Taking London Sightseeing to a Whole New Level

I was thrilled and privileged this morning to be invited by The London Helicopter to take a flight over our beautiful city on the day that MD Chris Mann and his welcoming team launched the UK’s first online helicopter sightseeing service from Battersea and Redhill.

 With attractions like the London Eye and now The Shard vying to lure tourists with ever more spectacular viewing platforms, the suggestion seems to be that the higher up you go, the more breathtaking the experience becomes. 

Well, yes and no …. 

Go too high up over central London - as you do when you come in to land following one of Heathrow's flight paths - and you may as well be flying over any other major city in the world, except for the distinctive shape of the Thames snaking far below you like the montage used for ‘Eastenders’.

But at the lower altitude of 1,000 feet, this new service achieves the Goldilocks Factor.  It’s ‘just right’ - not so high that you lose definition of the major landmarks and not so low that you’re obscured from putting the City layout into perspective.  It’s far more intimate and gives you a much wider scope, taking in as it does Greenwich/Docklands to the East and Putney/Wetlands to the West.

That’s not to belittle the fixed panoramic locations - as this service is meant to complement what’s already on offer by providing tourists with another option to bring London into line with the likes of New York, Las Vegas and Capetown - although I have to confess to feeling a little smug as I flew over those people below with inferior vantage points to mine.

And it’s not just for tourists …

Do you think you know London?  I thought I did.  I’m just about an authority on the sights when it comes to showing overseas visitors around and would go so far as to say that I have a better grasp of the roads and suburbs than I did of my native Brisbane.  Yet I was amazed by just how close places are in Greater London from the air - at one point I had three Premiership football grounds in view, with the Wembley Arena and the Olympic stadium in the distance.  A glance up the river from the Houses of Parliament and I could already see Canary Wharf looming large.

And if you’ve never been up in a helicopter, as I hadn’t until today, take comfort that it feels quite natural to take off and land in something that is essentially a familiar car cabin environment that flies.  Despite having bungee’d in the past, I once had a bit of vertigo looking down from the London Eye but felt none of this in the chopper - it somehow seems to cradle you by being suspended under the power source rather than being thrust forward in a giant metal cylinder like in a plane.

Loved it - a ‘must do’ for Londoners and tourists alike. 

For more information, visit The London Helicopter website or follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

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.