To be answered at the end of May 2015

Any decent government would step in and end the absolute scandal of ordinary full-time jobs being turned into zero-hours contracts.

Any decent government would step in and immediately make illegal totally immoral sharp practices like not paying care workers for the time they spend travelling from one house to another. And restrict their "allowable time" to (say) a mere 20 minutes per household - knowing damn well that many caring people will do more as they feel guilty about rushing in and out and not doing the job remotely properly. So they may work 60 hours but be paid for 18.

The shame is that there are plenty in the country - including some on here - whose attitude to that would be "well, nobody is forcing them, get a better job if you don't like it". If these sort of scams were made illegal then desperate people couldn't be fleeced and abused like this.

It's the 'government' that fund this and so they do it deliberately. The electorate need to organise themselves to stand up against it if they disagreee. Lobby your MP and get eveyone you know to.

That wasn't case pre-May 2010?

I don't that austerity is working in the North on any kind of large scale, there are some shoots of recovery.

In the SE it looks like things are more positive

So this stuff only started under this Tory government? delusional - this stuff is has been going on for ever. Compared to some of the restrictive practises that were in place during the hey days of union power these are kids play. Of course it is easy to excuse those on the left in your haste to bash those on the right.

Pre-May 2010 we had moved into growth. Subsequently, we moved into recession and are only just moving back out of it – albeit very tentatively, as has been discussed, and as Mr Carney has explained.



I don't think that anyone has suggested that, but please feel free to provide evidence that they have.

What [ihas[/i happened – and what [iis[/i happening – is that the financial crisis and subsequent recession/s have been taken by some businesses as an opportunity, to be used to [iforce[/i staff onto fewer hours, worse terms and conditions, and lower pay.

For instance, the growth in homecare workers being limited to 15 minutes per visit is very recent. As is the use of contracts for them that do not pay for time taken to travel between 'clients'.

If you want to prepare a balance sheet of legislation introduced to protect, promote and nurture the majority of the population, as opposed to further advantaging the privileged few. You'd best prepare for incoming

Here's a beaut: [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-25945052Three men to be prosecuted for taking food that had been thrown into Iceland store bins[/url.

Now, to stress: Iceland says that it did not report them and is as mystified by the charges as most other people.

On the basis of what we currently know – quite unbelievable.

As an update – [url=http://blog.cps.gov.uk/2014/01/cps-statement-iceland-foods-case.htmlthe CPS has now dropped the case[/url.

I see the CPS say this illustrates their willingness to review / reconsider cases! I would have thought it illustrated their incompetence and waste.

I also suspect it also illustrates the Met's desire for what they perceived an easy win in their bid to improve their clear up stats. (and possibly bullying).

I work indirectly in this sector, so I have some experience of what you're talking about.

It's rather missing the point to suggest that homecare businesses have seen an 'opportunity' to bear down on the working conditions of their employees; rather, since the swingeing cuts to LA health and social care budgets introduced under the coalition government's austerity programme (according to Adass, £2.7bn in the three years to April 2013) they have had little choice. In response to those cuts, LA's have zeroed in on the charges of private providers in tiny detail and forced many of them to shave out every possible extra cost. In order to continue to operate under the resultant reduced hourly rates on offer from LA's, refusing to pay travel time and introducing more short calls are often survival mechanisms, as opposed to a means to larger profits. I can tell you with certainty that it's very difficult to become a fat cat out of homecare - it operates on very narrow margins and is thankless, heavily regulated and very volatile. Equally, the home care providers I've encountered would much rather *not* do short calls at all - they know it's wrong and is driven by cost rather than by the needs of the individual. I extricated a client from a large contract in this very sector after the CCG reduced it's hourly rates by 30% and *advised* the assembled providers to stop paying travel time AND mileage allowances to their staff.

In short, I agree with most of what you said, but I think you've identified the wrong bad guy; not to say that there aren't some unscrupulous operators in the sector but in my experience, the decline in working conditions of homecare staff is attributable to the coalition governments stealthy use of austerity to justify attacking the sick and disabled, rather than homecare operators being opportunistic.

Delusional? You are indeed :-
1. I never said nor suggested this "stuff only started" under this government. I don't know if it did, or it didn't. Certainly it is now commonplace and seemingly spreading like wildfire, so it has been an issue which has become serious and the government of the day should have got straight on the case. The can find time to legislate for many things that are trivial in comparison.

2. You will find that it is a "coalition" not a "Tory government", despite who wears the trousers in the relationship.


Oddly enough. I think I'm at liberty to make a point, and not then have to write a dissertation on every other thing ever done by anyone, to compare them all. But if you'd like to expand the discussion to historical events, perhaps you could start by giving an example of a union-imposed restrictive practice that was as comparatively bad and immoral for a working person as making them be at work for 60 hours, but get paid for only 20. This should be interesting.

I bashed the immorality of what is happening in those instances. This was not because the government in power is on the right, but because the practices they seem to ignore are fooking immoral and they damn well SHOULD step in. I would make precisely the same point whoever was not doing anything about it.

How so? It was the Met who brought the charges, not the CPS.

Didn't that turncoat Vince come on the TV a few months ago and dismiss concerns about zero-hours contracts, saying something to the effect that it suits some people so it's OK.
That it is no sensible basis on which to plan a life financially for most folk matters not a jot.
What a caring individual you are Vince.

Come the revolution....

Vince Cable leaped aboard every opposition bandwagon at any opportunity before 2010, so much so that he convinced most that he actually knew what he was talking about and was hailed as The Chancellor That Never Was.

Unfortunately Vince found himself in a position where he had to start doing real things and not just talk about them and Vince has found it hard to come to terms with the fact that criticising something is not the same thing as fixing it, not anything like the same thing really.

Vince doesn't appear on TV half as much as he used to.

I entirely understand that and agree with your analysis.

If memory serves me correctly, though, there were issues in this area before the last general election.

I'm fairly certain a piece I did with two homecarers in Scotland, which centred on the issue of unpaid travel between visits, was pre-2010.

But it's massively increased since and, as you say, as a direct consequence of the cuts.

According the reports linked to the CPS ran with it until the press / Iceland got hold of it then they reviewed the public interest element.

I was watching one of tose emergency rescue programmes the other night. One of the almost fatally injured was a 19 year old care worker on her way to a client who was found after her car had crashed into a dry stone wall in the Dales. I wondered at the time if she had been rushing as a result of poor working practice / scheduling.

It's a reasonable hypothesis, I would have thought.

On the subject of scheduling & tracking of care workers, the company I work for has a tracker and job logging solution for remote and isolated workers, I have to use it myself. It was designed with care workers in mind using mobile phone technology and our own bespoke software and is marketed at employers as a duty of care product as well as an accountancy tool.

Surprisingly it has never sold in the numbers that we thought it might and its not for the want of marketing either, the technology has been used in other sectors and sells well there and so the only conclusion that I (personally) can come up with is one which a previous poster touched on - that of cost and of margins too tight to work with, if I was mischievous I might suggest that the businesses involved don't want the evidence recording but again, thats just opinion.

CPS didn't run anywhere with it, it never got to a court, but yes I would suspect that the shiitstorm was instrumental in a rapid review. We'll never know whether CPS would ever have run with it otherwise.

However I suspect not. For a start, I can't understand why the charges were brought under an obscure provision in an ancient Act (Vagrancy Act), couldn't the Met find a single offence in the Theft Act if they really felt these people were thieves?

For another, I doubt there is a first year law student in the land who wouldn't immediately see the difficulty in proving dishonesty if you are taking something which the previous owner has clearly abandoned, by throwing it in a rubbish bin. Is it seriously suggested that each and every item in a landfill site is someone's property still? Call the police!

But the saddest thing is to find that in our so-called civilised country, there are authorities who are happy to try to criminalise those so poor that they resort to eating thrown away food from bins. Yep, that's a useful way to spend our council tax, isn't it? They should transfer the cretin who thought it was a good idea to police the city tips around Mumbai. That would keep them busy.

A similar criminal brazenly operating on the sub-continent:

Just on this point, the local council tip (or recycling depot as they like to call themselves now) has several signs around its perimeter and entrance stating that removal of any items will be viewed as theft so despite promoting recycling and bemoaning landfill they seem to be very protective of the rubbish that you consign to their care and not at all keen on letting others do the recycling.

The Met would have charged on the basis of CPS advice, but I can't imagine any of the people I know from there suggesting a charge, never mind the laughing at the police and telling them to go away.

Ridiculous episode and the CPS press release is a bit naughty to ignore the CPS role in the initial charge.

I think what they don't actually want is dozens or hundreds of people scavenging through containers all day which would obviously be a complete non-starter for H&S purposes as well as preventing normal operation of the site. I can hardly tip my large box of general rubbish into the crusher while there are 2 or 3 people scouring the contents.

OTOH I would agree that some of the stuff would be of use to people, but I'm not sure to what extent the Council already arranges for that to happen, for example, do they sell the electrical goods, or the wood waste, etc.? Obviously stuff like cans glass and plastics are sold commercially in large quantities.

Whatever, I don't think they could sensibly or safely operate a "help yourself" policy, certainly not as far as the crusher containers go. Once the stuff is chucked in there you can't have people climbing in to find bits to remove.

Are you sure? The reports I saw all said it was the Met that charged. Maybe that was the reason to use the Vagrancy Act.

Agreed, and this supports the reports that it was the Met alone.


Unless it is correct