The text below has been amended: the interview initially stated in error that "she is a charity commissioner, holds a range of board-level positions and runs a consultancy spanning the management, governance and financing of the sector". She has been all of those things but is no longer
In search of evils
Housing costs taking their toll of society
James Harding, Business Editor
One of the unplanned but most intractable legacies of the Blair decade is the distortion of any normal or sustainable relation between house prices and people’s incomes. If that link is not already broken it is certainly stretched to the limit.
The rate of price inflation may be slowing, just, but remains obstinately high.
The question that always accompanies fresh data showing a fast-growing housing market is: are we headed for a crash? The short answer, at present, is no.
Yesterday’s quarter-point rise in rates will not make much difference and was not intended to. Few of the most vulnerable borrowers pay higher mortgage interest immediately just because the Bank’s rate has gone up.
A run of four rate rises must, however, put more pressure on new buyers. Allowing for high prices and higher interest rates, they are likely to have to pay a fifth more interest each month than a year ago.
But in London, which is again driving the price increases, interest rates have the least effect because far more properties are bought with bonuses or foreign money.
The squeeze on incomes must eventually tell. Next month’s new selling regulations may cool the market a little more. But there will not be a price crash unless there is a much sharper rise in unemployment than currently looks likely.
Nonetheless, there will be a price to pay for the continuing rise in house prices. As existing borrowers see their budgets stretched, consumer spending and economic growth will suffer, perhaps at just the wrong time. And more people will be excluded from decent housing.
This will not only raise shrill demands for regulation and subsidy. It has a social cost for those excluded from the housing market.
First-time buyers and lenders are resorting to evermore bizarre and unwise tactics to get a foot on to the bottom of the property ladder. Buy-to-let investors are pushing up the price of flats and houses, making it harder and harder for young people to buy a home.
So long as house price inflation outpaces growth in ordinary people’s incomes, the drive to buy at almost any financial or personal cost will continue. General inflation was only beaten when people became convinced that policy would keep price increases low and relatively stable.
At root, the problem is a chronic shortage of housing in key areas. There is a need for many more homes in London and other cities.
Homeowners may not want this to happen, hoping instead to be bailed out by inflation. But the price we pay for the rising housing market is more than just economic.
the people who suffer most from the consequences of criminal or loutish behaviour are the people who have little choice themselves but to live side by side with the chaos it makes, in a frustrating and draining war of attrition.
our prisons, crammed with an unending stream of illiterates, addicts, alcoholics, self-harmers and people with other forms of mental illness
Revealed: Britain's 100,000 'invisible' teenage dropouts
Anushka Asthana and Jo Revill on a shocking new study that finds thousands of youngsters give education a miss - and are then lost and cut loose without help
Sunday May 6, 2007
The Observer
When Kim Page turned 14 she met an older crowd. Tempted by a lifestyle hanging around the local park, pubs and clubs, she soon lost interest in her family and school friends. Late nights made the mornings difficult for Kim, now 18. Sometimes, when her parents, Becky and Bruce, came to try to wake her up, she had not yet made it to bed. Kim started making excuses to avoid school. At first she would go in late, at 10am, then 11am. At 14 she stopped going altogether. When the country welcomed her year's GCSE results to much fanfare, Kim was nowhere to be seen.
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Today The Observer can reveal the truth about the nation's invisible children; tens of thousands of pupils who simply disappear from the school rolls each year. Kim is just one of a growing and disturbing trend. They are the truants who never come back, the excluded, the bullied, the sick, the carers, the abused, those on witness protection programmes and many more. This month Wasted Education, a shocking report from the think-tank the Bow Group, will reveal that in England:
· Last year 15,000 children in their GCSE year were missing from school registers.
· Nearly 6,000 of them who were 14 in 2005 had 'disappeared' within a year.
· When it came to exams, more than 70,000 pupils who should have been taking them did not turn up.
· Twenty thousand pupils did not sit GCSE maths and 26,700 missed out on English.
'There are certain groups in society who have fallen so far below the radar that politicians are not aware they exist,' said Chris Skidmore, co-author of the report and political officer at the Bow Group, which is close to the Conservative Party. 'These are the lost children. If you compare the number who were at school three years ago and the number who are 16 now, you see them dropping off the rolls fairly dramatically. Others never turn up to exams.'
Although a few of the children will be home-schooled, government estimates suggest that this only accounts for between 636 and 3,180 in each year. Few people know where the rest are.
One 10-year-old boy from North Wales, who cannot be named, went missing from school two years ago. When he was eventually found, it turned out he was being used as a drugs runner for criminal gangs in the area.
'It was one of the most extreme cases I had ever seen,' said a child protection officer. 'Every time he left his house he would be picked up in a car by drug dealers who were using him. He just stopped turning up for school.'
In another case, a 15-year-old girl from Manchester started having panic attacks because she was being violently bullied at school. She remains too scared to go back.
Skidmore blamed a 'relentless focus upon academic curriculum' for failing to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of children like these. He also criticised the government for focusing too strongly on A to C grades and failing to look at the children who did not even achieve a G.
In deprived wards in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, the performance using the A-G measure, which reveals the number of pupils passing any kind of exam, has actually fallen, the study said.
The report will form part of the think-tank's 'Invisible Nation' series that will be launched in a magazine of the same name this week. 'My father served as a doctor in Vietnam,' said Charlotte Leslie, editor of the magazine and a Conservative candidate for Bristol North West. 'When assisting war-blasted casualties, he said that you should treat first, not the ones who are screaming, but the ones who are not screaming because they are really in trouble. There are members of our society who have quite simply stopped screaming. Being compassionate means hearing that silence and going to help.'
In Takeley, Essex, at the headquarters of the Inclusion Trust, a charity that tries to find and support 'missing children', the staff make their way through large numbers of emails and letters from desperate parents every day. Occasionally a child walks through the door and asks for help itself.
Professor Stephen Heppell, chair of the trustees, estimates that there are 100,000 'invisible children'. 'These kids could fill Wembley,' he said. 'There is clearly a sense of crisis. The tragedy is that the costs of social deprivation repeating itself over and over are enormous. Even if we only cared about the bank notes, it would still be worth tackling this.'
His charity is helping 1,000 children through an initiative called 'Not School'. Teenagers are given a new computer through which they log on to a school system that lets them study the subjects they want in the time scale they choose. They are in constant email contact with 'mentors' and 'experts', some of whom are based in New Zealand to ensure there is somebody that they can contact 24 hours a day.
Next month the trust will publish a major report revealing the results of a £15m project that has been running for seven years into how to help these particular children.
According to Heppell, he has a solution that could instantly pull 50,000 of the missing children back into mainstream society. 'I genuinely feel like I have got a syringe in my hand that can help people and I am being asked to play darts with it,' said Heppell. One person they were able to help was Kim.
When she stopped going to school she spent much of the day watching daytime television at home and then joined her friends at night. 'We would just hang around the streets all night, chat, sometimes drink alcohol or go to the pub,' she said. 'I could not be bothered getting up in the morning, and I kept thinking of excuses. Most of the time during the day I just sat at home.' Becky and Bruce attended meetings with the local authority, although she never came with them. At lunchtime her father would come home and beg her to go in, but she refused. But somehow Not School offered her something that she was interested in.
'It meant I didn't have to get up early and did not have to do it in one block every day,' said Kim. 'I learnt loads of things - English, biology, childcare, hair dressing, maths and French.'
Instead of being given a timetable, Kim chose what she wanted to study and when. In the end she was able to persuade a local college to accept her study as an alternative to GCSEs and was given a place. Now she is preparing to go to university to study psychology.
But there are tens of thousands of missing children who never get any help. According to Jean Johnson, chief executive of the Inclusion Trust, the government is not honest when it says that 'every child matters'. 'The truth is the sort of children we deal with are not welcome in schools. Most of these children don't matter. It is an astonishing waste of talent.'
Others agreed. Frank Field, the former Welfare Minister, said that in 10 years of Labour in power the taxpayer had spent £11bn on pupils who left school with no qualifications at all. 'I have met some unbelievably bright children who've left school with no qualifications, and it is not that they have failed but that our system has failed them,' he said.
He believes that the government should put more effort into providing technical academies for vocational education which would help children who were no so academic.
A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said it had been doing a huge amount to help such troubled teenagers. 'Record investment, radical reform and the hard work of teachers and pupils have delivered a massive improvement in school standards since 1997,' he said. 'Some 86,000 more pupils now achieve five good GCSEs than did in 1997, and more than 81,000 pupils are entered for GCSE exams than were 10 years ago.
'However, we are never complacent when it comes to bringing on the talents of all our young people, tackling educational inequality and improving social mobility. This is why we are spending £1bn to personalise learning, identify pupils who are struggling earlier, and provide catch-up classes or one-to-one tuition where children are falling behind.'
Kim's life is now back on track. However, for tens of thousands of others, the future ahead does not seem so bright.
The lost boys and girls
100,000 The number of children missing from school
70,000 Number of teenagers who should have taken GCSEs last year but never turned up
15,000 Number of missing 15- and 16-year-olds who are not registered at a school
5,800 The number of children, aged 14 in 2005, who disappeared from the school rolls in the following year
20,000 - 26,700 The number of pupils who do not sit GCSE maths and English each year
BP's Browne quits over lie to court about private life
Cover-up over how he met partner leads to dramatic exit and costs him £15m
Ian Cobain and Clare Dyer
Wednesday May 2, 2007
The Guardian
Lord Browne
Lord Browne leaves BP's London headquarters. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
The career of one of the titans of British industry came to a dramatic end yesterday when Lord Browne quit as chief executive of BP after lying to a court about his relationship with another man.
Following crisis talks at the company's London headquarters, BP said Lord Browne had resigned with immediate effect after losing his four-month battle to suppress newspaper reports about the relationship. In doing do, he forfeited a leaving package worth up to £15.5m.
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Lord Browne went all the way to the House of Lords in his attempts to prevent Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Mail on Sunday, from disclosing details of his relationship with Jeff Chevalier, his Canadian partner between 2002 and 2006.
A series of hearings considered evidence about the pair's extravagant international lifestyle, disputed allegations that company resources were diverted for Mr Chevalier's use, and claims - firmly denied - that Lord Browne attempted to evade tax payments.
The 58-year-old, once hailed as "the Sun King of the oil industry" lost his case, in large part, because he claimed to have met his partner while jogging in a London park. They had, his close associates conceded last night, made contact through a male escort agency's website.
In a statement which marked the end of a remarkable career, including a decade during which the company he led was regarded as the country's most successful, Lord Browne said: "In my 41 years with BP I have kept my private life separate from my business life. I have always regarded my sexuality as a personal matter, to be kept private. It is a matter of deep disappointment that a newspaper group has now decided that allegations about my personal life should be made public.
"I wish to acknowledge that I did have a four-year relationship with Jeff Chevalier, who has now chosen to tell his story to Associated Newspapers. These allegations are full of misleading and erroneous claims. In particular, I deny categorically any allegations of improper conduct relating to BP."
Tony Hayward, Lord Browne's designated successor, who had been due to take over in July, was immediately appointed as chief executive.
The disclosure of the relationship follows the refusal by the House of Lords yesterday to grant Lord Browne permission to appeal against rulings made earlier this year by the high court and court of appeal.
The high court had decided to lift an injunction which covered a wide range of subjects, including alleged discussions between Lord Browne and Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and EU commissioner Peter Mandelson, and a dinner at one of Lord Browne's homes attended by himself and Mr Chevalier with Mr Mandelson and his Brazilian partner.
Another was a claim that Lord Browne bought a flat in Venice several years ago and, it was alleged, paid cash for a renovation bill which did not include VAT, and that he failed to pay his tax bill.
The court also heard that Lord Browne took steps to enable Mr Chevalier to remain in the UK when his visa was due to run out early in the relationship. This included paying for a university course from 2003, so he would acquire student status, and helping him to set up a company to trade in mobile phone ring tones.
Mr Chevalier claimed that when the relationship broke down Lord Browne had agreed that "if needed, [he] would assist in the first year of me transitioning from living in multimillion pound homes around the world, flying in private jets, five-star hotels, £2,000 suits, and so on to a less than modest life in Canada".
The judge, Mr Justice Eady, said Mr Chevalier sought further assistance towards the end of last year, backed by what he said could be interpreted as a "thinly-veiled threat". Mr Chevalier denies making any threats.
Eventually, Lord Browne's attempts to prevent reporting of these matters, and to maintain his personal privacy, collapsed after the court accepted he had lied to conceal the manner in which he met Mr Chevalier. Lord Browne had told the court on more than one occasion that they had met while running in Battersea Park, south London. In fact, associates of Lord Browne now acknowledge, they met through a website called suitedandbooted.com.
Mr Justice Eady said: "I am not prepared to make allowances for a 'white lie' told to the court in circumstances such as these - especially by a man who prays in aid of his reputation and distinction, and refers to the various honours he has received under the present government, when asking the court to prefer his account of what took place."
The judge added that Lord Browne told this lie at a time when he was also making a "wholesale attack" on Mr Chevalier's reliability, showing a "willingness casually to 'trash' the reputation" of his former partner.
The Mail on Sunday said it would make its evidence available to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. "Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken went to prison for lying to the courts," a spokesman said.
However, Mr Justice Eady said he had decided not to refer the matter to the attorney general, saying disclosure in the judgment of Lord Browne's behaviour was "probably sufficient punishment".
In a statement last night the Mail on Sunday said: "The story we originally sought to publish was a business story involving issues of great importance to shareholders and employers of BP. Lord Browne chose to suppress this story by arguing to the high court that, because the story was supplied to us by his former lover, Mr Chevalier, it breached his right to a private life under the Human Rights Act." In lying, the newspaper said, it was Lord Browne who had made his private life a public issue.
t started with cat food. The cat came in during my housewarming party four years ago and never left. He was my landlady's but for some reason he preferred my vibrations. I didn't mind the company but with money tight, it was the food I objected to. So I began taking two sachets of cat food every time I called in at Spar. Hidden away in my back pocket, it seemed like a victimless crime. The cat was chuffed, it saved me silver and I convinced myself that, since Spar marked its food staples so high, it wouldn't miss the income on the odd sachet of tuna in jelly. But it wasn't the odd sachet. It was lots and lots, and as the cat's appetite for food grew, so too did mine for shoplifting.
Oddly, when I eventually did get nicked, I was innocent. I had been idly looking at CDs in Woolworths when a security guard noticed me. Before long I was in a police car en route to the station. It did put me off a bit, but it was the excruciating embarrassment that brought matters to a close. It is embarrassing when you can't go out for a meal with a new girlfriend or buy your ex-stepchild a birthday toy. I couldn't focus on anything, couldn't look anyone in the face. In two years I had lost all my money, quite a lot of other people's money, my self-respect and my sense of humour. I had become the sort of person I would normally avoid. That was one of the worst things, the self-loathing that built up with every stupid grab and stash. I wanted to feel normal, to regain my own trust, to like myself again.
