ear with power to act would have made all the difference. 'Customer Service' is more than call centres.

Exactly. We've already encountered resistance from banks and the like when trying to sort my Dad's accounts and bills for him. Occasionally you get a really good, helpful response - but at other times they just won't deal with you and it's very frustrating. Banks are coming under increasing pressure to clean up their ways of dealing with less able customers and there have been many examples aired in the newspapers and on radio recently, more skeletons in the banks cupboards coming to light.

What happened to the moves for the government to take over the money in moribund bank accounts and use it for 'social purposes'?

Isn't that money coming through for the Lib Dems cherished Green Bank?

I don't know. That's why I asked the question.

DECC is having issues just keeping up with day to day, never mind planning for the future

There's an increasing need for an agency, ombudsman or whatever with the authority to quickly clear up silly obstructions to people carrying on their daily life, especially in the case of the less able. I'll give an example. My father-in-law is in his 80s, has Parkinson's and heart disease and his wife has poor mobility, therefore he has a `disabled sticker' for his car. This was coming up for renewal so he filled in the form and sent it off well in advance because they can't manage without the car. A while later he got a letter telling him that the method of application had changed and he would have to submit it on a new form. He got this, completed it and sent it off, still with enough time (he thought) for it to be processed. But nothing was returned to him. Getting concerned because the expiry date has arrived, he has phoned them and asked if he can continue to use the old sticker until he gets the new one. The answer from the jobsworth is a definite No, and he will be unable to use his car. If this happened to me now I would probably continue with the old sticker and fight them if they tried to fine me. But someone my father-in-law's age and in his state of health can't face coping with that, he has enough to deal with every day as it is, so he will end up without his car until they manage to get a new sticker to him. We need an organisation with the authority to kick the jobsworths' backsides when they obstruct people in need and it probably should be staffed with older people who know better what it's like when you don't have full capability.

Talking of fighting, a friend of ours has been told by the man at the Council dump that he must buy a licence to dump stuff because he goes there with a tractor and trailer. He doesn't necessarily dump any more than you or I on average but can accumulate it then fill his trailer and make less journeys (saving fuel and CO2 emissions too). He refused, dumped his stuff and when he went next time they told him again, but he still refused. He told them you'll never get me to buy a licence to dump my stuff, I don't need one, and he carries on dumping there. He has the advantage of being a very big, muscular bloke and no-one has tried to physically stop him!

Tizer wrote:Talking of fighting, a friend of ours has been told by the man at the Council dump that he must buy a licence to dump stuff because he goes there with a tractor and trailer. He doesn't necessarily dump any more than you or I on average but can accumulate it then fill his trailer and make less journeys (saving fuel and CO2 emissions too). He refused, dumped his stuff and when he went next time they told him again, but he still refused. He told them you'll never get me to buy a licence to dump my stuff, I don't need one, and he carries on dumping there. He has the advantage of being a very big, muscular bloke and no-one has tried to physically stop him!

The same rules apply in Pendle, eventually someone will get the supervisor to send the CCTV to the police, and if they want to impose a fixed penalty. They just want to know that you aren't a business and avoiding paying the contractor to take away your waste

Tiz, I agree and think that one of the factors at work is how soft a target the jobsworths think they are dealing with. They don't like complications or the possibility they may come out of the exchange badly.

I see the banks have poked their collective heads over the parapet and issued dire warnings against the proposals to erect a firewall between their investment activities and main street banking. Does this mean that behind the scenes we are getting nearer to some actual regulation?

Not entirely sure that it is just the firewall.

The new regulations will ensure that pension and investment companies can only hold 30% of their funds in equities, rather than the current 70%

The increase in banks capital requirements will ultimately mean that the banks have less money to lend. I would, however, see this as good.

The new regulations will ensure that depositors money is paid for by the tax payer, whilst the rest of the bank can be waved good bye to if it goes bust.

None of these regulations will prevent another 2008 style bank bust, because none of the regulations actually look at what caused it.

Vince the Cable is distracting to deceive

Plus, in the UK, dividends are taxed as income, share increases as capital gains and there is stamp duty tax on every transaction

I note that Angela King thinks that the BofE giving the banks even more money is a good thing. Now there's a surprise.

Have a look at this LINK for some interesting revelations about the recent massive loss in trading in London. It looks as though a mistake was made in the algorithm that assessed Value at Risk in that department and in effect raised the threshold where the safeguards kicked in by 100%. No conspiracy, no rogue trader.

The link gives me a blank page.
EDIT: Got it later in the day - yes, a definite CW - but then what else would we expect from JP Morgan?

Interesting that the FT is today attacking Vince the cable for the banking reforms which might be responsible for prolonging the low economic activity

Full spectrum of views on the shareholder stuff. Sounds more like sound bite politics than actually changing the general dynamic. Shareholders can already vote against. Wonder if this will push WPP to remain in Ireland

Pluggy was telling me yesterday that sue, one of the ladies in the local HSBC branch that closes shortly told him that the reason for the closure given to them was that they were not making enough money. That is they were not selling enough insurance and other services. In other words they don't regard service to clients and the profits they make from them as a factor, it's simple sales. Bit of a clue in there to how the high street banks regard their role in society and their attitude towards the customers.