Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

it'll depend where she lives as another company gave exemplary service
the contracts for this health work are awarded by the "local authority", though i'm not entirely sure what that means
apparently some authorities will not pay properly - e.g. insist that 4 x 15 minute visits can be done in an hour; won't pay travel allowance between visits etc etc - but of course there is no compulsion on any company to accept that contract

i'ld guess "local authority" means your local health body rather than the council, and it should not be difficult to find out to whom these contracts have been awarded, and I dare say it should also be possible to discover the detail and more

Home owners will have to separate more recycling, says minister

Home owners will be forced to separate recycled material into more boxes because of new European Union regulations.






By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent

6:00AM BST 16 Oct 2013



Lord de Mauley, a minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told local authorities that they would be required to follow new EU guidance which requires homes to separate waste more efficiently.


The comments raise fears of further “bin blight” which has seen homes having to cope with an increased proliferation of different bins for their recycling and rubbish.


Many residents have as many as three wheelie bins - one for household rubbish, another for recyclables and a third for garden waste.


However, some have as many as ten bins, bags and boxes to accommodate all their household waste, prompting claims they are an “eyesore”.



More €U nonsense here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10381188/Home-owners-will-have-to-separate-more-recycling-says-minister.html

cynic, if you go into the BBC Breakfast part of the BBC website I think you can find various clips if you click on the episodes link.

I wasn't aware that this had anything at all to do with EU directives, but certainly our own "sorting" is about to become even more complex, yet in Harrogate, I believe there is no domestic recycling at all

DD - the name of the offending company was intentionally not given to give some protection the lady who works for them and was brave enough to speak out

Well it's a pity the company couldn't be named and shamed, but perhaps one of the newspapers will get hold of the story and find out.

Hays,

The public are in the majority of even tighter rules and caps on benefits.

The public are not always right and are often fed on misinformation and political propaganda and media hypocrisy.

=========







MK.

Until I looked closer, I thought the image was an advert for homes for the disabled and elderly.

i'm sure they will, and a good job too
the company was appalling in many respects, but of course the question that still remains is why they were stupid enough to tender let alone accept the contract at (well) below economic rates in the first place

fred - it is; the inmates are being taken for their weekly exercise!

camerons family making a fortune out of EU land subsideds

Haystack - 16 Oct 2013 13:55 - 31150 of 31160

gf
The public are in the majority of even tighter rules and caps on benefits. Due to previous Labour governments, we now have a benefit culture..................ends

That may be the case for these scroungers with 10 kids etc who have no desire to enter work again, but believe me more and more Tory MPs are starting to question I D Smiths policy on the genuine sick and disabled.

ARE YOU IN FAVOUR OF THOSE WHO HAVE NOT WORKED OR SAVED VIA A PRIVATE PENSION GETTING BENEFITS whilst those who have saved and have a small pension being disqualified from benefits and just get NI credits???????? truth please.

and today Cameron sniggered at the people with CANCER he is a very nasty turd
even a piece of shit is better than him

Cyners cheers bud, Ive printed that off ill pass it on to my mother.

Many Thanks.

TANKER yes you mean when Dennis Skinner put to him his question about ATOS in PMQs. Disgracefull considering he had a disabled son who died.

Dennis Skinner (aka The Beast of Bolsover) is always ready to exploit any story for political gain.

It's a vigorous, voracious press that keeps our country honest

Regulating the media would undermine its ferocious ability to highlight wrongdoing, writes Boris Johnson



I hope the press will tell the Privy Council to stick it in the privy Photo: Alamy


Boris Johnson

By Boris Johnson

8:07PM BST 13 Oct 2013



Good for Fraser Nelson. It strikes me that he is 100 per cent right. The editor of The Spectator has announced that his ancient and illustrious publication will have nothing whatever to do with any new system of press regulation. He will neither bow nor truckle to any kind of control. He will not “sign up”. He will politely tell the new bossyboots institution to mind its own beeswax, and he will continue to publish without fear or favour.


I think the whole of the media should do the same. Stuff all this malarkey about the Privy Council and a Royal Charter. Who are the Privy Council, for goodness’ sake? They are just a bunch of politicians, a glorified version of the government of the day. We are on the verge of eroding the freedom of the press. We are undermining the work of everyone from John Milton to John Wilkes – men who fought for the right to say and publish things of which politicians disapproved.


Why are we embarking on this monstrous folly? Because of a string of essentially political embarrassments that led to the Leveson Inquiry – and at the beginning of it all was the expenses scandal, and the sense among MPs that they had been brutally treated by the press.


More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10376382/Its-a-vigorous-voracious-press-that-keeps-our-country-honest.html

HAYSTACK ANSWER PLEASE.........

Haystack - 16 Oct 2013 13:55 - 31150 of 31160

gf
The public are in the majority of even tighter rules and caps on benefits. Due to previous Labour governments, we now have a benefit culture..................ends

That may be the case for these scroungers with 10 kids etc who have no desire to enter work again, but believe me more and more Tory MPs are starting to question I D Smiths policy on the genuine sick and disabled.

ARE YOU IN FAVOUR OF THOSE WHO HAVE NOT WORKED OR SAVED VIA A PRIVATE PENSION GETTING BENEFITS whilst those who have saved and have a small pension being disqualified from benefits and just get NI credits???????? truth please.

The problem with the ones who have not saved is that they may never have been in a position to save. Benefits are there to help the most in need.

Warren Buffett said Wednesday the threat to not raise the nation's debt limit "after you've already spent the money" is a "political weapon of mass destruction" comparable to poison gas and shouldn't be used by either party.


"I know it's been used in the past, but we used the atomic bomb back in 1945 but we decided we weren't going to do something like that again," he said hours before the government's midnight deadline to raise the debt limit or possibly default.

Buffett called on both sides to pledge not to use the debt limit as a weapon. "There are plenty of weapons that can be used," like filibusters, he said.

In a live interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman said he doesn't expect the U.S. will do anything to damage its 237-year reputation of paying its bills on time, but if it does it would be a "pure act of idiocy" and "asinine."

"Credit worthiness is like virginity, it can be preserved but not restored very easily, so it is crazy to play around with it," he said.

Buffett said Berkshire owns short-term Treasury securities but he isn't worried about getting paid.

He also said the ongoing crisis in Washington over spending and the debt limit is no reason to avoid buying securities, pointing out that Berkshire subsidiary Marmon Group just paid $1.1 billion for a British drinks dispensing business. "We did not buy it with a condition that we could call off the deal" if there was no vote to raise the debt limit, he said.

He added that in his long career, he has never put off a deal by a few weeks to see what might happen in Washington.

When it was pointed out to him that he may be "unique" because he is a long-term investor, he replied that "most people are."


"If you take the people I meet in Omaha, you take the people who own farms, you take the people who own apartment houses, most people are long-term investors, thank heavens," he said.

Buffett rejected the idea that investors should be worried about a bull market "bubble" for stocks. He said, "We could at some point, but no, stocks are not selling at bubble levels. What do you diversify in? You want to diversify into cash? I think it's a terrible investment compared to equities. You want to diversify into long-term bonds? I think it's a terrible investment compared to equities."

Buffett also said Berkshire's spending rate on acquisitions this year is as "high as ever."

He told Becky Quick he had been working on a big acquisition, a $12 billion "elephant," but the deal didn't come together.

Moments after Bank of America announced better than expected earnings, Buffett said "the banks are in the best shape I can remember."

He also defended JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon amid the bank's many legal problems, some of which are the result of its acquisition of Washington Mutual at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket. And believe me, you've had a lot of cops" following JPMorgan, he said.

Responding to activist investor Carl Icahn's public calls for a large Apple stock buyback, Buffett said, "I think Apple's management has done a pretty good job of running the company... and my vote would be with them." He joked, "I just wish I'd bought the stock many years ago."


"I do not think companies should be run primarily to please Wall Street and largely shareholders who are going to sell. I believe in running Berkshire for the shareholders who are going to stay and not for the ones who are going to leave," he added.

Buffett said he has a "rooting interest" for the troubled retailer J.C. Penney because he worked in one of their stores when he was younger, but acknowledged it's "very, very tough" to compete against competitors who are always moving. "Coming from behind in retailing is just plain tough," he said.

Berkshire companies are still selling a "significant" amount of goods to Penney under "normal terms," he said and he's not worried about the retailer's survival.

In response to a question about the Obamacare health exchange rollout, Buffett said with a chuckle that he's glad he wasn't in charge, but argued that something is going to have to be done to control medical costs. They are the "tapeworm" of the American economy, he said.

On the economy, Buffett said he continues to see slow improvement and pointed out that "two percent a year growth with less than one percent population gains means one percent real growth per capita. In 20 years that's 20 percent. If every generation lives 20 percent better than the generation before them, that's not terrible."