This site is still in its early stages, but if I wait for it to be nicely polished it will never be published. More topics will be added over time. Launched 26 March 2019. Last Edited 20 February 2020.
Services
to be completed
topics will include:
DEFENCE
I don't have much to say here (yet), so I'll just throw in a few questions to provoke some comments:
Should we keep our nuclear weapons?
What size army / navy / air force should we have, and how should they be organized?
Can we 'delegate' our defence to another organisation, e.g. the UN?
Should we have some form of National Service?
Should we use the army to augment the police?
NHS
TRANSPORT
An idea to help the NHS
The British NHS is one of the most efficient in the World, but its funding is less than we would like, so some services are lacking. We all know we need to spend more on it, but how much? How do we know how much money it needs?
If we give the the NHS, say, and extra £5 billion a year (about 4.5% more than present) what would it be spent on? Are the extra doctors that are needed trained up and ready?
Efficient though the NHS is, I suspect that there are further improvements that can be made. Lots of managers try this or that, sometimes their ideas make an improvement, sometimes they make it worse. Decisions are made by guesswork, with insufficient understanding of the consequences. However, private companies, often working with far smaller budgets, do not operate this way - they use computer models of their business, and run simulations of different scenarios in order to make informed decisions. If £10 million were spent on a computer model of the NHS and its effect on patients this would represent a huge budget for a computer program but a tiny fraction of the total NHS budget. This way, managers could make informed decisions about the effect of say, closing a ward in a hospital or changing the way clinical cases are prioritised or abandoning one of the performance targets, or changing the cancer screening strategy. The computer model would help to identify otherwise unforeseen consequences of a change, it would look at consequences beyond the local budget, and would highlight problems or opportunities that would not otherwise be seen. It would not be based on the NHS itself (though the NHS is an intrinsic part of the model) but on the people the NHS exists to serve. And the government would be able to anticipate where skills shortages are going to emerge if they increased the budget of the NHS - so training could be implemented from the outset rather than wait for the skills shortage to become apparent.
If such a computer model were written, and it made an improvement of just 0.1%, then it would pay for itself every three weeks! And I'm sure it would do much better than that.
What do you think? Please comment here
Transport underpins any modern economy, and is often the reason for the biggest engineering projects or the biggest arguments. There are special topics on this website on High Speed 2 , the price of fuel and improving driving standards.
More will be written here as time goes on.
How would you reduce congestion on roads? Please comment here
Why are British car park machines so awful?
A typical British car park machine gives you a limited set of options depending on how long you want to stay. That's all very well if the time you want matches one of the options, which usually it doesn't. I once stayed in a pay-on-exit car park that had the following charges:
1 hour £2
2 hours £4
3 hours £6
4 hours £8
5 hours £10
6 hours £12
10 hours £20
I stayed 6 hours 20 minutes, and got charged £20. I felt "ripped off" by the charge.
Everything about car park machines is designed to maximise the profit for the car park:
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rounding-up of charges
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not giving change
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requiring the typing in of car registration numbers so tickets can't be transferred
The car registration number is particularly annoying - the keys are always small and not clearly marked, the lighting is bad, and often the person ahead of you takes an age typing the number in because they are struggle to read the keypad or they can't remember their registration number. The extra minute or so multiplied by the number of people using these machines adds up to a vast amount of wasted time. All this to 'prevent fraud' from a machine that won't allow you to enter half-hours or quarter-hours, and won't give change?
Why can't parking machines charge a certain rate per hour, and give you the time you pay for, even if it isn't a whole number of hours, like they do on the continent?