Monday 1 January 2018

Migration Advisory Committee call for evidence: International Students

Impact of International Students in the UK: 
Call for Evidence Responses - part 1 of 3 - page 217 from "Individual C" it says.

Introduction: some suggestions with reasons further-down.

https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2018/01/international-student-course.html
shows economics courses with worst student feedback getting most international students, and so making most money because some of the international fees are much higher.

This response is made without funding and without great short-term memory so it rambles under some of the headings. Thanks for patience in reading the bits that ramble, particularly because I've just written something quite rude and the theme continues. My name and address are at the end, with archive links to pages that caught the 26th January deadline for evidence to the Migration Advisory Committee.

Lobby data doesn't mention "crowding" or "full" next to student migration
The Greater London Authority changes it to "agglomeration"

Lobby data is commissioned by lobbyists from Oxford Economics or London Economics.

Crowding is my word for housing & transport overload that could be mentioned under most of the headings below. For housing, or tickets, or space in the congestion zone, or polluted air, or tiny bits of space shared with too many people. As someone who lives in a crowded city, I don't think it works very well. Any provider of services finds it expensive to hire staff and space in crowded inner cities, and so harder to run services. Meanwhile there are disproportionate needs for staff to run parts of the housing and transport systems at inefficient maximum capability, just as health and social care are run at maximum capacity everywhere. It would be good to read about why immigration is bad for cities that are full from the most full city - London - but any statements are hard to find.

The Greater London Authority publishes speeches from the Mayor and reports from GLA economics. Unfortunately they report what lobbyists tell them, except lobbyists don't mention "crowding" or "full", while the GLA mentions "agglomeration".

International students often take courses with bad feedback, in expensive areas like London

If both colleges closed, the world would be a happier place.
Both teach in the most expensive areas of London.
Both do a lot of business with government, for example through London Fashion Week, working with the Greater London Authority on the Queen Elizabeth Park Project, or teaching students on Chevening Scholarships, so governement departments could be making the problem worse or have a chance to make it better.

I don't have the spreadsheet data or the skill to link every course's feedback with the proportion of international students on that course. The data isn't free and I am not deft with spreadsheets, but the example of a troubled subject like economics at the colleges that take most international students, most often in financial subjects, could say something about all the other courses that international students do. By chance a lot of international students from the far east study at London College of Fashion and other University of the Arts colleges, putting them in the same league table of colleges with most international students which is nearly the same as the league table of colleges with least satisfied students, as you can see on (archived page)
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2018/01/international-student-course.html
Afterthought. 
When the Migration Advisory Committee published their report, with access to paid-for data and some quite nifty regression skills, they read the evidence a differently.
 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/739090/Impact_intl_students_annexes.pdf  gives the result in Annex D. The difference is partly that they measure satisfaction on the "overall" measure rather than "intellectually stimulating", and they measure all courses rather than the extreme ones like business studies courses in central London. Beyond, that, I have not quite caught-up.

How to help international students find better courses in cheaper areas.

The Higher Education Funding Council

could restrict funding to colleges that advertise badly abroad, and restrict funding to one or two colleges that work directly against the interests of UK taxpayers, UK students and UK manufacturing like London College of Fashion that ran a Creative Connexions project and published course material and case studies about fictional organisations related to Ethical Fashion Forum for the Department for International Development. I think that a record of publications that are untrue, and of hosting a Creative Connexions project  designed to reduce UK manufacturing, should be a big factor in whether the college gets further funding. I think London College of Fashion should not get further funding from UK taxpayers via the higher education funding council. I don't know if any can be clawed back.  

The Advertising Standards Authority

has already required six colleges to withdraw vague and misleading claims: https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/universities-comparative-claims.html  

The British Council

service to promote higher education can be changed to offer course advice rather than promoting colleges. I understand that the British Council is largely funded by the Foreign Office and it might get a Department for Business grant for this work. At the moment it offers an extra service to colleges that pay more. I think this should stop, because it encourages the promotion of colleges over courses and so promotes bad courses.

Home Office

visa application systems could have an online form with a few questions, to check that students know what syllabus they have applied to study, know the Unistats feedback and the relative housing costs, and have not seen too much vague language on the prospectus.
The form could ask prospective students to cut and paste the syllabus from Unistats or one of a list of sites that compile the data. The same idea could be taken much further and maybe staff at Unistats could advise how - for example a check that applicants know the common faults of each type of course according to impartial staff, who might say it doesn't lead to a job in the form applied-for and that some other combination is better, or graduates and drop-outs, who might say that it's boring or list things they wish they'd known when they applied. "London is expensive and anonymous". Things like that.

The Home Office could do this for all applications backed by colleges. The college would then have to tell the applicant how to fill-in the form, and avoid using vague words on their prospectus.

Foreign Office

"The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is once again the top destination for 2012/13 Chevening Scholars, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office has reported"  - LSE web site

Cease Chevening Scholarships to
  • economics courses that don't mention the welfare state, or
  • courses with bad student feedback or
  • courses taught in the most crowded areas.
The current system is that people from other countries get student grants which are not available to UK taxpayers, to learn how to mis-manage the system which UK taxpayers pay for, take-up space in city centres while they are doing it, and then go home to other countries and run them just as badly.They are part of the critical mass which keeps these awful courses open.

What impact does the payment

of migrant student fees

to the educational provider have?

  • Migrant fees from outside the EU are about double per head, with double impact.

  • Migrants are worse at choosing courses, so the worst course makes the most money.

Any other group of students who are easily-led or mis-led have the same bad effect, but students who pay double fees have a multiplied bad effect. Everybody looses including the student, home students sitting alongside, anyone who would benefit from better educated students, or another educational provider looking for students and a chance to do a better course that's more interesting to study or teach. So even the people who teach Economics 101 at London School of Economics suffer a bad impact from migrant students, because they loose a chance to teach a more interesting course in a cheaper area.

Social Insurance & Allied Services

Take the welfare state as an example of something probably not taught on the worst course like London School of Economics' Economics degree, but more interesting to teach at another course to more interested students in a cheaper area. The standard LSE course takes two years to get to the point, during which you are taught how to be a computer. Then in year three you can take various courses which don't include how to fund the welfare state. You can take a course in Game Theory but not how to keep a hospital open. That topic is banished to minor courses with more obscure names - maybe Public Administration nor something like that, as though you would know at the age of 18 to apply for a course in public administration and economics, if it exists.

If a course began with problems that other people face, told students what theories were available, and let them choose the relevant ones, then a lot of time would be saved, leaving time to teach what students wanted to study.

I think this bad teaching influences our politicians. If you ask one how to fund the NHS, they don't know what to say. The Prime Minister was caught with the question and said "people are getting older", and I doubt many prime ministers could have answered better. A bit like a rocket scientist saying "it just goes pop and there's mess everywhere". Or a brain surgeon.

What are the fiscal impacts of migrant students, (including student loan arrangements)?

Crowding costs are the obvious urgent problem, but not mentioned in lobby data.

I think the fiscal cost of public services rises more per head as crowding increases, as a curve, so it is less per head in Lampeter and more per head in London. I think the data funded by lobby groups via Oxford Economics or London Economics is silent here, as you would expect. London Economics does do some work to try and price public services per head in different constituencies, but only has two zones for health spending, and has a theory that some categories of public spending are much higher in Wales for example, so I don't think their figures help and they don't state how the figures are worked-out.
.

Take housing.

Housing is more expensive to manage if it is scarce and expensive than if nobody cares about a months’ vacancy or qualification for a special needs waiting list. There used to be some hotels around Argyle Square and Gower Street that might take a guest on housing benefit and advertised in Loot. I expect the guest had to be convincing at some kind of interview and provide lots of ID, but they did it, making a lot of social housing provision unnecessary. Now that housing benefit is harder to get and housing costs in Camden are about the highest in the UK, I doubt you can still get a hotel room on housing benefit. Gower Street is also the main address for London University; prices round Gower Street and Camden and London are increased by London University's trade

Take transport.

I guess rail journeys cost more per ticket at capacity than at half capacity. Signaling, unsocial hours, and emergencies cost more at full capacity. Journeys cost more than the ticket price if one emergency stops a line from working for an hour, as they do in central London. As the limits to capacity are tested, it becomes clear that money cannot buy more tube tunnels, cubic meters of air to disperse exhaust fumes, linear meters of traffic lane or parking space, seats in existing transport, miles of commute that commutes are willing to endure. There are congestion charges in London but some streets are still too polluted by EU standards. So all services in central London have to beat the cost of harder deliveries and harder commutes. And transport is one of the more measurable factors, along with housing prices.

There are plenty of less measurable fiscal costs to the numbers of public sector staff needed, the stress to them, the cost of staff turnover or bad staff, and the fiscal cost of extra wages paid to make-up. The fact that shortage occupations include emergency medicine and old-age psychiatry suggest, in part, that not enough people are trained but they also suggest that not enough people want the job at any wage after a few years in post, quite likely because of strains related to overcrowding, lack of social care in overcrowded areas, high staff turnover among colleagues, and so-on.

Take lobby data about international students: a repeated point

Lobbyists fund data.
Universities UK finds reports from Oxford Economics; other lobbyists fund London Economics. Lobbyists want taxpayer funding or student fees, so they don’t pay for data about overcrowding and its fiscal costs, obviously. Not obvious to elected mayors of London or ministers, but obvious. Mayors and ministers have a puppy-like enthusiasm for trotting-out this stuff out in speeches after going on a visit and shaking someone's hand.

So as taxpayers, we read claims of benefits and have to un-pick them, un-paid, to state the costs to officials & politicians. If we send these opinions in, as I did to Sadiq Khan about a different way of funding London Fashion Week, we might get an acknowledgement from their secretaries, or might not, and then we see their next speech with the puppy-like enthusiasm for lobby data because I suppose they have met someone in person and shaken their hand and believed every word.

The Mayor of London uses taxes to fund some economists directly. Their office is called GLA Economics. I hoped they would have a report on crowding of housing and transport, and so the need to have less visitors to London as students or tourists or arts audience or lured-in tech employees or any other category.

https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/research-and-analysis/economy-and-employment/
https://data.london.gov.uk/gla-economics/
This is an example report:
https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/research-and-analysis/economy-and-employment/economic-evidence-base-london-2016
Their web site does mention rising population, pollution, an a graph of median earnings falling against housing costs over time. This looks like an argument for less crowding.

Next to these chapters are other pages about the need to bring more business and visitors into London: an argument for more crowding. This is the clash between evidence and policy that I do not understand, and seems so blatant that I do not know how to argue against it except by stating the obvious point about over-crowding under every heading. On a closer look, it seems that the mayor has come back from a lobby meeting, dropped-in to the GLA Economics office, and told economists to cross-out "crowding" or "full" and write "agglomeration". I have the odd quote below.

Fiscal cost of crowding:

(could be repeated under "how much money ... spending ... impact ... regional")

This is the most important point and could sit under several headings, including fiscal costs of governing an over-crowded expensive town like London with staff on Inner London Weighting, Congestion charges, long commutes, excessive staff turnover, extra services like traffic control and congestion charging, extra costs of running services over without spare capacity for housing or social care, and so-on. Some of this is a personal cost to the person who tries to work for Haringay Social Services or such; some of it is cost to the taxpayer, and some is cost to the people who try to use these creaky services run by temps from all over the place. I pick that example because it is described in the Victoria Climbie Enquiry's report.

The briefing paper notes a report on education healthcare and social services spending, which are not much used by people of student age.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/257236/impact-of-migration.pdf

I think it's obvious that the crowding ads to the cost of those services. They have to be run without enough beds, bedsits, flats, transport seats, meters of traffic lane, parking spaces, or cubic meters of air to disperse exhaust fumes. This makes each service, from social care to education to housing, more slow and stressful to manage. There is a congestion charge. There are 24 hour traffic monitors trying to keep traffic moving even so, and people working full-time on the cameras that catch people on certain yellow box junctions when the traffic jam strands them there. All these extra public services have fiscal costs, even if those costs are funded by traffic fines or tickets

Meanwhile, reports from lobby groups have nothing to say.
Oxford Economics mention no costs, if I remember right. I have linked to the part of their report that states working methods. http://bit.ly/reportmethods

London Economics does mention some costs or "fiscal impacts". One of their reports costs public costs and benefits by parliamentary constituency, and if there is a vital part that I have missed it is in how they cost public services per head in Westminster or Coleraine or West Highlands. Their main report is more national.

Costs of Hosting International Students
⦁ Funding Council Teaching Grants
⦁ Costs of Student Support
⦁ The Other Public Costs of Hosting International Students
⦁ Total
⦁ Other Public Costs for Students and Dependents

This is the only lobby data I have seen which mentions higher costs in Gower Street, Camden, London, than in Coleraine or West Highlands. The calculation is rough, and opaque. It calculates that health costs £729 in some regions and £529 in others - there are only two bands. General public services are cheap in London, it estimates, at £84 compared to £159 in Wales. The calculation is kept private. So I don't think that lobby data helps any more than GLA Economics in making sense of the cost of crowding

.

Fiscal cost of scholarships to international students:

Most international students are over-charged by the colleges, but some are subsidised by the taxpayer through scholarships, I understand, even though the same taxpayer no longer gets a student grant themselves.
Source
https://study-uk.britishcouncil.org/options/scholarships-financial-support.
The Great China scholarship fund is worth a million pounds says and the Great India scholarship fund looks similar. There is an EU Erasmus program which I don't understand. The Chevening Fund is for students "personally selected" by British embassies "Funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and partner organisations", meaning that it is funded by removing money from the welfare state.
A million pounds pays for 1890 average peoples' health costs a year at the lower rate, according to London Economics prices, but Oxford Economics says that this is only a tiny percentage of the public service funded by taxes on international students' spending. For example they spend a lot on transport - London Economics has a pictogram. They have to spend a lot on transport because some of them have courses held in London's Oxford Street. I am getting confused.

If you are not a courtier but just live in the UK and pay taxes, I understand that you can only get a student loan for fees and maintenance, charged at 7%, repayable in installments if you ever earn an average income. The government pays interest at a much lower rate, but does not pass-on the saving and ministers have stated that the scheme makes no money; it makes a big mark-up but the system is expensive to run and a lot of people don't ever make an average wage with which to repay their student loan.


Fiscal cost of unraveling the statements

There is no government grant for un-ravelling the statements made by Oxford Economics or London Economics for public-funded organisations that want more taxpayers' money. I think that's a bit unfair because they use taxpayers' money to pay for the reports:

"The economic activity and employment sustained by international students’ subsistence spending generated £1 billion in tax revenues in 2014–15 – equivalent to the salaries of 31,700 nurses or 25,000 police officers"
http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2017/economic-impact-international-students-final-WEB.pdf

London Economics did similar research for one sponsor and something called the "Higher Education Policy Institute", (registered charity number 1099645) named to confuse by the look of it. They ran a dinner event with the title "challenger institutions: useful competition or unhelpful disruption?" and invited a minister or MP along. So they are probably the same bunch as the other sponsor, Kaplan, which is a crammer that wants to be called a University and gets a fiscal subsidy for the PR by calling it a charity.

London Economics' account of jobs created does not mention jobs lost as a result of so many students studying bad courses in crowded places. London Economics' estimate might make sense at Coleraine in Northern Ireland, or the West Highlands, or in County Durham. Areas where there are empty bedsits, and if this isn't always true, then the less measurable claims of benefit make-up. Maybe students add variety and connections and bring skills, or maybe they make businesses viable that would otherwise not be viable, such as cheap clubs and venues that local people can also use. Unfortunately I think that most areas are more crowded than this.

The most crowded area is London if you measure by property prices.

Universities UK's report from Oxford Economics quotes this about London:
 £1327m      off-campus expenditure
 £2.714bn    export earnings.
 8,855       jobs created by spending (it doesn't say on or off campus)

There are no notes and queries attached, which is a worry.

A politician or a civil servant could simply take these figures as given. Just as a lot take the cliches as given - "world class", for example. Manchester University economics students have noted the lack of critical thinking allowed on one of the very courses that attracts a lot of international students and supplies graduates to the civil service or parliament.

I doubt any of these figures helps.

Off campus expenditure would be spent by other people in London who would be allowed-in if international students were not there. The people priced-out, who commute-in. They would also be less tired and more enterprising, maybe talking to children more or sleeping or doing a more fun job with lower prospects or earnings or hanging around clubs and bars and venues. People who do whatever common people do.


Fiscal benefit of VAT and other taxes on the supply chain for off-campus spending

This requires modelling that is not easy for most of us to challenge although I would welcome a chance if there's any need for specific feedback, or if anyone with more up-do-date skills wants to do it with me.
http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2017/the-economic-impact-of-universities.pdf
... is the report commissioned by a lobby group
... http://bit.ly/reportmethods is the part that quotes their reporting methods
including student loan arrangements?
(I don't know any relevant evidence to send to the migration advisory committee.

There could be a chance for UK students to build their student loan into the state national insurance scheme, so that, if they have a high income throughout their lives, maybe they get a state pension years later than someone who has worked in mining from the age of 16 for example.
It is frustrating that UK government cannot afford student grants to people in the UK, but does grant them to people in China or India as part of a scholarship scheme, and does still grant research work to universities in large amounts)

Do migrant students help support employment in educational institutions?

Crowding can be mentioned under each heading,

...such as long commutes or high local housing costs.

How much money do migrant students spend in the national, regional and local economy and what is the impact of this?

Crowding can be mentioned under each heading.

Housing spending will crowd-out other potential users of the land, or the specific floor space if students rent privately.
Transport spending will raise the congestion charge, or crowd–out other users of public transport

How do migrant students affect the educational opportunities available to UK students?

To what extent does the demand from migrant students for UK education dictate the supply of that education provision and the impact of this on UK students?

I take these together, under Quantity, where I state that I'm confused, and Quality, where I state some examples that come-around again other other questions.

Quantity.

A couple of reports note international demand for courses otherwise harder to run.

So far as the quantity of teaching goes, I think the reports make sense, but they have not said why these courses lack a critical mass of home students - maybe because of faults in schools or bad choices made by prospective students, or lack of wealth among home students.

Quantity of numerate home applicants - overlapping with points about quality

If UK schools don't provide numerate applicants for courses, there is a work-around:
"Abandoning Economics because of an inadequate supply of numerate applicants ignores the availability of first-year modules to improve students’ mathematical skills, something which universities are expected to do much more now" - A Management School for Keele, 2009, Keele University and College Union, p38

Better still, there could also be ways of teaching a technical course with mathematics taught in context, as needed, to solve real problems, rather than taught for its own dry sake in the first two years of the course, including maths that doesn't get used.

Puzzlement


The reports suggest that post-graduate study is strategically important. But. How could home students possibly afford it? Why aren't their first degrees sufficient to teach them to study by themselves without further help? What does it mean for their job prospects when applicants from wealthy backgrounds have two degrees and they only have one? Does a first degree get dumbed-down and un-critical in a college where so many students are postgraduates? Do the conventional wisdoms about how the world works get influenced by the wealthy. international backgrounds of so many students? How does an employer distinguish between a rich but useless person with two degrees and poor useful person with one degree? Who empties the bins while so many young fit people are on courses?

Lobby reports don't clarify, despite repeating their point often.

"Graduates entering employment predominantly move into management, banking and finance and the civil service.", according to University College London economics department, and I find that rather frightening when I think of the problems of economics teaching in the UK.

I simply quote some paragraphs, to show the arguments I mean, before moving-on to

A further benefit for UK HEIs from the presence of international students has been cited as their role in achieving critical mass for teaching on some courses, including some which may have declined in popularity with home students. In some STEM subjects especially, the proportion of international students may be relatively high in some institutions, and without the presence of those students the course would become unsustainable, thereby reducing the range of courses available to UK students at certain institutions. The make-up of some course groups reported by the alumni supported this view. Any such reductions of course availability could have potential long-term impact on the UK stock of strategic skills.
These issues also arise in relation to postgraduate research study.
- BIS (2013) The wider benefits of international higher education in the UK
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-higher-education-in-the-uk-wider-benefits

The same point is made for Universities UK by Oxford Economics several times in different parts of their report
International student fee income accounted for 13% of sector income in 2013–14, and demand from international students can support the provision of certain strategically- important subjects in the UK (eg engineering, technology and computer science, particularly at postgraduate level where around half of all students are from outside the EU).
Universities UK (2014) International Students in Higher Education
http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2014/international-students-in-higher-education.pdf

Quality: I said this under "impact" but it could just a well go here,

  • Migrant fees are about double home fees if non-EU, so have double the impact.

  • Migrants are worse at choosing courses, so the worst course makes the most money.

Any other group of students who are easily-led or easily mis-led have the same bad effect. Everybody looses including the student, home students sitting alongside, anyone who would benefit from better educated students, or another educational provider looking for students.

Take one example. Economics students are often not trained in how to fund the welfare state. That syllabus is banished to an obscure degree subject called Public Administration. So, if you ask an MP about funding the NHS, they don't know what to say. The Prime Minister was caught with the question and said "people are getting older", and I doubt any of the last few prime ministers could have answered any better.

There is a table of data showing economics course feedback scores for the colleges with most international students, showing that most have the worst student feedback.https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2018/01/international-student-course.html (26/1/18 )


International students choose by college rather than by course

A student might decide to study economics, and then choose a college by things like a web site that says "world class", "foremost", "vibrant buzz", rather than checking what kind of syllabus the college teaches and how satisfied previous students were. Politicians seem to make the same mistake in allowing business deals with these colleges and quoting their lobbyists word for word.
One graduate, Pok Wong, is taking Anglia Ruskin University to court over its false claims of graduate employment prospects, and the Advertising Standards Authority has required six universities to change their prospectuses, according to https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/student-anglia-ruskin-university-mickey-mouse-degree-pok-wong-tuition-fees-a8250441.html 
The colleges and The British Council advertise by college rather than by course.  And international students say that they choose by college rather than by course. The Survey of Graduating International Students found that "recognition of UK qualifications, the university reputation and the language" were important. On the other hand, there was no question about the course itself, so a different survey might get a different result.
http://www.cpc.ac.uk/docs/2017_SoGIS_Technical_Report.pdf

I guess that home student applicants choose by college rather than course as well, but are getting more sophisticated with help from Unistats and the spin-off private sector sites, and other students' own rueful feedback scores on courses like LSE Economics. In a way, students are getting a vote about how their courses are going to be run. Meanwhile, more and more institutions are getting degree-awarding powers. The parental role of institutions in trying to provide courses that applicants should apply-for is replaced by a market force to provide what the student does apply-for, and maybe regrets later. Like a very boring course in how to be an astronaut, which doesn't lead to an astronaut job at the end because it doesn't teach how to make a space ship. There are lots of courses like that. Fashion design for example.

Engineering or Computer Science courses

I wrote a blog post called "star courses" about the courses with the worst student feedback and the least related employment for graduates. One such was a group of Portsmouth University graduates in Petroleum Engineering, if I remember right, who did not have the resources to drill for oil once they had left the university at the age of 22 with no savings. I don't know of any survey which says why so many Portsmouth Petroleum graduates have poor job prospects, but guess there's a common theme in most of them that the scale of operation, and the technical tools, make it hard to apply the skills except by getting one of the rare jobs on an oil rig at the other end of the UK.

On the other hand, there are shortage occupations for the more technical product designers. So there is a problem to be un-picked about how some engineering courses are popular because they help get a job, some are unpopular in hindsight because they don't get a job, and what can be done.

If I could find the lobby quote, I think it would say that international students help "particularly at post graduate level"  and I have to ask: why can't they study at home without paying fees to a college? Maybe they loose more than most.

Some examples of courses which get a lot of international students and a lot of bad student feedback.

Leeds College of Health, circa 1996.

I was myself on a distance learning course, advertised as part of Leeds University but in fact run by Leeds College of Health, a mental health training organisation which was unable to provide any contact at all with tutors, and lost its last one, I think while I was on the course. I think it collapsed at that point. (A successor organisation exists for addiction studies and it, too, has closed to new students "following a review" - http://www.lau.org.uk/training/courses.htm I find it un-nerving that Leeds University still allows its name to be used by some related organisation )

What I noticed was that most of the distance learning students were from Pakistan, and another large proportion were paid-for by a health trust in Yorkshire. I suspect that these two groups of students were less likely to complain, and less likely to know what to expect, than a self-funded student. I suspect that's why the course survived as long as it did and my chances of study were reduced instead of increased, because someone could have set-up a proper college and I could have found it if Leeds College of Health had never existed. And so the demand from those migrant students and employer-funded students reduced the supply of education to me, with a bad impact on how well I did my job and on my job prospects. Current unistats data would single-out the course and force closure a little sooner than in 2002.

Manchester University Economics degree, quoted in 2013

http://www.rethinkeconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Economics-Education-and-Unlearning.pdf
100% of marks awarded by multiple choice exam for both Principles modules in first year.
UK Micro and Macro have 90% awarded by multiple choice exams and the other 10% is an essay. However, this essay is only 1,000 words long and students get 100% for handing it in on time. This means that many students don’t widely research the topic or fully engage with the material.
Micro and Macro Principles are a delivery of neoclassical theory and students are expected to learn the theory by rote.
There is no mention of what school of thought is being taught or that there are any other schools of thought. It is presented as facts about the world which leads to the possibility of students believing that these ideas represent indisputable truths


The largest recruiter of overseas students - UCL - now claims to have improved its syllabus:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0917/180917-core-economics-teaching
The news has not reached their page on the complete university guide for 2018 admission
https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/courses/details/16439574.

If graduates are produced who don't look things up or think things through, and haven't quite got the right skills for self-employment, there must be an effect on the demand for graduates. One measure of this, I think, is the number of people who do post-graduate courses that I know very little about.

Example of bad quality offered to international students:
University of the Arts London College of Fashion Footwear degree

Last I heard, Clarks asks students to design some prototype uppers each year, but not the soles because those require engineering which the college doesn't teach. Meanwhile, one of the shortage occupations is "product development engineer; product design engineer" under an engineering heading.

Anecdotal examples that human rights and democracy are not much mentioned by
Lobbying of mayors such as Khan: " It's great that so many people want to come to London to study fashion". I disagree, but the effect of un-democratic lobbying is greater, I think, than the democratic pressure to make london a less crowded place to live,

What is the impact of migrant students on the demand for

⦁ housing provision

⦁ transport (particularly local transport)

⦁ health provision


Crowding is the main point here.

The Planning Act prevents building to meet demand; Britain is overcrowded in most places. British manufacturing shrank more than manufacturing in similar countries, I think, during a period of high exchange rates from 1979-2009. That left the jobs disproportionately in the areas where service industries are common, rather than in Belfast or Tyneside

So there is a lot of overcrowding in London, quite a lot in most areas, and just a few tiny bits like Coleraine or West Highlands where migrants are a help.

Extra crowding, I believe, can only add to fiscal costs, even without thinking of data.
If taxes have to pay for roads, for example, then they might as well pay for rails, and so there is a fiscal cost to peoples' long commutes to London. There is the fiscal cost of running transport very near to full capacity, with the extra traffic monitoring work that has to be done, and the cost to travelers of the congestion charge. There are fiscal costs of a less efficient workforce, more stressed and tired because of long commutes.
The fiscal costs of housing rise with over-crowding too I think. There is the fiscal cost of housing benefit has to rise with rent. Emergency housing schemes like council homeless persons units have to make extra use of hostels and B&Bs to house homeless people because more suitable space is not available, and increased rough-sleeping because people who are willing and able to use a room or a hostel space on housing benefit are not able to find one.

The fiscal costs of running public services have to be higher in a crowded area. The market price for a care assistant from an agency is likely to be higher in London. People on formal public sector pay scales are likely to be on London Weighting or Inner London Weighting.

Transport specifically: stating the obvious


GLA economics publishes an estimate of the numbers of people who commute between regions, mainly in-bound, mainly long-distance, mainly to London. It is a big estimate.

GLA also publishes numbers of London international students.

Both figures have the same number of noughts after them; they are the same order of magnitude. So if there were no international students in London next year, and no home students filled their places, there would be a lot less commuting.

Housing specifically: stating the obvious


a general point based on easily-available data from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23234033, which maps UK housing costs.

One bed flats in Camden range from £1,457 to £1,625 mid-market to £1,842 for more expensive Westminster and Kensington are slightly more expensive. Generally, the cluster of institutions that attract overseas students have their central buildings in Camden and central London.

The example I looked at - Footwear design at London College of Fashion - has a library and teaching space above British Home Stores in Oxford Street, and uses a former school at Golden Lane in Islington. One of their halls of residence - Cordwainers Court in Shoreditch.- sounds as though it is one of the fixed assets sponsored by past generations to help UK shoemakers study.

  "Standard rooms (shared bathroom) are £154 per week for 42-week tenancies, (£6,468 in total) and £150 per week for 50-week tenancies (£7,500). These rooms are approximately 12 m2"

I don't think economists need to add-up all the rent paid by students and declare it a good thing, arguing that it trickles-around the rest of the economy.

A general point about crowding-out by study as well as tourism and arts


I think that the opportunity cost of this space being used in such an overcrowded part of London is that other rental is crowded-out, just as tourist hotels crowd-out other people from London, or the Royal Opera crowds-out people from London with the bad effects of homelessness, high housing costs, long commutes, and a reduction in variety of London services which is hard to explain economically, but seems associated with high rents. I don't think this would matter if the students
⦁ enjoyed their courses,
⦁ got value for money by being stretched, stimulated, interested, career qualified etc
⦁ benefit the rest of us as much as anyone else who might end-up in central London.
The evidence I can see points the other way on each point.

The London College of Fashion charge for overseas students is £17,500 a year, which is a lot for a course that doesn't teach you to run a shoe factory, learned alongside UK students paying £9,000.

In contrast, there are two shortage occupations on the home office list - "2126 ... product development engineer, product design engineer" which are in demand as well as "2219.... prosthetist". These similar skills are clearly not much taught at London College of Fashion, or hard to practice after graduating with the skills taught, or they would not be shortage occupations.

What impacts have migrant students had on changes to tourism and numbers of visitors to the UK?

Crowding needs a mention under every heading.

There is no room on the Piccadilly Line for more tourists at rush hour.
Most areas of the UK are overcrowded and short of housing, and migrant students study in the most overcrowded areas with the least housing, so if they increase tourism, it might well be in the areas that have too much tourism like London.

Reports including The Value of Fashion by Oxford Economics list extra visitors to London prompted by London Fashion Week. Each extra visitor causes more crowding on the tube.

What role do migrant students play in extending UK soft power and influence abroad?

Long after the close of the call for evidence, I read how nasty and expensive the visa application process has been: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-pernicious-politics-of-immigration.html

Combine that with the extortionate fees charged to non-EU students, and you are likely to disgruntle some of the applicants. The worst example is applicants who got a place at London Metropolitan University, took part of the course after paying high fees, and were then given 60 days' notice to leave and a "task force", whatever that is. I doubt any of these students crop-up in research about graduates' warm feelings towards the UK because they are not easily tracable via facebook links provided by an alumni office - one of the methods used to research the role migrant students play in extending UK soft power and influence abroad. Nor do any or the people who apply for a visa and don't get one, but think they are over-charged or badly treated. Or people who drop-out.

The question could be re-framed: how can UK government services be fairer and nicer to people abroad? How can our government not offend people for the wrong reasons?

Getting back to Department for Business research, I found the results unclear.

The Department for Business research asks about their interest in "british goods" and "british brands" interchangeably.

Goods made in Britain are good for the economy, helping money circulate and providing a wider range of UK jobs to job applicants who want a wider range of jobs.

British brands may not even be owned in Britain and are unlikely to be made in the UK.

The research found no great take-up of either goods or brands by graduates, but the interchangeable use of both words suggests the problem: international students are not keen on a society in which taxes are earned to pay for public services.

I think there is potential for greater benefits among the fifteen categories listed. If every migrant student had to understand the principal of national insurance and similar schemes, the faults of countries without such schemes, and the difficult of trading between the two kinds of country, then I think more of the worlds' countries would reduce poverty sooner and fewer would compete unfairly with the UK.

There are fifteen categories of soft power listed on one report, without much evidence available for success or failure in any of the fifteen categories, so to avoid rambling I say nothing more.

If migrant students take paid employment while they are studying, what types of work do they do?

?

What are the broader labour market impacts of students transferring from Tier 4 to Tier 2 [student visa to ex-student visa with rights to apply for skilled work related to the course] including

- on net migration and

?

- on shortage occupations?

Shortage Occupations:
need for research on why they are unpleasant jobs, and spending on solutions already known

I think each shortage occupation deserves research on why it is such an unpleasant job that not enough people want to do it for long enough, or to train to do it, even when the pay is high and job agencies have the vacancy ready to fill. Not quite an answer to this consultation, but a point worth making. In some cases, like emergency medicine, I think the answer is well-known. A lack of social care, mental health services, and hospital capacity make the job frustrating and stressful. The answer is clearly to spend less on another shortage occupation - classical dancers and choreographers - and more on social care or mental health services.

There is clearly a need for NHS managers to know more about why nursing is an unpleasant job, I am told by a nurse. She says the clinical nurse specialist job is turned into a production-line job with one diagnosis and one small role and no chance to use experience and training. I don't know what more junior nurses on shift work in wards think, but it is worth asking.

I used to do social work social work jobs and found them, the line managers, and the offices a little bit like the ones described in the Victoria Climbie Enquiry.
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/victoria-climbi_-inquiry
It strikes me that if there is some way for a course to test whether a social worker is intelligent and honest, that should be the only sort of course to justify a student visa.

I think social work is an unusual job in that the people who most think they can do it are the least good at it. So the current system by which rather desperate marginal universities will give anyone  a chance is not a good system; it gives a false confidence and career advantage to the least able. A bit like the masters degrees in public administration done by more senior social workers who want to run departments.

I knew a social worker on a postgraduate course at Kingston Uni who was shocked by the other people on the course, and thought that they were just interested in the job for the power. Maybe they were the same people who cropped-up a year or two later at the Victoria Climbie Enquiry, with their effect of making the job unattractive to saner applicants.

Suppose there is a country where it is more often hard to judge whether student visa applicants could become social workers with these qualities...
  • polite in UK terms, not giving direct instructions to the client
  • respect the idea of an insurance like service pre-paid by the client through taxes,
  • help where possible instead of just assessing, for example in looking up benefits rules or fitting a stair rail

    and are

  • intelligent,
  • honest,
  • able to look things up with a history of doing it, able to do it at an interview
  • able to think-through messy problems and simplify what if anything can be done.
I wrote "suppose", but if there is a country where student visa applicants are harder to judge, where a college might get an applicant who is just plain barmy, then visas should not be allocated in that country, even if some applicants are perfectly good. Until someone can devise some extra special tests to allow the sensible ones to get a visa.

Ideally, social work employers would know how to select job candidates. That wasn't the case at Harringay Social Services when they hired Carole Baptiste. If the Migration Advisory Committee can find out where Carole Baptiste or other employees of Haringay Social Services got their qualifications, I think that would be a good piece of work and help to prevent bad social work courses from running in future - I write with sympathy for the social worker at the bottom of the management hierachy, on whom everything was first blamed, who got no commitment from any of her bosses to give opinions or help or even run an office or write a sensible job contract.

Whether, and to what extent, migrant students enter the labour market, when they graduate and what types of post-study work do they do?

?

In addition, the MAC would like to receive evidence about what stakeholders think would happen in the event of there no longer being a demand from migrant students for a UK education.

The economy...


Other exports would have to increase


The effect would be the same as an end to any other export, such as oil or financial services.

The pound would fall until some some other export - something else - became more competitive and made-up, which would quite likely be goods rather than services because easily traded. Import substitution would work the same way. For example, I have just bought a cheap car tyre which was probably from Asia. If the pound falls a lot lower, I might be offered a UK-made re-tread next time.

Government can make exports easier


There is no list of “something else”; there is no directory of UK manufacturers taken from income tax & VAT data. Manufactures are at a disadvantage compared to educators, who's degree courses are all neatly arranged online. Such lists can't be compiled for manufacturers from tax data, because the Revenue and Customs Act restricts use of tax data for other purposes. Government can make exports easier by changing the law and helping directories of UK manufacturers get the most complete possible data. At the moment it's easier to log-on to Alibaba and find a footwear company in China than it is to find one in the UK, which will probably be very lean, keep a low profile, and stick to some niche market.

I think an advantage to manufacturing exports over service exports is that they tend to export from regions that have lower property prices, shorter commutes, no congestion zones, and less crowded public transport. Whether people enjoy manufacturing jobs is another question - it depends on the person and the job - but other advantages are clear.
  • The effect on the local economy of any crowded part of the UK, such as London, would be to reduce crowding.
  • And the effect on remaining students would be increased integration
.

The effect on students:
UK students might integrate with each other more


English schools are not designed to integrate different types of English pupil. An increasing number are faith schools. A proportion are private, and a higher proportion of university students are privately educated. The private schools have a contingent of pupils from overseas. Anecdotally, the schools that retain a little capacity for boarding find it filled mainly with pupils from Asia. My old boarding school, Wellington College, now has a branch in China. So an ex boarder from Wellington like myself at the age of 18 would know more about wealthier Chinese people than people in the council school down the road. I expect that there is some self-censorship among people at Wellington about human rights abuses in China, the lack of democracy there, and the difficulty of a country with no welfare state trying to trade with a country that has one. That last point might not even be stated, and if I went from Wellington to a college like University of the Arts with its big Chinese student population, the pattern would be repeated. If I went on to become Chancellor of the Exchequer I might sign trade deals and encourage ownership of nuclear power stations and airports that don't seem to be in the interest of the UK.

When I was 19, the differences between people at college were to do with class, region, skills, and different kinds of shared general knowledge. People had done quite well at ignoring religion in order to make it go away. Now, there is increasing segregation on religious grounds that also happen to be racial but also show in the wearing of veils, the avoidance of alcohol, and I suspect sexism, homophobia and mis-treatment of animals. there's also a resurgence in Catholic faith schools. I hope that students at UK universities find-out more about segregated groups just as previous generations found out about people from different classes, and I guess this is more likely if there are more people from the UK in each university.

Future MPs might learn a little more about people in the UK


I am constantly surprised by the way MPs seem to know very little about the country where they stand for parliament, assuming that local people are mainly interested in the issues around them (Susan Kramer MP at a public meeting), or that they prefer points to be expressed as emotions rather than arguments (David Lammy MP on Genfell), or that ordinary people cannot understand economic arguments. As a result, populists are left to make the popular arguments. If UK school children and students were better integrated, I think that would help the ones who become MPs be better MPs.


An example is TTIP free trade agreement that Hilary Clinton was in favour of, as was Cameron, without thinking it worth debating or important. The presumption was that ordinary people don't need to be told what graduates and post-graduates have worked-out for them. A big indicator of voting for Trump was being a non-graduate. A big election issue was that he's interested in industry, and spots any unfairness of trade with China.


An example is Brexit. A big indicator of voting Brexit was being a non-graduate. Graduate MPs seemed to have trouble catching-up with the issues of migration between very different countries, and of the cost of belonging to the EU organisation. So populists made the arguments instead.


An example is Ethical Fashion Forum, Creative Connexions, Making it Ethically in China, and the cluster of related activity. The cluster was funded in secret, with Ethical Fashion Forum miraculously getting a chance to exhibit at The Crafts Council and the V&A with help from the British Council as well as getting funded by Business Link to give lectures on how to run a business. Officials met in ministries and worked-out with Futerra Communications how to set-up something that looked like "social proof", as Futerra put it, rather than a project by Hilary Benn MP at the Department for International Development and then Defra. The presumption, again, is that non-graduates wouldn't understand the need to close UK manufacturing.

(Something similar is likely to happen again: Nike have a "nothing like a Londoner" ad campaign, which suggests that their sponsored department at London College of Fashion has cooked something up with the Greater London Authority.)

I think that if future MPs mixed more with other UK students at university, they might be less surprised and surprising.

Effect on London and crowded areas: increased diversity


"International students bring many benefits to the UK, which have been well articulated in recent years: they bring diversity to campus life and enhance the student experience for ‘home’ students" - Oxford Economics for Universities UK (2014) International Students and Higher Education

I don't know where to find evidence for increased uniformity in expensive, gentrified areas like London. A reduction in music clubs, gay bars, odd ethnic restaurants, and independent businesses. A reduction in things that people can only do if they pay low rent. A tendency of councils and development agencies to try and gentrify deliberately in underhand ways. I think the evidence for this is often anecdotal; I don't know where to look for something quantitative.

If a lot of London colleges closed, I am sure that would slow the increase in London living costs and I hope that would be good for diversity.


impact of migrant students depending on the institution and/or subject being studied –

do different subjects and different institutions generate different impacts?

Suppose there were no more non-EU international students next year.

I think that would be a relief in overcrowded cities like London, but a worry to institutions with most non-EU students like the LSE, London College of Fashion, and their lobbyists.

There would be an immediate drop in income from non-EU students' higher fees, forcing a reduction in back-office and facilities spending on things like lobbying politicians, applying for research grants less likely to be received, paying lawyers to fend-off complainants, vice chancellors' salaries, as well as more obvious facilities. The institutions claiming to be most impoverished would find a lot of money for lobbying: meetings, marches, letters to The Times, speeches in Parliament, but real people wouldn't notice any difference. Colleges that take a lot of home students have, a lot of them, already shrunk a lot since trying to charge £9,000+ fees, so the process is nothing new.

There would be immediate cuts in provision of courses which are not much applied-for by UK students, like business studies in central London, and most of the courses would not be missed. Other courses would have to compete for less qualified and more picky home students, for example by responding to student feedback to get better Unistats results. Only 37% of LSE economics students think the college takes any notice of student feedback at the moment. London College of  Fashion doesn't offer any workshop space to use by the hour or cheap practical training for selling shoes.

I think that courses in expensive areas which get bad student feedback would close more than ones in cheaper areas with good student feedback, so the likes of Coventry University would continue to grow while LSE might shrink. Home students wanting to study in central London would have more choice because of lower entry requirements. At the moment, you have to study rather intensely as a teenager to get the A-level results for a place at LSE, and it would be good if that changed.

Benefits to Londoners of less competition for central government grants

A report on the London Development Agency began by saying how many billions of pounds it had spent over several years, but that worklessness remained a problem in London. The same can be said of education funding. The cuckoo organisations claim large amounts of money from one arm of government or another - such as the Higher Education Funding Council - but there is no adult education course to help londoners sell their stuff on a Wordpress site with options to try Magento Prestashop or Drupal. There is huge expenditure by the Greater London Authority and the Department for Business on London Fashion Week, but few courses for Londoners who want to learn how to set-up a clothes factory or a shoe factory, and, if they did, some of the factory space was knocked down for the Olympics. It would be good if a new generation of fashion and footwear colleges worked by supplying factory space and training any users who wanted to be trained.

If the large lobbying cuckoo-like organisations had less money to bid for more grants and to lobby, I think there might be more money for other things. 


Some examples could be headed "closing this course would increase happiness all-round and raise more tax at the same time".

This expands on examples made above under other questions, headed "quality"
How do migrant students affect the educational opportunities available to UK students?
To what extent does the demand from migrant students for UK education dictate the supply of that education provision and the impact of this on UK students?
I answered with example paragraphs about Leeds College of Health trading as Leeds University, Manchester University Economics Degree, and London College of Fashion, which comes-up under several headings.

Fiscal cost of damage done by badly educated scholars: a strange example

One graduate obtained funding from the Department for International Development, that also co-operated very closely with London College of Fashion so that it was difficult to see where her project, called Ethical Fashion Forum, began and where London College of Fashion ended.

The graduate claimed to be a dress importer with a business called "Juste", and author of a book called "Can Fashion be Fair?", as well as an award winning architect. On a closer look, it turns-out that "Juste" was a college project that never traded, run as evidence to be awarded a taught masters degree in international development by Oxford Brooks University, close to Oxfam's offices, often studied by ex-Oxfam volunteers. I don't know why Brooks Uni awarded a masters degree for a fake dress import business, to someone without a first degree in architecture or anything else, but imagine it was to please a funder; I imagine that international development students are funded by something like Chevening scholarships. So the idea of British "soft power" meant a particular sort of British interest represented by a stooge.

Certainly the student who went-on to found Ethical Fashion Forum as a kind of front for UK government interests, as did EU-funded online course materials by London College of Fashion, which quoted her as a "case study", alongside Pants to Poverty, who shared a public-subsidised office at Rich Mix on Shoreditch.

I said you don't have to think critically to get the grant. If you don't believe me, I'll send you some qutoes from the masters degree thesis at Oxford Brooks. She claims that people in the UK made their own clothes until international trade allowed them to enjoy fashion. She mixes-up the East India Company with the British Empire, but not with Nike. She backs-up her opinion with a quote that looks fake, on a web site that looks as though it never existed, from an academic who generally states different views. One thing that's clear in her opinions is that she is opposed to UK garment production and she repeats the point on her Ethical Fashion Forum site, using a series of rhetorical tricks.

This particular student has cost millions of pounds in lost revenue from the companies that she has helped close in the UK, by diverting attention from UK manufacturers.

For example, while Pants to Poverty, who shared her office, promoted themselves as "ethical", Manchester Hosiery that made T shirts and underwear in the UK went bust, was bought out of receivership, and went bust again due to lack of interest from customers. It made T shirts and underwear on high-tec machines that wove them to shape from yarn and could produce more cheaply than T shirts with more sewn seams in them.

The same Ethical Fashion Forum team promoted a seminar of about 50 clothes buyers headed "buying from co-operatives". They didn't mention UK co-operatives.Within a month or two, Equity Shoes of Leicester had gone bust and was closed by the receiver because of lack of interest in UK-made shoes. Equity Shoes was a 100 year-old worker co-operative in a high unemployment area.

And then there was the seminar "Making it Ethically in China", funded by the taxpayer through the higher education funding council, that promoted Chinese production with speakers including a fur-dress importer, a Nike consultant and Terra Plana. It was held within a mile of JJ Blackledge, a cheap British PVC wallet manufacturer, that went bust the same week. Just a few orders might have encouraged them to keep going.

I do not know how to estimate loss to the UK economy caused by this covert operation of Dfid, British Council, and scholarships for students who agree with them. I understand that when companies call in receivers, there is usually a statement of reasons why the company failed. A study of these reports, and interviews with former directors, might show that a little encouragement, by universities and government, of firms that pay UK taxes and reasons to buy from them, would go a long way in keeping more of them open and make a positive difference to tax revenue while reducing the costs of benefits and services to stressed people or deprived people.

To save you clicking on the link, I add the email which I got inviting me, as someone in the footwear trade, to the event.

Own-it Event:
Making it ethically in China -
A practical guide for fashion and textile designers

Sourcing materials or manufacturing in China should be considered seriously if you want to compete in a global market and keep production cost low. Many do not think that China should be your first port of call if you have decided to build your brand on a sustainable business model in which worker's rights are recognised, the materials used are environmentally friendly and your carbon footprint is as small as possible. However, China has started to acknowledge the need for sustainable business practices in the production of textiles and clothing, and has set up the Sustainable Fashion Business Consortium in Hong Kong in 2008 to promote just that.
Own-it, Ethical Fashion Forum and Creative Connexions have invited a panel of experts to discuss the current situation in China, how designers can source manufacturers and material that meets their ethical standards and how they can monitor compliance. A lawyer will speak about important clauses in manufacturing or licensing contracts concerning IP rights and confidentiality, as well as what to do when you are faced with counterfeits that are cheap, unethically sourced and damage your good name.
 Date: 28.10.09 Time: 6-8pm followed by drinks and networking until 9pm
 Location: Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP
Cost: Free (paid for by taxpayers and paid for again by loss of tax after UK factories close as a result of this)

Fiscal cost of colleges which actively damage the UK economy, sustained by fees from international students and UK Higher Education Funding Council grants.

The international student industry has a cuckoo-like ability to claim grants from UK taxpayers which I think should mainly be meant for the UK population.


My example is London College of Fashion, working with School of Oriental and African Studies, and Kings College, both parts of University of London. It adds a couple of its own off-shoots to the list as well: Centre for Fashion Enterprise and London Business School. It is hard to know the boundaries of this cluster of institutions.

It won a bid for 80% of the Higher Education Innovation Fund promoted help by universities to business until 2005, when it was used for a different purpose, which was to put UK-based designers or anyone from the UK in touch with Chinese manufacturers.

  "The Creative Connexions project (originally called "Creative Capital-World City") received £5 million of funding from HEFCE via the third round of the Higher Education Innovation Fund bidding process ("HEIF 3"). This funding was allocated to the University of Arts in London which was the lead higher education in the project bid. This represented just under 80% of the total project budget which was £6.275 million. "

I think the covert use of this tax money is so opposite to the overt, and so opposite to the interests of UK taxpayers, that I think something special should be done.

⦁ The institutions should not be awarded any specialised grants for higher education for the life of this government and a suggested fifteen years total; they should receive only the standard higher education funding per head that any other college gets.
⦁ The names of officials & ministers who signed for the payments should be published, and similar funding bids and grants likewise.
⦁ The process should be published, step-by-step, date-by-date, that led to the grant.

Another example is the cost of promoting UK colleges overseas by civil servants at the Department for Business and the British Council, which I don't think benefits UK students or taxpayers. When these colleges are in over-crowded parts of the UK, I think the spending is directly opposite to the interests of UK taxpayers. It is as bad as spending on the Olympics, and it is more like corruption than proper government spending.
A third example is a pretend fashion industry, centered on London Fashion Week and a couple of feed-in fashion shows, which is good at getting column inches but not so good at promoting UK manufacturers. It is as much to do with manufacturing and UK jobs as a Eurovision song is to do with music you would want to hear or play. I believe that London Fashion Week exists in competition with UK manufacturers, particularly for column inches of media coverage.

Footwear, London College of Fashion, part of University of the Arts


I was a stake-holder in the UK footwear industry, selling dozens of pairs every day or two with a commitment to promote UK manufacturing. Unfortunately, bad health got in the way. I suffered very slight encephelopathy or bad concentration after an accident. You can probably tell by my rambling style of writing. But I keep the old web site running and keep in touch with events. I blog as planB4fashion.blogspot.co.uk and on veg-buildlog.blogspot.com as well as on my own website, Veganline.com

When I became ill, I looked on the net for business support of adult education that might help me. For example my short term memory got too bad for me to learn how to set-up an online shopping cart to sell shoes. I could probably do it with subsidised help, or as part of a class where other people did it together, but no such class exists. I expected to see classes run by London colleges with titles like
  • "automate your book-keeping without an accountant", or
  • "manufacturing course suits this workshop space available by the hour"
  • "sell with Prestashop, Magento,Wordpress, or Drupal".
  • "product photography for ebay and small ecommerce businesses",

  • "make shoes or clothes without workshop space"

  • "how to make trials and top-ups of clothing and get a factory to do larger orders"

  • "try your clothes in a market for four weeks and see if they sell: share a stall"  

I don't care who teaches the course if they're competent and I can afford them. but London College of Fashion trains a lot of footwear and fashion graduates, and they need these services just like anyone else. London College of Fashion runs some footwear courses, but no knowledge transfer partnership system works to help small businesses in London. The Knowledge Transfer Partnership person at London College of Fashion has no background in fashion or footwear, and uses the job to promote a course. I did find a cluster of taxpayer-funded activity centred around London Fashion Week, London College of Fashion, and Ethical Fashion Forum. A cluster of overlapping organisations and groups of people claiming various government grants in order to promote Chinese or Bangladeshi or Kenyan goods at the expense of goods made in the UK. I found that a significant grant from Greater London Authority went to London Fashion Week, which is a PR organisation that fashion colleges try to infiltrate for their graduates but has as much to do with making clothes as Eurovision has to do with making music. I believe that if London College of Fashion closed, the world would be a happier place. Something else would supply the informed demand for good courses - probably the universities of Leicester and Northampton for footwear degrees. Kingston has a better-reviewed course for design. I believe that the network of grant-claimants, claiming European Social Fund grants or working with the Department for International Development or the British Council or the Cabinet Office or the Higher Education Funding Council or the Greater London Authority would stop applying. That would leave the grants now paid towards London Fashion Week, for example, to cease. Maybe a replacement would spring-up in the midlands, representing the works of UK factories rather than graduates of fashion colleges and a few other applicants who do not state where their products are made. Either way, there would more more column-inches and air-time for people who make things in the UK and argue the case for goods made in a democratic welfare state. I think this would be great for the economy and particularly for non-graduates who want to do manufacturing jobs. I believe that the covert operations of this lobby would be discouraged, or at least have to be privately funded. Operations like the online course materials from London College of Fashion with their completely false "case studies" of businesses which had never existed, like Juste, a fictional dress import business run by someone who became a front for another bogus organisation, Ethical Fashion Forum (the industry voice for ethical fashion) which had little to do with fashion businesses, ethical or not, and promoted free trade with Bangladesh.

Example of Manchester University Economics Degree.

I think this course would probably close, as it should, and UK students would find other universities willing to provide better courses. I quote a student report on year one, as taught about 2013, on this page, to illustrate that it puts theory first and doesn't mention public administration.

Example of Cardiff University Economics Degree

This is what their professor wrote about free trade deals with countries that have no welfare state and so lower costs: "Over time... it seems likely that we would mostly eliminate manufacturing, leaving mainly industries such as design, marketing and hi-tech. But this shouldn’t scare us." I would like https://unistats.ac.uk/subjects/satisfaction/10007158FT-100 - unistats marks it down I would like to repeat the quote back to him, but with "bad economics courses" instead of "manufacturing". Here are some stats about the Cardiff economics degree. 3,285 international undergraduates (7,110 including international post-graduates) 73/83 on the Complete Uni Guide league table for student feedback, with students 46%   stimulated by the syllabus, 69%      interested by teaching 52%      applied what they had learned. Other universities have shrunk considerably in the past few years, so a good course in a shrunken university will have plenty of space in lecture theatres and halls of residence and teaching rooms. I think that they have more chance of changing, if it brings-in students. They have a history of running more unusual subjects. There are also universities taking-over at the top of league tables for student feedback for economics - Coventry, East Anglia and DeMontfort - which could expand. The important point is that students need to know more about the course and think less about the institution as they apply, so that students who would have gone to Manchester don't go to another bad course instead. I think better economics courses would produce better voters, civil servants, politicians, and people in business. For example, past economics courses have not prepared us for the funding of the NHS over the next decades as the population gets older. The systems have not been set-up. I think this is because of bad economics teaching in the past, in colleges full of ex-pats and ex-private school pupils, staffed by people who use a US style syllabus with its silence about public administration.
https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/Research--Policy/Statistics/International-student-statistics-UK-higher-education, presenting data from a spreadsheet called Table 3 here

University of the Arts with its London College of Fashion courses

is a big recruiter of international students. I have a run-down footwear business in London and keep track of what they do. They teach a footwear degree. They also have a long-running problem with their associates promoting a different sort of footwear or fashion to the sort that I have produced in the UK. My sales points are that the footwear contains no animal products and is made in a democratic welfare state with a good human rights record. Their sales points - if I take Terra Plana for example - are that the brand's intellectual property was borne in the UK, wherever it is held now. I think the brand is defunct after a web site quote saying that "China is arguably more democratic than the UK", and stating that footwear production is only possible nowadays in China. I sauntered into their shop once, and asked, after a while, why the brand was promoted as "ethical". The assistant said I should look at the web site. But this is a brand promoted by UK taxpayers at the expense of companies that have had to close like Manchester Hosiery, Equity Shoes, Remploy Uniforms and others. Similar companies put great emphasis on whether their shoes can be put in a compost bin and promote this as the only ethical test available. I don't know if Terra Plana shoes can go in a compost bin. I say "they" because I have no detail about who in what ministry asked for Terra Plana goods to be displayed at the V&A, the Crafts Council, and British Council exhibitions, or why David Cameron wore a pair; I am up against something organised, but I don't often know who organises it and how much the organisation overlaps with London College of Fashion. They are my rivals in a way, trying to persuade the public to buy fast-changing designs made in China. Some international students come from countries which offer free or cheap education to people from the UK. I know so little about this subject, that it is best to pretend nothing. Obviously, the deal that a UK student gets when studying in another country is relevant to the deal a student from that country should get when studying in the UK, and if that country offers free education to people like me, I think my taxes should offer students from there similar deal, or at least a cuddly toy or a "thank you" note, if they come over and pay high fees for a bad course in an expensive town, even if they do increase over-crowding,

Agglomoration. Words like "crowd" or "full", "expensive", "long commute" are replaced by "agglomoration" by the Mayor of London, after speaking to lobby groups and GLA econonomics.

There is clearly some kind of hotline between London College of Fashion and various mayors of London of different political parties, including this most recent one Sadiq Khan. I keep coming back to this lobbyist hotline, but there seems to be a whole switchboard of them. "The Mayor’s Brexit Advisory Group provides regular high-quality advice on the priorities for different sectors and organisations. In July this year, the Mayor hosted a summit of London business and university representatives, public service providers and migration experts to discuss what a future approach to migration should deliver". I think maybe he should ask someone on the bus instead of asking lobby groups. The next paragraph sounds like Alan Partridge as well. London’s higher education institutions are world-leading and a huge benefit not just to the London economy. They are a ready supply of top talent, and responsible for innovations that benefit business, science, health, and living standards in the widest sense. However, the inclusion of international students in the annual migration target has been a costly mistake - it has affected the reputation of our higher education sector and the UK as a welcoming place. This comes at a time of increased global competition for international students, talented academics and researchers. It is clear that the Government should reverse this mistake as a matter of urgency. There is a sentence about how wonderful the worst-reviewed UK courses are - apparently they are among the best in the world. And then finally there is a statement about the word "full"; how can more people make a full place better? One answer is to cross-out "full" and write "agglomeration". The capital’s success is based on its openness – to people, trade and ideas. London has responded to globalisation and made use of its competitive advantage in a number of specialisms. It is the world’s leading city for business and culture and is a major asset for the whole of the UK. London’s agglomeration enables innovation, market opportunities and business growth at a rate that many cities cannot match. However, London’s international competitiveness cannot be taken for granted.  [...] The UK’s future approach to migration will be a key determinant in whether London remains at the top, or loses investment to New York, Singapore and Paris. So "agglomeration" is that thing that you see on the Picadilly Line at rush-hour: loads of happy talented people encouraging each other to do more together than they could do apart, more than the people they crowd-out, and more than if they were not in a crowd. I haven't seen it myself.

Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith answered questions from Vogue for the mayorial elections. I had sent a statement to Khan about London Fashion Week as he started his campaign, but he didn't reply.

Vogue Q5. London is home to some of the best fashion schools in the world, many of which are oversubscribed - what will you do to address this? SK: It's great that so many people want to come to London to study fashion. We are blessed with some of the world's most famous institutions like the London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins. I always love visiting the University of the Arts. But being popular brings with it its own challenges - and to cope with that, we need to support our fashion schools to expand. The mayor can help with this - from sourcing land, to supporting them through the planning process and making sure that in large developments we find space for new state-of-the-art premises. The fashion industry will have a friend and ally in me at City Hall. ZG: In the next few years, the mayor of London will get control of further-education funding in London. I want to channel funding into London's growth industries, and fashion is definitely high up the list. Kingston College, in my current patch as an MP, is one of the most successful fashion schools in the world. I want to export that across London. Vogue Q9. London Fashion Week, London Fashion Weekend, and London Collections: Mens are major attractions throughout the year - do you plan on working with the BFC on these events and if so, how? SK: Absolutely! I really enjoyed David Koma's show at London Fashion Week this year. I know what an important part of London's calendar it is. It's really broken through in the last decade and our designers have been recognised internationally, from big brands like Burberry, Paul Smith and Alexander McQueen, to smaller ones like Christopher Kane and Mary Katrantzou. I will work hand-in-hand with the British Fashion Council to make London Fashion Week even bigger and better. I'll also use the role of mayor to sell London abroad, travelling to new and expanding markets to promote the city's crown jewels including the fashion industry. ZG: Absolutely - these are flagship events for London, a chance to show off our city and its brilliant designers to the rest of the world. As mayor, I will protect the financial contribution that City Hall makes to these events, and I will be enthusiastically promoting them - in government and across the globe. This response to the Migration Advisory Committee is from John Robertson 2 Avenue Gardens London SW14 8BP 0208 286 9947 shop  [at] veganline com (archive.is/JWMpT archives the page with table of economics courses ; archive.is/3Q0D3 archives this page at about the time of the 26th January call for evidence and they got a word-processor version of this page by the deadline)

Footnote about how London College of Fashion works closely with government "The case studies are based on the information provided by the companies and have not been verified of investigated"

https://issuu.com/shomil/docs/growing_sustainable_fashion_economies
"The case studies are based on the information provided by the companies and have not been verified of investigated" That's an odd thing to read in a college textbook. Like "we made this up to get a grant",  and it was written by a consultant on UK taxpayer funding. She mentions it on her CV and blog:  The screenshot is one of London College of Fashion's publications listing fictional "case studies" of fashion companies, to be promoted by government departments at the expense of real UK fashion manufacturers in getting PR, recognition as ethical brands, or orders. A typical list would be Ethical Fashion Forum, Sari Dress Project, Juste, and Pants to Poverty, dropping Terra Plana, from the list after bad publicity about their Hong Kong supplier. This particular publication mentions Juste and Ethical Fashion Forum. I don't know if the Bangladeshi firms are fictional. The example of Juste is another college project that never traded, done by someone from Zimbabwe studying at Oxford Brooks, and probably on a Chevening Scholarship. The example of Sari Dress Project seems to be another college project, possibly sponsored by the Sri Lanka government at the time. A graphic design student got her name on the web site as author, but officially it is by staff of London College of Fashion. Pants to Poverty was real, but only in the sense that the Ethiopian girl band sponsored by Dfid is real; it never made pants or profit and it helped put UK manufacturers out of business. Development Partnerships in Higher Education must have been real because it cost taxpayer £15 million. The example is about ten years old but the pattern continues, with plans for the college to help develop parts of East London appearing in the Mayor's proposed budget for the next few years.
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SW14, London, UK Migration Advisory Committee, 2 Marsham St, Westminster, London SW1P 4DF, UK

Thursday 10 August 2017

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article-times-misleading-makes-me-so-mad-kate-hills

The usual story from the likes of London College of Fashion, Monsoon, Ethical Fashion Forum, or this time New Look. Kate Hills, who wote the blog post, has used the same tactic against me when I try to wrestle free information about UK T shirt manufactuers from her...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article-times-misleading-makes-me-so-mad-kate-hills

As Kate Hills says, if you look hard enough in the UK for a factory which will employ people under the minimum wage, you will probably find one. If you pay enough for a UK factory to pay a minimum wage, or you increase the lead time and order size and you pay your bills on time you will find loads more which New Look claim not to have heard of.

If you want to know more about New Look, you can find their bad reviews on Ethical Consumer:
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/scoredetails.aspx?ProductId=275703 

The firm has had trouble getting financial backing recently, and has trouble keeping on good terms with its financial PR companies, working through three in quick sucession.
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Tuesday 8 August 2017

Do not invest in Bondora | P2P lending

P2P lending
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2016/09/p2p-lending-risks-and-rewards.html
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2017/04/just-invested-few-tenners-in-primestox.html
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2017/08/p2p-lending-risks-and-rewards-bondora.html 

Bondora review: do not invest in Bondora
http://p2pindependentforum.com/thread/4853/invest-bondora

Fintech awards: Bondora (ex Isepankur)

Glad that not many of my loans turned-out like Bondora loans, with worse returns than Funding Circle a few years ago or early Zopa personal loans. Worse than Bitbond. I could be wrong, but my Bondora login screen writes my account as worth €4,160 except that I can't withdraw it. The amount I can withdraw is €0 (worth €4,160 in Bondora money). If I click "sell loans", a high figure for salable loans appears sometimes, and then with a few clicks corrects itself to zero, so I can't withdraw Bondora money and I can't sell Bondora money, and I can't eat it or live in it or anything else either.

While Bondora write €4,160 on the account, profit is minus €834 (suggesting 8% or 9% bondora returns with the Bondora portfolio manager). Meanwhile they are happy to take card payments and pay commission for referrals. I imagine that a lot of people borrow on their credit cards to lend, and for some reason, nobody has written articles about what a scam the whole thing has become after a promising start before the firm tried to expand very quickly into new lending markets like Spain and relied more and more on equity finance companies to buy them out.

http://p2pindependentforum.com/thread/4853/invest-bondora has dozens of Bondora trading reviews from people who have lost money on the site, but for some reason there are no search results saying the same thing from newspapers and website claims look impossible to justify. There is another thread for the technically-minded showing just results: None of the technically-minded people look pleased.
http://p2pindependentforum.com/thread/4340/general-bondora-statistics

I don't see ads from Bondora so I can't forward them to the UK advertising standards authority - they do a lot of web and PR stuff and those Trustpilot reviews you can get done, but I'm surprised that it isn't sombody's job in some country to get the claims changed or just stop Bondora taking-on new loans. There are loads of very good euro P2P lending sites that loose trust because of their neighbour.

If you would like to nominate Bondora and their equity finance backers (who don't invest in the loans themselves I think) for the Fintech awards, please add a note saying "not seriously".
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Friday 28 July 2017

Sons of Divine Providence T/a Orion

Council funding over £500 is public nowadays, as spreadsheets.

"Sons of Divine Providence T/a Orion".looked a bit frightening. Like Jimmy Saville with knobs on. Scroll down to tbe bottom of this blog post and you will see what I mean, even though inspectior's reports are good.


The Royal Borough of Richmond upon Themes is the council that paid The Catholic Childrens Society to provide schools counselling services, just after that organisation ceased being an adoption agency to avoid prosecution. They would have been prosecuted for refusing to talk about gay fostering and adoption or allow it. Richmond council didn't give much information about that:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/schools_counselling_contract_awa

Suspicious about Sons of Divine Providence T/a Orion (but not keen to do a load of work digging I don't know if this spending is down to someone who needs social care, and their guardian. It could be that a faith-group enthusiast is responsible for someone with learning difficulties, and asked the council to fund this particular care home. So I don't know if the choice of care home has anything to do with the council.

Suspicion led to prosecution and judgements aganist the mayor of Tower Hamlets a few years ago. I was interested in Tower Hamlets Council because they helped fund a bunch called "Ethical Fashion Forum" along with "Ethical Fashion Bloggers" and a cheap office for another bunch called "Pants to Poverty" at a building called "Rich Mix", which was an arts centre and small workshop letting space apparently, built at headling-grabbing cost on the site of a nearly identical building which was knocked-down to make space. Each of these organisations was something other than it first seemed; none was much of a trading company or trade association or a group of bloggers. After all, why would a group of bloggers have an office address? Each group was influenced, I think, by an advertising agency called Futerra, which was keen on free trade at the expense of producers in democratic welfare states and their potential staff, often in Tower Hamlets according to unemployment stats from jobcentres..

Part of the time the council was controlled by Mr Rahman, trading as THF, a political party. These are paragraphs from the court judgement that removed him.

"In essence the allegation against Mr Rahman is that considerable money was paid to organisations (including media organisations) operating within the Bangladeshi community by way of grants, with the corrupt intention that those who belonged to or benefitedfrom those organisations would be induced to vote for him and for THF"

"It is said that undue religious influence was exercised so as to convince Muslim voters that it was their religious duty to vote for Mr Rahman and THF"

I have got about half way through the judgement and may not ever read to the end, but it suggests why a council should back causes associated with a faith group in order to boost the vote, and do it in un-stated ways. A council might write "thinning" to claim a woodland management grant to reduce "invasive speces ... knotweed", when everybody knows they want to stop gypsies and gay people using a piece of park, and there is a stonking-great 2m height restriction built to stop caravans getting in and a ginormous ground clearing operation, applied only to areas used for cruising, to make gay people more vulnerable to crime and to discourage them.

Barnes Common, Friends of Barnes Common, and the anti-cruising clearances

Richmond Council claimed a £40,000 grant for thinning woodland in order to protect native grassland and prevent invasive knotweed on the south side of Barnes Common. Action  not wanted needed or done. Spending is on the north side. The council's client organisation, "Friends of Barnes Common", said half of this after a training session from a group at Tower Hamlets Cemetry, where they went for a walk-around and introduction to techniques for reducing cruising.

They spent £60,000 on "regularising" a car park with floodlights on masts which happen to shine in to the cruising area to annoy and endanger the gay cruising taxapayers of Richmond upon Thames.

Funny what councils do isn't it? I thought they had a duty to provide social care, education, social housing, and maintenance of minor roads with the taxpayers' money they get. To be fair to them, I saw another payment to "Eagle House School", which is some wierd place I had to go when I was 8-13 years old. I wouldn't recommend it to future generations any more than - from the look of it - I would recommend this bunch. Both probably pass care quality commission tests and I checked that this one does. But it looks like Jimmy Saville with knobs on, saying something very strange about parents and funders that is nothing to do with what's best for someone with learning difficulties.
Sainthood is obviously stupid and promotes people like Jimmy Saville
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Friday 16 June 2017

Grenfell Tower - get on board


Grenfell Tower's Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation: Get On Board
I used to work just over the road from Grenfell Tower on a housing and social work job. Scroll to the bottom for an anecdote headed "anecdote" that might make you laugh. From that, I learnt nothing about Grenfell Tower directly (one or two tenants moved to council flats next door but not in the tower) but a lot of the evidence is obvious about the causes of the fire,
  • cladding not sprinklers
  • housing associations management, not "residents listened to" or "fire regulations" directly
  • what an inquiry should talk about, if there is a need for one at all

Polyurethane Cladding

Everyone has seen fire damage on tower blocks, which effects one flat and just possibly the one above or two floors above, if cinders have got in through a window. It follows that the problem is not directly about sprinklers, even if they would have helped. Everyone has also seen the smouldering cladding on TV, so that's where the problem lies.

Housing Association Management

Meanwhile, The Guardian writes that a load of people are in Kensington Town Hall chanting "we want answers" while The Independent thinks they are shouting "we want justice" - it must be hard to tell who should ask what question to who. Kensington Council is ground landlord to a specialist housing association that spent £10 million on polyurethane cladding. A small amount of extra spending would have bought inflammable cladding. It's as simple as that.

One thing I did learn while working for a housing organisation was how completely dotty they are, obsessed with procedure and hierarchy that forces staff to act a bit like MPs, stuck between residents and a procedure that says they have to be consulted about decisions already taken. While procedure is important, the theory behind what they do is almost secret and has to be picked-up gradually with luck. Each member of staff has a different theory to what the organisation is meant to do. Grenfell Tower was slightly simpler because it offers permanent housing, but some of the complications are the same.

Examples.


Should a supported temporary housing organisation exist to help
  • past residents with resettlement and opportunities to come-back to a club or for advice
  • future residents
  • just the ones in the building who make a fuss?

If a junior member of staff somehow gives a senior member of staff a funny feeling of unstated disagreement, is this a question of
  • facts,  polite disagreement, action according to who's job it is to decide what
  • bad attitude and an excuse to discourage a potential rival?

Should the funding of the organisation be
  • described in a contract in the director's safe, which nobody else is allowed to see?
  • presumed by everyone concerned in their own way, often conflicting? For example people could agree that it would be good for a volunteer to do something, but need more information about whether taxpayer subsidy or rent covers something done by paid staff.

Should fire safety information be
  • evidence based with training to anyone who needs it based on records of past fires and clear facts?
  • left at the discretion of fire safety officers who speak to the maintenance manager about fire regulations that don't exist or are very hard to look-up?
  • oddly enough, an ex employee of the housing association has written an article for The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/worked-kctmo-nightmares-burning-tower-blocks . Her experience is a little less frustrating in some ways. She got a job after university; I faced all this in the 80s and had to work-up to the privilege of a housing job or a housing support job. Housing support workers were paid less and that was my job title. She also got some kind of clear training about fire by default. I had to talk about fire safety because team meetings required it, so I asked for proper training and eventually got it, from the firm that supplied fire extinguishers. An unusual success but true. The ambivalence is the same. Is the job social work? Or letting agent? Or an awful mixture of the two under glaring management scrutiny by people who shouldn't really be in the job, but were somehow allowed to cash the subsidy cheque.

    Should consultation of residents assume
    • that all residents want the same thing, to be determined in a meeting, and "get on board" as the picture suggests?
    • that every tenant will want a slightly different thing, often overlapping? For example most might think plastic cladding flammable, some might not care either way if sprinklers are installed, others might think it a waste of money and a few might not want the things in their flats while they are tenants, whatever happens outside. That's not a "get on board" answer.
    You get the gist that nobody would want to work for a housing organisation for long and staff turnover is high. Meanwhile a group of residents is encouraged to use vague language and to feel disappointed. I disagree with The Guardian's statement about a similar group:

     "Residents are not ignorant: they have to live in buildings like this one every day, hoping for the best in the knowledge that this home is the only one they have. Grenfell Tower’s tenants may not have been experts in architectural cladding – who is, apart from the people you entrust with the safety of your home? – but they were well aware that their building didn’t have an adequate fire-alarm system or procedure for evacuation in the event of a serious fire."
    The truth is that residents have different levels of ignorance, and the tricky bit is to inform and educate about background detail, and that's something that could be done on the .gov.uk website or anywhere similar; it doesn't have to be done by every single landlord. Just today, someone added a note to this page https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire to say that planning permission was for less flammable cladding. That's the kind of fact that residents need so that debates can be reasonable and not break-down into phrases like "doesn't listen" or "justice".

    If I lived in a tower block, I would not vote for fire practises, nor go-along with them if introduced. I would be the one who left a pushchair next to the lift and got cross with an official who sent a letter. The truth is obvious. It's plastic cladding that spread the fire, and sprinklers would only use-up scarce time and money, so making the choice of cheap cladding more likely.

    There another bit of ignorance that politicians and media encourage. It is a view of a religious people who like to come together in shared togethery-ness, and have no need for the Social Fund or whatever it is called now, or Housing Benefit, or the council's duty social worker or duty to rehouse in emergencies. No politician went to visit Work and Pensions staff trying to deal with emergency claims, but a few visited

    No wonder there is a group of people making a fuss about sprinklers that wouldn't have helped, and a group sitting in the ground landlord's lobby chanting "justice" or "answers" as loudly as they can. If there is a public enquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire's cause, that's what it will find out. An organisation with high staff turnover, low availability of facts, and shelves full of tenant consultation notes and policies as their name - Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation - suggests. If you check their web site at this difficult time, you see just such a message, as a pop-up that all new visitors have to acknowledge.

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    what an inquiry should talk about

    • Planning permission was for one cladding; the suppliers' receipt was for another more flammable one. That's the whole thing sorted with just some background stuff to find out about
    • How members of housing association staff thought plastic cladding was OK.
      This is the same as asking: how do people who wish they could get a better job end-up making a decision when bombarded from all sides? What is it that makes the job difficult and short of applicants? What allows the Machiavellian applicant to get the job? Why are people writing about the need for sprinklers, which would reduce a tight budget, when more expensive cladding (or none) is obviously the answer?
    • How fire laws, law-like rules, and evidence could be made more search-able and well-written. To the point where any builder or housing association worker or tenant in a consultation meeting should be able to start looking them up, even if they give-up and ask advice later in the process. This is more important than whether laws and law-like things are up to date on plastic cladding, I think that private sources of information and negligence law should work almost by themselves, even if nobody updates things like ministerial guidelines for decades.

      If evidence of past fires and injuries could be linked to the same sources of information, so that someone in a meeting with colleagues about cheap cladding, under pressure from all sides, could point to previous fires, that would be ideal.
    • How people who are fair and who respect facts could be hired info public-funded management jobs. This I think requires a way of getting a reference from previous junior colleagues, as well as the senior ones who might be Machiavellis or just desperate to be shot of the person they give a reference for.
    • How people are so ignorant of facts that they invade the wrong building, claim they are being lied-to about facts which nobody can yet know (the death toll) and generally believe that making a noise helps. I think the rioters are the problem as well as the cladding-choosers and their management.
    • How to get breathable air to a flat that has toxic smoke wafting about. Sprinklers wouldn't help. A long fire-proof hose in each flat might help, either to climb down or to breath through.
    • Finally there is the issue of dignitaries and camera units coming to film and shake hands with people called "community leaders" in one case. There was a report today that a local catholic priest was praying for victims of the disaster. I hope it made a concrete difference, but in the UK we have a
      benefits agency with
      hardship payments, we have
      duty social workers,
      housing benefit, and the
      council's duty to re-house people made homeless by disasters.

      All of these are important and more likely to have any effect than what the BBC reports, which is priests and shared togethery-ness. So the enquiry should enquire why no politician could be bothered to visit the benefits agency and no public sector information worker put-out statements about how benefits are meant to work. The result could be better understanding by claimants about what they've paid for, better understanding by politicians about whether the system works, and less of this pretend system by which people pull-together and post random jumpers to local churches in case that helps.

    Anecdote - skip to para two if in a hurry

     As it happens my employer - London Cyrenians - rented cheap space off the building where Grenfell residents met politicians or spent an emergency night or two, a building built as a church, with basements and balconies sub-let to social work and education agencies, and still working for faith groupies in the middle. Our office was in the left-hand balcony, where Victorian architects planned for so many more faithful to congregate that two tears of seating would be required. Maybe they expected even more and left room to build more balconies. By the 1950s or 1960s, someone must have guessed that this was not going to happen and built partitions with frosted glass and lockable doors to make a lettable office space.

    One day the boss was a way for the weekly stupid team meeting. We heard music. Lead Kindly Light Amidst Encircling Gloom ... Leed Thou Me On ...  something like that. So we sang along, as you do if trying to bond with colleagues.

    This was a real funeral for some faith-groupies, apparently. The director told us a day or two later, just in passing. There was nothing else to do or say

      related post about London Housing Trust:
      https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2016/06/london-housing-trust.html

      John Robertson now works at Veganline.com for vegan shoes online
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      Thursday 13 April 2017

      Primestox.com - I have just invested in a new P2P lending site

      P2P lending related pages


      P2P lending on this blog
      https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2016/09/p2p-lending-risks-and-rewards.html
      https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2017/04/just-invested-few-tenners-in-primestox.html
      https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2017/08/p2p-lending-risks-and-rewards-bondora.html 

      Primstox logo copied for a review of primestox.com
      Just invested a few tenners in Primestox.com , a P2P lending outfit that has trappings of sanity like a nice web site. It has high annual percentage payback rates on very small short-term small investments if all goes well, and next to no references from other web pages. So I decided to invest about £100 yesterday, and write this referring page which I revise now and then. There's also a link to a P2P invoice finance company further down which might interest the same businesses, and a P2P business capital company which is good for secured loans on equipment. I don't know why I wrote "capital" rather than "finance" but I think it looks good for larger amounts.

      ( Update February 2018 - Every Primestox deal has paid on time or early, one or two have posted freebies, and the system has worked exactly as described. Most of the deals have sold-out within hours, so the rates on offer are dropping. Below 12% it is harder to get P2P lenders interested quickly because sites like Lendy and Fundingsecure offer that much for bridging loans; at the moment Primestox offers are about 18% with free card processing. )

      The Primestox contract

      primestox.com/faq/ + a brochure or ask customerservice@... or the formal version: primestox.com/terms-and-conditions

      Investors have a right to a parcel of food on default

      The firm finances food for investors, and, being a P2P platform, investors own the food. Other P2P systems are a bit theoretical about this, but not Primestox, where it is a point of pride and and spelt-out in some detail, with inevitable gaps. The food is financed over about three months allowing its manufacture, sale to a shop, and payment back to the manufacturer or importer. Each investor owns the right to an individual parcel of food, with free delivery, if the process goes wrong. A pound of flesh for example. The earlier deals have been branded, upmarket, and valued at a near-retail price somewhere like Waitrose. More recently there have been bulk spice imports as well.

      There is no link from one lender to one physical piece of food until the parcel is made-up, but it's a safe bet that a food company will have food to spare if not money, and there is a more general link between one batch of loans to the food company and one batch of food produced.

      A way of funding food production before it is produced without borrowing

      primestox.com/producers/ is the new producer's page or ask producers@...com
      +44 (0) 207 846 0153

      sack of oats picture - wholesale foodI'm not a producer and pick this up from examples under each past loan, headed "the proposal". The gist of it is that you pre-sell some of the product before it's cooked - while it is a sack of oats for sale at a supplier's warehouse, worth so much less than the finished product that you can offer a very attractive rate of return to a few investors. These are some notes from a proposal, with the adjectives left-out.

       Fund the production of ... snacks.
      Oat, Almond, Carob, Seed, Apricot, Brazil Nut main ingredients for chewy or chunky squares
      Packed in retail cases of 20.
      Sogud will produce of 4 varieties x 70 cases  (280 total)

      Product Review
      Good
      Location
      Lanarkshire, Scotland
      Producer
      Sogud Ltd
      Duration
      4 months
      Repayment date
      26th Sep 2017
      Profit offered
      5.5% absolute, 17% annual
      Security
      100% of the product
      Product
      Sogud Single Serve Gluten Free Squares (20 per case)
      Marketplace
      Fife Creamery, TK Maxx

      • Promoting the food, retail, wholesale, and the brand in the background

        P2P finance makes your business public to a few dozen people on each platform who become interested in your brand. A few is better than none. It also allows you to offer a cash-back deal that encourages some lenders to think about buying your food. Some do. Some remember to claim cash back This is a more targeted kind of promotion than a loan raised on Seedrs or Crowdcube, where some of the same food firms have funded production.

        If lenders want food instead of repayment on a small loan, better still - Primestox encourages them to email, and will forward requests on to you.

        "CrowdCube does a fantastic job of publicising SMEs. But does this always lead to sales? PrimeStox's product focus can boost revenues of our producers. " -primestox.com/comparison

        "From the manufacturers perspective this will finance inventory and drive sales to consumers. A positive double whammy! ", - review in Informatia.

        Lenders are called "friends". I'm a blogger; I don't know much about human relations, but this doesn't sound quite right.

        Even a blogger can sense some connection between an invester and the food. Some lenders may be bloggers or tweeters or chatterboxes or dinner hosts or potential stockists. They might offer the cash-back deal to someone else. They also have an incentive to fund small amounts, simply because of the risk (a theoretical risk so far) of defaulted borrowers' food plonked on their door step, so there are a more plonkees per batch of food than lenders per loan on other P2P sites - it's like crowd funding with extra incentives to buy food.

        The link to your brand and sales pitch remains on the Primestox site for as long as they want to show their track record, which is probably a long time.

      • Formal way for informal contacts to lend

        If a food producer has relatives, partners, staff, customers, or any kinds of contacts who want to take a flutter, this provides a formal way that they can do it without having to draw-up a contract. So your 50% partner can put more money into the batch and remain a 50% partner. Paroducers just put-up a poster for Primestox. Contacts sees the url, log-on out of curiosity, and your family or your customer might take a punt. Or take a punt on the next deal if they ever have spare money in the bank.

      • Promoting the food for clearance wholesale

        This is un-tested, but from a food producers' point of view it might be good to be known to a lot of foodies, just in case one of them can offer a price for specialised food near its sell-by date. Maybe another person who puts money in is a shopkeeper who will try selling the stuff and order some more when it runs-out. My search for investers on twitter reveals a physics teacher, a football journalist and a P2P lending enthusiast who likes bitcoin. I am a P2P enthusiast too, but one who advertises a facebook page to vegans for a vegan shoe shop, so I could help try to clear products for the vegan market. I guess that one food industry person tends to attract another over time. Maybe they all live together in a special building somewhere ... or maybe I'm going off the point a bit here.

      Incentives to borrowers compared to invoice finance, banks & crowd funding

      Security. The name says it. Other lenders start by asking about the business, then very quickly ask for as much security as for a personal loan. If the loan goes bad they can hardly be bothered to think about the value of stock. A personal guarentee can only be given so many times. For example at Investly invoice finance, when either side somehow messes-up - either the shop or the supplier - then the loan is backed by the supplier's personal guarantee. Called-in for payment, this could be a distraction that causes stress and legal costs all round rather than paying-back the lenders or letting the borrower get-on with earning a living, so anyone who is short of credit might use Primestox for all of a loan, while another borrower might use some combination of Primstox and Investly. I don't know the contract, but there is certainly not much stated to investers about personal guarantees. The contract probably evolves from experience over time.

      Small loans allowed. The track record says it. The smallest loan on their web site so far is £3,000, while Rebuildingsociety has a minimum loan amount of £25,000. Investly will lend from 1,000 and Marketinvoice has a calculator that starts at £5,000 with a minimum £250 fee to match.

      • Compared to 1.65-2.6% monthly interest for invoice finance on Investly

        Investly is a P2P site where lenders lend the value of an invoice not yet paid.
        It doesn't have regular stream of loans for lenders, compared to other P2P sites, but might appeal to the same people who are looking to borrow or pre-sell; the companies that sell food on Primestox.

        Investly's site says borrowers pay 1.65-2.6% a month - about 20-35% annually.         If the invoice has not yet been agreed, there is no loan; it is only for a month or so between sending an invoice to the shop and getting paid. Assuming the shop doesn't want to pay before production, that leaves a lot of ingredients and work to finance, even before sending the food and the invoice. So invoice finance just competes with the last month or so of the three-month cycle that Primestox typically finances. Primstox' one press mention, in Informita New, December 2016, says that there aren't many stock or inventory finance companies - "there are some out there who have had limited success, but none have hit the market in a bit way", so the niche-within-a-niche of "perishable" could do with a specialist P2P firm. There has also been a shortage of cheap bank loans to smaller firms, allowing P2P markets like Rebuildingsociety to fill the gap and make loans secured on equipment or buildings.

      • Benefit compared to a bank

        It's a kind of civic duty to find alternatives to banks at the moment, but there are financial reasons to avoid them as well. Everybody knows that they have high costs and are short of money.

        Our experience tells us that business owners are in distress about having their overdrafts and other bank products pulled with short notice. In fact, research suggests that banks are pulling £5 billion in overdrafts from business in the UK each month! What’s more alarming is that this is not new and has been a trend for almost a decade, since before the financial crisis, and banks are still not lending anywhere near as much as they did prior to 2007.

        The alternatives to SME bank lending have all notably moved away from a ‘one size fits all’, ‘computer says no’, ‘box-ticking’, approach, understanding that different businesses have different financial needs at different times. - K Grieff of Rebuildingociety , 7/6/17

        The Primestox alternative offers a little very targeted advertising, tempting people to go into shops and buy the food. A better deal than borrowing more money to pay for advertising. Which is presumably why some firms experiment with sites like Indiegogo and Crowdcube to raise cash; Primestox pitches itself in the same producers.

      • Primestox.com/comparison v Indiegogo, Market Invoice, Crowdcube & Ratesettter

        A neat point-by-point comparison chart. - Indiegogo is a donation or investment platform that doesn't necessarily offer rewards to investors. - Crowdcube offers shares as a reward, which pay no dividend and can only be sold at another funding round. There is no other security like security on specific stock or a personal guarantee. - Market Invoice is an invoice finance site, that I don't know about as a lender because they have a very high minimum investment. - Ratesetter is a consumer credit and low-risk lending site.

      My first two or three investments...

      • £30 for 16 x ¼ litre fruit juice, cold-pressed @ £15 a litre.
      • £20 for 20 x 60g fruit energy bars @ £16.66 a kilo. For comparison, ClearanceXL tries to sell 60g fruit energy bars at a quarter the price - four for a pound plus delivery. If they were buying they'd want to pay - what? - 10p a bar sale or return for some minimum amount?
      • £20 for 200g of vanilla paste @ £100 a kilo
      • £25 for 10 x 200g pots of fermented pickle @ £12.50 a kilo. This is usually home-made or sold in wholefood markets apparently.
      • £20 for 10 x 500g packs of frozen chips, sweet potato, battered @ £4 a kilo. MySupermarket shows a few shops selling sweet potato chips, usually not battered, with the smaller packs or upmarket brands around £4 a kilo while typical prices are £2.60 or less on special offer or under £2 at Aldi. Waitrose sells these battered ones at £5.60 a kilo. The same brand has some crisps at ClearanceXL (see below) but I get this wrong at first glance - they are crisps and not these chips.
      • If I update this page after any of my loans default, I'll mention it at the top of the page but repeated loans on different deals have all gone well so far.

      Incentives for lenders

      • Cashback

        If you buy the food in a shop, borrowers might offer a cashback deal, should you be organised enough to keep the receipt and send it in. Maybe when the payment comes, you could use it to buy a packet of food with the cashback deal. Primestox suggest you email them if you want food instead of interest,

      • Flutter of excitement - food is delivered to you if the borrower can't pay

        For investments of a few tenners, the excitement is in the flutter. A parcel of food might turn-up one day if the payment doesn't. If payment does arrive, you could use it with a cashback scheme to get a packet of food, or put it towards beer and fags and gambling debts, or leave it in the account to spend on the next deal to come-along and watch the money grow.

        For investments of two or three hundred pounds at a time, it's trickier. Nobody knows the risk of the borrower not paying - whether one in twenty or one in a hundred. If a borrower can't pay, nobody knows the chance of some compromise offer like selling at clearance prices to Approved Food at a lot less than the price you paid. The bottom of this blog post lists some firms that make offers for wholesale food near its sell-by date. If you have to take delivery of more food than you can eat, there is not much else online to say what you can do with it but you might have some use for bulk food and have all sorts of schemes. Talking of excitement, the hobby of thinking about food might encourage you to curry some over-date veg in the fridge instead of throwing it away, so you save that way as well.

      • Interest

        There is interest of one or two pounds on the sizes of investment I've described and a three month loan, but there is a tick box you can tick to invest a lot more. One or two pounds is a lot of interest on ten or twenty pounds, for a three month loan. The annual percentage rates are at the top end of what investors can get, I think. In comparison Investly invoice finance pays around 10-20% to lenders on an auto-lend system: The loans only last a month or so, but your cash is re-lent automatically to the next one if business picks-up (it's a bit slow as I write) and it costs nothing to sign-up.  Other platforms like Rebuildingsociety had high rates of interest on offer when they started, which gradually dropped in an auction system.

        the morning after
        Rebuildingsociety are good at dealing-with defaults, but still have enough bad debts to take average returns down to the mid-teens. Lenders' experiments with sites like this will loose on a few like Bondora who just shovel-out money like Leaman Brothers and shrug when it doesn't come back. A better investment could be in selling cocaine to the director of Lehman Brothers - pictured - but that's probably illegal and I don't know whether he took decisions and drugs at the same time - it's just the way someone took a photograph that suggests it.

      For borrowers and lenders - Default: what next?

      This is a hunch. I have never dabbled in commodities trading so I might be quite ignorant about how often it comes to the crunch and commodities get delivered to lenders. And none of this has happened.

      If there is a deliberate and very convincing fraud, the producer disappears leaving no commodity. This is a very old problem. Contracts were invented for this kind of situation. Anyway I doubt that a deliberate fraudster would pick such a public way to do it, with so many different people looking at the details, so that's a very tiny chance. Then there are natural disasters, illnesses and the like but I guess that just about every batch of food gets produced, into shops or warehouses and worth a lot more than the original sack of oats.
      I guess that food companies want good publicity from their borrowing, and will do a lot to avoid defaulting on the loan if they can pay, but these things happen. "the situation could arise that [they] could not pay. In that case you continue to hold title to the the product until it is sold. You also have the option of requesting that the product be sent to you or a location you specify - at no additional cost. " - FAQ An online vote, run by Primestox.com, allows other investors to out-vote you on the best option, but I guess that a vote would allow some people to take the stock and others to hold-on for repayment or accept an offer if available. If the borrower is still in business and half solvent, I imagine that they want to pay later for the food that will sell, rather than return all of it. There are degrees of mess-up, from late-payment to late payment under legal threat to receivership to wind-up and non-existence, and I suppose that nobody wants to work down the list if they can stay at the first stages. "the producer may experience production issues affecting the quantity or quality they can produce. Alternatively they may have difficulty selling their product in the market. In such cases delays may occur to your payment. However in all cases you continue to hold title to the product until you're repaid in full with profit. If during this time period you wish to receive the product which you paid for, you can request its delivery to any UK address at no additional cost. " Late payment turns into the chance of no payment after a while. Sell-by dates get nearer.

      With luck, the borrower might organise an option of very cheap sale and lenders might discuss whether they could do better. Takestock.com allow you to do something similar by opening an account and try to sell surplus food on a free small ad via an 18% escrow service. Takestock's details are further down the page. If 18% for an escrow service sounds high, you can see what other links I have found at the bottom of the page as well. There are loads of them under the heading "selling food from home and on classifieds sites", but none says "we pay near retail price at somewhere like Waitrose for an upmarket brand". They all look a bit clearance-ey.

      Getting back to Primstox, their contract does
      - not say that Primestox will use their commission money to pay for deliveries
      - not say that Primestox invest in every loan so won't flog duds. I imagine that Primestox do invest in loans at this stage, just to try to balance lenders and borrowers, so they will learn from experience what works. Their low-budget way of working suggests that they don't have equity finance people pushing them to make money fast at all costs. There isn't a staff team and an office and a bunch of bills to pay in the short term; they can think in the long-term.
      - not say that Primestox will run an eCommerce site or help any lender who does so, selling surplus food to other investers. I imagine that other investors are a sympathetic market for the one or two who have a tonne of soup on the doorstep. So after a default, in the worst case, you have invested far too much, and more food than you want to eat is plonked on your doorstep..
      • If you have anything to do with catering you might find other uses. If you need contacts in catering, you might use the app that connects restaurants and their surplus food and customers who want cheap deals, you might already have a restaurant contact who might be open to ideas or make a suggestion, but the ones near me are generally bakeries. Anyway, a caterer might offer a dish of the day, or a special offer by the restaurant to bargain-hunters who use the app for that restaurant.
      • If you have anything to do with food sales, an idea might come to mind like... - special offer food by a shop counter. Maybe your newsagent would borrow some food, and give you a credit note for 50p per jar sold for you to spend on other newsagent stock.
      • If you have nothing to do with food sales, but want to start, Takestock.com membership is free. - free small ad and escrow service that charges  you 18% on any offer you accept
      • If you plan to eat it the food, freezer space might help -for-sale.co.uk/freezer includes ads on sites like ebay and gumtree. Local searches are most likely and you might even find a free one on Trashnothing, or join the same site to give some food away. An app called Olio comes-up on search engine results, specifically for giving food to neighbours if they happen to have the same app. Maybe someone will offer you an apple crumble two miles away once you subscribe.
      • I don't know much about those food bank collection points that you see in places like supermarkets. There are a few sites on search engines for locating organisations and collection vans that can use food. I suppose that a one-off donor of a freezer-load needs some scale between the nearest collection-point and the agency that can send a van. This list covers foodbanks, who might help. - theguardian.com/society/datablog/2012/jul/12/food-banks-uk-directory-guardian-readers

      Background to the Primestox.com company

      There are practically no references to the site on other sources. It looks more polished and sane than some sites that do things like bitcoin lending, or my own shoe shop that you should try, but less referenced from anywhere else. The borrowers are food businesses with web sites linked and which tend to link back.
      https://www.check-business.co.uk/business/09915596/primestox-limited is the company. The check-business site would drop a couple of tiny hints from an Equifax report if there was anything to say, but there isn't - the business is too new. The Companies House entry doesn't state much more - just connections to West London from previous employers that are confirmed from the director's Facebook page and choice of software engineer, so the business looks UK-based. Linked-in profiles mention some people related. There are three shareholders and one of them seems busy employed in South Africa; only one is an "officer" on the Companies House form. The postal contact is the first floor above Starbucks in London's Oxford Street, also home to BG Partnership accountants and 23 other companies. There is no mention on P2Pmoney yet; I added a post on P2P independent forum, and P2P money have added this site to their list of P2P lending sites, just as one or two food companies have given the site a mention.

      Software

      http://www.selfstarter.us/
      The software looks a like crowd-funding software, which can be had for free. I don't know if it is Selfstarter.us but if there is one free open source piece of software, there will probably be others, cheap or free, and this company has used something similar-looking for the new purpose of P2P lending, which is otherwise expensive to get going, I think, for lack of free software. I don't know if this is unusual - it's good to see that it can be done. The company paid Alex Panichi, user interface web designer who answered an upmarket job ad and "worked to improved various steps in the user journeys. The user interface has been enhanced and refined. There has been lots of sketching, wire framing and hundreds of iterations to de-clutter the interface. In fact, the main challenge was to show the most relevant information to the user at each stage" So, £200 an hour for several evenings and weekends doing iterations on a general theme is a few thousand pounds, but not bad.

      blog background

      Written as a hobby and to promote Veganline.com for vegan shoes online - an online vegan shoe shop selling boots belts and jackets mainly made in the UK

      Selling food from home and on classifieds sites

      Ebay and the mainstream sites tend not to advertise food, but I have a log-on for Takestock.com that allows selling! The site doesn't have a huge amount on it, with a lot of the guide prices well over supermarket basics prices per kilo. People use it to advertise sales to new customers, I guess, rather than for regular turnover. I hope this list helps borrowers to shift surplus stock and repay their loans, but, when they default and can't make a decent offer for the food. maybe someone else among the lenders can use one of these to get something better or maybe it helps if a borrower has to take delivery of too much food to eat.

      Takestock.com classifieds - allowed login

      • Buy from their advertisers by signing-up and contacting them. It's a classifieds site for food. A photo and often a minimum order is available for each advert once you sign-up; guide prices are cheeky-high except for the odd overdate thing which is low.
      • Delivery - postcode or place name on each advert but no map or search-by-distance. Most offer to help with delivery. Some have a place name like "London" which helps searching; a lot are in north england or Norfolk for vegetables. There is a box for questions which is a good place to ask if the seller would use your favourite cheap courier such as Parcel2go's UPS shop-to-shop service for up to something like 20kg for not much money. Parcelmonkey are good for courier quotes too.
      • Sell to their readers by signing up and advertising - they take the money via their bank account and take ? 18% +VAT if there is no dispute. 8% on fresh food.. The selling page recommends a low minimum order and to offer help with delivery.

      Amazon not yet sure

      • Buy from them - for example https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scarlett-Mustard/b/ref=bl_dp_s_web_5324604031?ie=UTF8&node=5324604031&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Scarlett+%26+Mustard
      • Delivery -
      • Sell to them - not yet sure if it's possible. Hermes delivery costs are a problem. I don't see a "sell" tag next to the items on Amazon Groceries either, and if the brand isn't already for sale on Amazon, you have to persuade the site to list it.

        Amazon is the only classifieds site that comes-up if you search for words like "peas" "biscuits" or "chocolate" on for-sale.co.uk, bar the odd rare add on ebay or gumtree

      other home retail

      • There are ecommerce add-ons for facebook, I think, which might be free. Maybe Paypal links or something specialised. I don't know if facebook contacts would use them, but they might see the page and offer you cash. An idea for someone with a zillion facebook contacts.
      • http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5232467 mentions facebook selling groups, a gumtree-like thing that I didn't know about
      • Leaflet a hundred letterboxes with an explanation and half-price offer. Someone might be intrigued enough just to say hullo to a neighbour. Cheapest paper is from Wilko or supermarket basics. Cheapest ink is a CISS system on a printer or Epson Ecotank.
      • Fly pitching, pop-up stalls, honesty boxes , vending machines... all a bit unfamiliar to buyers I think, who would pass-by to avoid being bothered, or assume the goods second-rate in some way. My aunt - do you know my aunt? - anyway she used to sell potted herbs in a market for the womens' institute. They were cheaper than the garden centre but people were just programmed to buy them from the garden centre. Anyway, if you know my aunt, you are on to something. If you don't know my aunt, you might want to try door-to-door leafleting to advertise an honesty box or a fly-pitch or a ring-the-doorbell-and-ask offer. Ringing other peoples' doorbells doesn't seem worth the hassle to customers, even ignoring the stress to you.
      • Pop-up restaurants. There is something in this; I am not sure what
      • Buying from self-employed people like stallholders could be a good habit to get into, in case one of them can suggest something if you are caught with a lot of stock. Easier if they know your face.

        Expirybuy.com classifieds - didn't send a login

        • Buy from their advertisers - it's a paypal system
        • Delivery - ads say things like "ships to Blackburn"
        • Sell to them - I've signed up, waiting for confirmation by email. No mention of commission yet. Still waiting for confirmation a few days later.

        Gumtree

        • Buy from their ads -  https://www.gumtree.com/search?search_category=all&q=freezer
        • Delivery - parcel2go or similar
        • Place an ad - there is only one food ad and two non-food in this category, but it might be free

        Merkandi.co.uk classifieds - want £86 sign-up fee

        • Buy from them - https://merkandi.co.uk/categories/food-beverage/26
        • Delivery -
        • Sell to them - same

        Stockondeals.com/ - mainly Denmark so crossed out - typically electrical but some food

        • Buy via their site
        • Delivery -
        • Sell via their site - it's EU and Danish state funded, so the commission might be low

          Selling to shops and wholesalers

          Approvedfood.co.uk

          • Buy from them - http://approvedfood.co.uk/
          • Delivery - http://store.approvedfood.co.uk/delivery_charges £6 delivery on £17 minimum order
          • Sell to them - http://store.approvedfood.co.uk/page?name=sell-to-us

          Clearance Wholesale

          • Buy from them - https://www.clearancewholesale.co.uk/contact no web shop - Grimsby cash & carry
          • Delivery - apply for pallet deals
          • Sell to them - https://www.clearancewholesale.co.uk/sell-my-stock

          ClearanceXL.co.uk including Swinco.co.uk

          • Buy from them - http://www.clearancexl.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/%22Food%20%26%20Drink%22
          • Delivery - http://www.clearancexl.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/NEW__399_DELIVERY - £5.25 most areas. Free collection by appointment in Sheffield S9
          • Sell to them - https://www.epayments.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/%22ABOUT%20US%22/Supply_SWINCO has the email address
          Companyshop.co.uk
          • Buy from them - membership scheme offered as a staff perk by some employers.
          • Delivery - sites around the UK. HQ in Yorkshire
          • Sell to them - they sell surplus food and write about it - not sure if they pay or get donations

            Eatbig

            • Buy from them - http://www.eatbig.co.uk/shop/ - possibly cheaper per kilo on nuts, but usually expensive
            • Delivery - http://www.eatbig.co.uk/delivery/ - £3-£5 or free over £40
            • Sell to them? - they tend do sell catering-size packs - not sure how to contact

              Factoryfoods

              • Buy from them - no web shop
              • Delivery - walk-in at Rotherham or Barnsley http://www.factoryfoods.uk/directions/
              • Sell to them - http://www.factoryfoods.uk/sell-to-us/

              Frugalitis

              • Buy from them - https://frugalitis.com/ aka Essential Brands Ltd. Also sell to ex-pats.
              • Delivery -
              • Sell to them - ?  Phone: +44 116 3440001 Address: Online Division, Celandine  Road, Hamilton, Leicester, LE5 1SW.

              Self Trading

              Not quite sure what this one is - it once bought a supermarket's stock. Found by googling "short dated food"

              SOS Wholesale

              • Buy from them - apply for an account or use the Derby cash and carry.
              • Delivery - apply
              • Sell to them - http://www.soswholesale.co.uk/residual-stock-management/

              Unlikely

              This lot are listed to save looking at them again, or just because they looked interesting http://www.londonpopups.com/p/advice-resources.html

              Bargain Outlet

              • Buy - discount shop in Newkey and Weston. Prices from 25p. May be the same as Affordable  Foods, who have a franchise system with a branch in north Blurton, Staffordshire.
              • Delivery - walk in, retail
              • Sell - "supermarkets get in touch" .... "buys from supermarkets"

              Bigbarn.co.uk

              • Buy
              • Delivery
              • Sell - looking for regular producers; food is sorted by manufacturer

              Grapepip.com - wine only

              • Buy - postcodes not given - prices start about £100 for 12 bottles - no licence or business needed. Buyers and sellers both pay 5% + VAT
              • Delivery - "Please note that the location of each lot is clearly stated; as a Buyer, it is your responsibility to take note of the location prior to bidding as any subsequent transfer/delivery costs are the liability of the Buyer." Clearly stated to people who understand "Location: Octavian: Duty status: Under bond" on the first ad I looked-at.
              • Sell - wine only - 5% + VAT "As long as your wine has been professionally stored in the UK since its original sale/shipment, you can list your wine on GrapePip. Please note, however, you will be required to provide documentation to confirm original purchase and subsequent storage in a UK warehouse of every lot listed on GrapePip. To find out more about how to sell your wine on GrapePip, please go to our Private Vendor Information Page. If you are a wine merchant looking to sell your wines on GrapePip, please go to our Trade Vendor Information Page." Winebinends is another wine-only firm that works as a broker - charging 30% commission to find a buyer with only one delivery hop to pay-for. They say that other clearance companies that have warehouses charge 70% and two delivery trips.

              Mackenzietrading.co.uk - frozen food clearance wholesale for trade sellers

              • Buy - "Essentially we are a frozen food broker: purchasing surplus stock from frozen food manufacturers...."
              • Delivery - can involve storage and repacking in Lancashire
              • Sell -  "... and selling this onto high street retailers and catering companies"

                Nifties

                • Buy - https://www.dontwastethetaste.co.uk/shop aka Nifties, Good for onions at a first look, but the web site is turned-off this February 2018 so you'd have to walk-in.
                • Delivery - Delivery - https://www.dontwastethetaste.co.uk/ - £7, £2 in Dover or walk-into their Dover shop.
                • Sell? - probably not for specialised upmarket products by the look of them

                The Peoples Supermarket

                • http://thepeoplessupermarket.org/  - no web ordering - £25 annual membership to work 4 hours a month and get 20% off
                • Delivery - walk in supermarket in Lambs Conduit Street, North Central London
                • Sell? - now owned by one wholesaler - history of one-off deals before that - web site statements about avoiding food waste

                Toogoodtogo.co.uk

                • Buy- app links you to bakeries or restaurants with closing-time bargains.
                • Delivery - you need to link to a restaurant near you via the app which works on Ios or Android. Pay the app and go to collect the food.
                • Sell - restaurants welcome. If you know a restaurant on the system, they might use the app to try to sell for you on commission.

                Yumbies

                • buy -
                • delivery -
                • sell - looking for regular batch producers not surplus stock - 18% charge
                  Not trading C...a ran just for the end of 2016 and start of 2017 Foodbargains Discountbargains.co.uk
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