Tarred with the Same Brush (The Honest Victims of Austerity)

Today marks the trial rollout of the cap on housing benefits across four London boroughs but, as with all new initiatives, not everyone's circumstances fall into neat pigeonholes.

Innocent and ordinarily hardworking people, who fell foul of the job cuts perpetuated by the economic mess our bankers got us into initially, will now fall victim to constraints on reasonable standards of living.

But this time a good portion of the blame should be lain at the feet of the town halls themselves, who were slow to identify cases where the existing system was being so blatantly exploited.  Only look at the first boroughs to be targeted - Haringey, Enfield, Croydon and Bromley.  While the Government has no doubt done its homework in respect of where it can effect the greatest savings on the public purse, they should at least also have made examples of the boroughs that failed to address the obscenity of people on benefits living in £1M+ properties in places like Ealing or Belgravia.

More and more people will see their living standards reduced through no fault of their own and, in my view, none will suffer more than the now middle-aged children of Thatcher's Britain who, having been encouraged into home ownership, are now seeing that dream being shattered because they fall into one of the two most affected unemployed groups: the over 50's, seemingly invisible to employers and recruiters alike, and - at the other end of the spectrum - school leavers who have been let down by a society that allowed it financial affairs to get so horrendously out of control.

And, at odds with the the FSA's new mandate of having to treat theirs customers fairly, banks continue to penalise their unemployed mortgage customers by only taking into account one of the two primary lending considerations - equity and capacity to repay (guess which one?) - when existing arrangements hit their renewal anniversary, opting instead to apply the standard variable rate ('SVR') to inflict even more pain on the embattled long term unemployed who have already seen mortgage relief reduced from interest on the first £200K down to the first £100K.  Santander, are you listening?

Beefing Up the Price of Meat

When the horse meat scandal first broke, my immediate thought was "If the price of meat goes up now, it would suggest that the supermarkets had been implicit all along and knew what they were buying", because the deception and profiteering would have been occurring further down the chain if they'd been paying normal market prices for their raw ingredients.

Well, prices are going up - and some of the explanations we're being offered don't sit well with me because, as with the finance industry, we're again being asked to stump up to meet the costs of ensuring that others will now act with the honesty and integrity we'd previously expected to take for granted (remember the Financial Services Authority's edict that banks should now adhere to the principle of 'Treating Customers Fairly'? ... duh!).

And, drawing further stark parallels with it's identically-acronymed (FSA) and equally ineffective financial watchdog counterpart, the toothless Food Standards Agency has abysmally failed to exercise even the most fundamental duty of care to the consumer.  Surely one of its first functions should have been to, erm, monitor that food was up to a certain standard. Caught napping, it will probably now put out a radical new directive like "The description on food packaging should be accurately representative of its contents or else we may, in the unlikely event of actually holding anyone to account, fine them and pocket the proceeds so that we can continue to fund our valuable work".

So now the cost of DNA testing is being held up as one of the reasons we'll pay more for meat.  Another, based on consumer behaviour in the immediate aftermath of Horse-Gate (a significant drop in processed food sales), is that market forces will come into play as a result of the increasing demand for fresh meat produce.  I can see this, but again we're paying the penalty for a change in consumer behaviour brought about as a direct consequence of the actions of the unscrupulous.

Dr Pamela Robinson, a former Tesco executive and now a lecturer in international food chains, warns that it's inevitable that supermarkets will have to put up prices to guarantee quality.

So they didn't care before?

UBS - Whiter than a White Lie?

Back in 2005, I contracted to UBS in London on a Sarbanes-Oxley (risk/governance) remediation project.  Part of the recruitment process was that Kroll Worldwide would run a background check on my CV.

Kroll asked me to clarify what I'd been doing for a period of only a few weeks' gap in part of my CV.  Penna Meridian, the outsourcing company Merrill Lynch engaged as part of my redundancy package in my previous role with them, had emphasised the importance of showing continuity of employment and had advised me to offer any explanation other than 'looking for work' - they recommended that I should say something like I'd been on holiday.

This I duly did, telling Kroll that I'd returned briefly to Australia to visit family and friends - thinking that would be the end of it.  It wasn't.  They came back again seeking a statement from someone who knew me confirming this.  Rather than perpetuate the lie or embroil anyone else in my innocent deception, I put my hands up and explained that I'd been acting on professional advice.

UBS's HR department later contacted me to say that I could never work for them again in any capacity - albeit that they called me back the following year for Phase II of the project.

Although I subsequently contracted to Bank of New York Mellon, I've now been out of work for some considerable time and I occasionally wonder if that minor indiscretion led to me being blackballed by other City employers.

My point is, while my role at UBS ironically helped to put a monitoring framework in place to provide greater transparency and establish internal ownership of specialised investment vehicles, someone as diligent as me was passed over while those who later went on to fix Libor rates or otherwise engaged in fraudulent activities made the cut.

Yes, I'm bitter - and I'm frankly disgusted that more bankers aren't in jail.

Dear Bank Manager (Part 2)

As you haven't responded to my last idea, can you please qualify why whole countries are going down the pan - and the UK itself is living beyond its means - yet you treat us like some sort of criminals for struggling to make up the payment shortfall you've imposed on us with your latest mortgage rate increases? [which, incidentally, became 'necessary' as a direct result of your own recklessness].


Using your threats to exercise your charge over our home as the standard strategy for debt recovery, who would take possession of Greece e.g. when their debt mountain collapses? - where would a whole nation be expected to live?  And why can Governments be bailed out with rescue plans spanning years yet you're already getting trigger happy about what might only be a couple of months arrears?

You seem to have abandoned most of the factors previously taken into account when assessing someone's risk profile and focused entirely on capacity to repay.  In our case, you're not exposed while we have around 50% equity in our home and, despite my continuing inability to find work, I've held some responsible and well paid positions in the past and my prospects are still good.

You also don't seem to grasp that, if you realise on your security, that will be one less loan accumulating interest for you in a market where you're already having trouble getting rid of the stuff.  But that shouldn't change the outcome much - as soon as I find work again, you'll lose my business anyway for failing to be as loyal to me as I've been to you.

You need to get back to basics and stop pigeonholing people - understand your customer and use some common sense.

You're not quite off the hook yet, Santander

After our action group had a win over Santander in their attempt to hoodwink us on Business Banking charges, you'd think I'd be done with beating them up for a while.

Not so.  From tomorrow, they intend to inflict more pain on 400,000 mortgage customers by increasing their standard variable rate ('SVR') by half a percent to 4.74%.  Oh, and yet again, they've reneged on a promise - that the SVR will be never be more than 3.75 percentage points above the Bank Rate - by raising the cap.  The words 'guarantee' and 'promise' obviously don't translate well into Spanish.

Their reason?  They say 'the cost of providing mortgages has risen over the past three years'.  And why?  Because of the 'need to meet tighter regulatory demands, which in part require them to build up a bigger capital buffer'.

The irony is killing.  Why has governance made organisations such as these so top heavy cost-wise in the first place?  Because they couldn't be trusted to give their clients a fair deal on their own.  You can you imagine the contempt they must have held for investors and borrowers alike, to have to be TOLD to treat them fairly - isn't the first rule of business to build trust and goodwill with your customers if you want them to come back?

Coming from the days when retail banking was a profession I proudly represented as a regional manager in Australia, I've now become totally disillusioned with the banks.  Instead of putting service first, they bombard us with reams of the small print that we all fought to eliminate a few decades ago (whatever became of the 'Crystal Mark'?), in which they disguise strategies deliberately calculated to catch us all out at some time or another - just ask any small investor who, perversely, has to change banks every year if they want to avoid an automatic rollover offering only fractions of a percent.  As BBC Watchdog pointed out, they actually rely on us not to check the anniversary of our investments in the hope that we don't notice.  Not to mention their heavy sales techniques (driven by target not need, as evidenced by recent mis-selling scandals).

Now, I can't understand why the banks aren't making money.  Back in 'my day', banks and building societies could lend out around ten times the amount they held on deposit, on the basis that not everyone would want to draw on their investments at the same time.  So why, when the investments they're offering paltry returns on can generate multiple parcels of borrowing at a higher rate, are they crying poor?  Could it be something to do with needing to replenish the coffers of the investment arms they so irresponsibly decimated? - and which they are now so reluctant to separate from their high street business?

Make no mistake - Joe Average is paying for 'The 1%' to shaft him again and again.  Someone pass the KY.