Foreign Perspectives

Stories like the 30k couple with 11 kids are appearing with increasing regularity in the press these days and, as usual, it’s collected the expected collection of comments expressing various degrees of indignation that these people feel that the state (ie us) should pay them to look after their kids full-time.

But, why would they bother to look for work if they were getting 30k coming in for doing nothing? Actually, it’s somewhat more than that as there’s the 15k to add on for the house and together that’s equivalent to a pre-tax salary of at least £60,000. Even with the best will in the world to find work, they’d need great qualifications to find a job paying anything like that level anywhere in the country. Thus, they can quite validly say to the benefits office that they are unable to find suitable work.

As most of these people say, it’s not their fault that they’re entitled to so much. Despite the comments that such cases always attract, they are quite correct once they’ve reached the situation of having double digit numbers of children. That’s not to say that it’s right that they should be entitled to so much though because it just isn’t. Where the benefits system falls down with people like this is that it’s designed for reasonable people who are expected to have the intention to behave in a reasonable way in regards to their family, looking for work, etc. Reasonable people don’t expect other people to pay for enormous families but there is no limitation in the rules that says “five is enough” or anything similar. Thus, in principle, you could have a family with, say, 20 kids pocketing over £100,000 and perhaps there is such a family out there.

How many would be “enough” children though? Would it be, say, three because that’s just over the average for the country? That seems a reasonable point to start reducing benefits for numbers above that. However, what do you do with someone like Miss Shepherd (the case mentioned above) who has had the children to three different fathers? You might think that would be difficult to deal with but it’s not really if you allocate the “reasonable number” of kids to each parent ie not “three per family” but “1 1/2 per parent” so you could quite easily allocate the allowances.

Whatever way such changes come in, as they surely must do, there are going to be screams from those benefiting from all that money now. It’s never going to be easy to get such people to change their attitudes because they’ve built up over such a long period but the “someone else can pay” attitude needs to get stamped out and soon.

One thing that many country park type places seem to have in common is that they work to what seems to be quite a tight timetable.

Thus you’ll find on a sunny day if you’ve not found a parking space by 1pm or so then you can pretty much forget it until after 3pm when it quite suddenly becomes very easy to find a space. The reason is, of course, largely down to the lunchtime BBQ that’s very common in the summer and, by and large, it doesn’t matter a whole lot which day of the week it is although, on the whole, it’s a more mummy crowd during the week and a more equal mix at the weekend.

But what’s confusing is that it seems to happen in all the parks, or at least all those that we go to. We went to the relatively new for us Peaklands Park on Sunday and found the same thing. Arriving around 1pm the car park was relatively empty but seeing as it was nice we thought we’d nip out around 2pm to pick up a heap of BBQ stuff, finding the car park completely full and cars parked right out to the main road. Coming back little more than 40 minutes later there were quite a lot of spaces. When we’d to nip back out to the car a little after 3pm there were loads of spaces and by 5pm it was almost empty.

It wasn’t even that the park activities had closed down at 3pm as it’s basically a country park so the only activity is the delightful (and, for a change, good value) little train which goes on to just after 5pm.

Still, if you’d like a park relatively free of people, 3pm or later seems the time to go.

One of the quite noticeable features of the Open University is that they use your information to promote courses in much the same way as Amazon use your previous purchases to promote books to you.

Thus, once you’re entering the sign-up period for your next course you can expect a little email noting a few courses that you might be interested in. Typically if you’re following broadly the normal path towards a degree these will make some kind of sense. Thus whilst I was doing the French sequence in the French Diploma, I’d get an email basically letting me know that it was time to sign up for the next course in the sequence. However, if you’re not following a standard sequence, the suggestions can be just ask wacky as those from Amazon frequently are.

Since we’re in somewhat more difficult financial times than usual, they’re pulling out the stops to promote courses even more than normal at the moment. Thus even small courses like Plants and People (S173) which would normally only get a brief mention as part of a general promotion of short courses was pushed quite heavily during the SXR270 summer school and has just had another push from the course manager yesterday. Oddly, the summer school for next year hasn’t, yet, had any sales pitch although perhaps they’re assuming that we’ll do that anyway.

What they haven’t done, yet, is the more sophisticated joined-up marketing that some places get up to. Thus, although presumably S173 would help with the plants residential (SXR375) there hasn’t been any cross-marketing of the two of them.

Although everyone uses their outdoor space quite a bit in the summer, once the cooler weather kicks in that usage drops very quickly indeed.

It doesn’t need to be like that though. There are an increasing number of ways in which you can extend the period of the year through which you can use all that outdoor space. Conservatories are an obvious addition which can be seen sprouting up at what sometimes seems an alarming rate in some areas. They essentially bring the outdoors inside for you and are usable throughout the year whatever the weather.

It’s also possible to look at the range of outdoor fireplaces which are a little bit more limited in terms of year-round use but let you use the outdoor spaces well into the Autumn months. They’re also different in nature to the conservatories as they’re taking the indoors outside rather than bringing the outdoors inside. Essentially they let you use your garden directly over a much longer time of year.

In the relatively slow summer months the chats on the Open University forums tend to wander well off the topic now and again and sometimes come around to what people are thinking of doing over the coming winter months.

Chats like that can go just about anywhere as people chip in with their own plans with the current “in” topics being multiple degrees and ebook readers.

Surprisingly it can be rather easy to pick up a second degree depending on what your course choices have been. For example, if you do a purely biological degree it’s usually a matter of two more years to pick up a chemistry degree because many of the biology courses are also chemistry courses thus in my own case it looks like about one more year will be enough to do the trick. Similarly the physics people often consider adding just a couple of courses and picking up a maths degree which works because they need to do quite a lot of maths courses to be able to do the physics courses.

As for the ebook readers, well a combination of them being considered a “good thing” and Amazon dropping the price to £109 has led to quite a number of orders being placed. Now, if only they’d waited for a few months and seen the colour version on the horizon. Still, that’s next years Christmas present sorted 🙂