One is on pensions and how they have changed in 10 years, in the Telegraph here, and one in the Daily Mail on the fail in crime detection rates here.
Pensions
10 years ago we had the strongest pensions in Europe, now they are in collapse. The report looks at the value of a pension paid in at £500 per year over 25 years maturing in 1996 and in 2006. The pension would have been worth £120,239 in 1996 and would be worth £55,992 now. As an annuity that would give an income of £13,466 in 1996 and £3,975 per year now.
Some people blame Gordon Brown for his £5 billion a year pension raid, others blame the fall in the stock market and some both. Who or what is to blame is irrelevant, the issue is that nothing has been done about it. A climate has been created in which people don't feel it makes sense to save for a pension.
Crime
The figures here are worrying. Far less people are being caught for things like robbery than used to be the case. The same is also true for rape and other violent offences. Murder detection rates are high though which is good.
The one thing most likely to deter crime is not what punishment people get if caught, it is the chances of getting caught which counts.
So why do we have this mess? Well, partly it is red tape, but it is also in my view a result of the vast number of new laws passed in the last 9 years.
This government seems happy to throw around resource (in terms of money) at things without getting the results.
A new Conservative government will need to use imagination to fix the structural problems being built in to our society.
2 comments:
Spot on, rhetoric and legislation, but absolutely no enforcement.
Yep. What a useless bunch of gits.
I also can't see what most of this new legislation would have acheived that could not have been achieved by enforcing existing laws.
Mind you the regulartory reform bill terrifies me.
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