Today's PMQs clash over Baby P naturally pushed an important item off the comment agenda: James Purnell's announcement that the Post Office will keep its card account worth £1 billion.

Inside Housing magazine reports here that Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett, is actually considering proposals by the Chartered Institute of Housing (of all people) to end lifelong social housing tenancies.

I covered this appalling suggestion here last month. The idea is that all tenancies should be flexible and subject to review. So if you are a social housing tenant (an ugly term, I wish we could think of something better?) gets a better paid job or their kids leave home, they face eviction? Leaving aside for now, that this would result in modern day social housing ghetto’s which are only inhabited by the very poor and the desperate.

I RARELY write as a transport minister on transport issues; this is a personal political blog. However, one of my regular readers has suggested I respond to John Redwood’s piece about transport on his blog, and for once, I’m more than willing to do so.

Michael Gove unveils his plan to privatise schools in the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/education/2825885/Tory-plan-for-biggest-educatio n-expansion-in-generations.html

Does this mean that we are happy now to sell the minds of our young people to the highest bidder who comes along?  What about a country wishing to use petro-dollars to promote salafism here or another organisation to promote creationism?  Who determines the curriculum?

What does not for profit mean?  Can the directors or headmasters extract funds via "salaries" higher than are reasonable?  Can I extract funds out of these organisations via the "award" of contracts?

How will the funding system cope with this?  Can they select students and choose which ones they can make a profit on and reject those that they will make a loss on? Can they select on the basis of ability, religion or race? 

What happens when this adds even more spare spaces into the system?  Can they make hostile takeovers of other schools and generate a monopoly in an area?  What happens when they run out of backers and go under?  Does the local authority then have to step in?

What are the restrictions on the right to practice?  Do they have minimum quality threshold, what happens if they fail?

Who are these parents who are setting up these schools.  Can we all club together to pay ourselves the school fees and teach from home (actually they will give us a building as well so we could all become "caretakers" and get a free house as well)?

The plan is to create smaller schools, does that mean that the concept of economies of scale are now lost on the tories?  Do they have any concept of the IT costs and estate costs of schools and the level of investment that is required in running a successful quality management programme?

Ultimately what is the point of having state education if the tories are not prepared to run it?  Why not just scrap the state school system and give every parent £6,000 per child per year?

We do not need any more school places, what we need is an improvement in the ones we already have.

If this is the tories idea of sound business principles then they really need to get back to the classroom.  If I own shares in a company and the company is not up to scratch I sack the management.  I don't build an additional company from the bottom up to see if I might recoup my money that way.

Apparently Gove picked this up on a tour of Sweden, well all I can say is no wonder their tax bills are so high out there as they are wasting half their funding before they start.

as detailed in the Guardian

They slash wages, provoke strikes, sack stewards, sue and try to close down Labourstart - Barnet UNISON  in West London have been campaigning to stop vulnerable ex-local authority care workers, having their wages and working conditions slashed by this so called  caring “not for profit” company, Fremantle.  Not only are their basic wages being cut by about 30% but their sickness pay, holidays and overtime rates have been cut.  See the UNISON web site.

Lot's of news stories about Channel 4, another one today about the upcoming documentary on Diana (yawn!)

This story was in was the Telegraph the other day:

'Brown may take Channel 4 private' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/30/nchannel430.xml

What do people think? 

Just when you thought there was nothing left to privatise...

A funny thing happened to me the other day at a constituency meeting. A retired labour MP blanked me for suggesting that instead of privatising parts of the NHS we should re-nationalise some areas privatised by the Tories.