Who will chair the new DECC committee?
I’m on holiday this week but thought I’d pass on this rumour. Plenty of interest in Westminster in who will chair the new Energy and Climate Change select committee, which will keep tabs on Ed Miliband’s new department.
Lots of MPs are keen to get themselves a seat on the table. Apparently Elliot Morley, a former environment minister, is Labour’s choice to chair the committee. Read more
Would the CML like to explain itself?
The Council of Mortgage Lenders firmly denied reports from the BBC a fortnight ago that its 2009 forecast for repossessions would be 75,000. The CML’s spokeswoman said on the record that this was the wrong figure and the real number was likely to be significantly lower. This is what we said at the time.
Today, lo and behold, the CML has put out its forecast. It is of course 75k. Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything different from the group – which spectacularly failed to spot the crash coming. Read more
The rebellion has started in earnest. The PPS to the post office minister has just quit his job in protest at the plans to part-privatise the Royal Mail. It is his moment of glory, a brave stand that will see him join the masses of disgruntled MPs on the Labour benches. But there is one question that can’t be avoided: who is he? Read more
It is often wrongly claimed that Gordon Brown failed to spot the housing bubble. In fact, he called the bubble as early as 2005. The trouble was he believed he had addressed it. Brown thought he had successfully managed a boom without a bust. Read more
You don’t need to be in Berlin to take a swipe at Gordon Brown’s economic record. Members of the monetary policy committee have started to put the boot in too. Andrew Sentance, one of the MPC’s external members, recently gave a thought provoking speech demolishing the idea of a “bust without a boom”.
While we may not have seen a classic inflationary boom-bust cycle on the 1970s-1990s model, it would equally be wrong to deny that the current bust was preceded by a boom of some sort….We are now appreciating that the earlier years of this decade saw an expansion of various forms of financial market activity which have subsequently proved unsustainable. Read more
Are the Treasury showing a fondness for back of the envelope calculations? While the Tories are wild about tax cuts that pay for themselves, Alistair Darling seems to prefer tax cuts that are cheaper than forecast.
Remember the great fuss over the stamp duty holiday? When Darling unveiled the tax cut in September he said “it would cost a total of £615m”. But take a look at the fine print of the pre-Budget report: the estimate is now down to £280m. Read more
The renewables target is now 14.5 per cent, not 15 per cent
The UK was supposed to generate 15 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020. That was the received wisdom. The prime minister himself has referred to it on several occasions*.
In fact British officials in Brussels have negotiated a slightly lower figure which equates to about 14.5 per cent. Read more
More on Mapeley
I wrote here a few days ago about Mapeley’s falling share price. The company came to public attention several years ago when it bought hundreds of HMRC buildings in a deal which was controversial because the group was based offshore.
This month the government announced it would close more than 90 tax offices. Read more
Corus, the GMB and “total bollocks”
I was surprised to see the GMB union describing as “total bollocks” my scoop this morning.
The story revealed talks between Corus and union officials over a possible 10 per cent pay cut for the steel group’s 25,000 workers. It’s interesting because this is the kind of idea which could be followed elsewhere (FT journalists have already been handed a pay freeze for 2009). Read more
VAT cut is “crass Keynesianism”: The latest view from the German government
Peer Steinbrück, Social Democratic finance minister, hardly pulls his punches in a Newsweek interview:
“Our British friends are now cutting their value-added tax. We have no idea how much of that stores will pass on to customers. Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90? All this will do is raise Britain’s debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off. The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking. When I ask about the origins of the crisis, economists I respect tell me it is the credit-financed growth of recent years and decades. Isn’t this the same mistake everyone is suddenly making again, under all the public pressure?” Read more
New details (but not many) of the “Mortgage Support Scheme”
The Treasury has just put out details of how its new anti-repossession scheme will work. (The one in which, if you lose your job, the bank will defer part of your interest payments for up to two years.)
They still only have support “in principle” from eight lenders. That means no change from last week’s announcement in the Queen’s Speech. Read more
Mapeley’s falling share price and HMRC
The Westminster village should remember Mapeley. The property company is linked inexorably with the purchase of 600 Inland Revenue offices several years ago – controversially, after it emerged that the group was based offshore.
Since then it has floated on the stock market – although US investment group Fortress remains the biggest shareholder. Read more
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Jim Pickard is the FT's chief political correspondent, having joined the lobby team in January 2008. He has been at the FT since 1999 as a regional correspondent, assistant UK news editor and property correspondent.
Kiran Stacey is an FT political correspondent, having joined the lobby in 2011. He started at the FT as a graduate trainee in 2008, working on desks including UK companies and US equity markets before taking over the FT's Energy Source blog.
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