South Lakes Poverty Truth Commission, South Lakeland (2026)

04/10/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bath tub. A frantic scramble for Oasis tickets.

Now this might seem a bit agricultural but I thought it was an excellent (or appalling) example of how government works, or fails to work. I thought it would make sense for me explain the Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 scheme Window 2 problem.

Farmers were given two windows to apply to join the Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 scheme.
The first window was open to two eligible groups: small farms under 50 Hectares and farms without an existing Environmental Land Management (ELM) revenue agreement. The window was held open for two months. During this there was £60 million on offer but as only £57 million was taken up the remaining £3 was rolled over into the second window, which was everybody else.
Window 2 opened at 10am on Tuesday 22 September. Official policy was that nobody was told the date or time before hand. On the other hand anybody who was signed up to the Gov.UK.Blogs notification service, you would get an email saying it was open. There might have been other methods of instant messaging as well. Because all £233m was allocated in six hours and the window closed again: waiting until you read about it in the farming press was never going to work.

It was a shambles, somebody commented that you cannot run a business like it’s a "frantic scramble for Oasis tickets."
Now there are serious issues. Farmers tend to work outside. They might not switch the computer on at all until the evening when after a quiet ten to twelve hour day they settle down to a jolly evening of paperwork. These people would discover the window was closed before they even knew it was open.
It seems that those who won out were those who had gone to the expense of using land agents to submit their claim. Now I know that one senior official at the rural payments agency commented, “If we have not made this scheme simple enough for a farmer to apply without agents help, then we have failed.” But even the land agents ran into problems. Some had to triage their clients. If you were signed up to the notification service you got an email to tell you when 25%, 50%, and 75% of the money had been paid out. So some agents realised they couldn’t get all their client’s applications in, and had to decide who to leave out. I would love to be a fly on the wall as the agent explains to the client who missed out why it had to be them.
As an aside, it has been pointed out to me that major landowners such as RSPB, National Trust, United Utilities all have a lot of land in schemes. Also they all have in house land agents just ready to press the button. A lot of farmers are asking just what proportion of the money these organisations managed to get between them.
Then there were the inevitable problems with the website. In one case the Rural Payments Agency had somehow got the wrong information about a field, in spite of having been given the correct information in the last communication they had from the farmer. So when the farmer came to enter their claim, the website kept rejecting it because that field was ‘wrong.’ To get the scheme accepted they had to get the RPA to change their records by which time the scheme was closed
But one important thing to remember is that all this has an impact on the environmental work done. This scheme isn’t government buying something once and for all. Basically it is a scheme that covers the costs of creating and maintaining an environmental feature. So if you grow a bird food strip, not only do you have the cost of the seed and cultivation, you lose the income from the grain you could otherwise have grown. It’s the same with the attempt to get farmers to grow more herbal leys. This is grassland where you are not allowed to put on any much muck and fertiliser. It also has to have various herbs. The problem is, with a herbal ley you don’t get as much hay or silage, and fewer cows can graze it. So the payment compensates you for the extra costs and loss of income.
The scheme you sign up for lasts three years. So when you try to reapply for the scheme and miss the window, you can no longer afford the herbal leys or bird food strips or whatever. So they have to go back into food production.
At the moment it’s agriculture that has been hit by this. But in reality it’s ‘same old, same old.’ We have governments and civil servants who obviously don’t understand the mechanisms of the schemes they have created, the people who the schemes are designed to help, or the effects of the schemes in the real world. You see it here with SFI. But you see it with PIP, or Universal Credit, or any number of schemes that probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
Perhaps if governments called upon people with lived experience? You know, talked to people who had to live with the schemes. Note, by ‘talk to them’ I don’t mean ‘consult them’. I mean get them in to the top table so they can shred the schemes in the presence of people with the clout to make serious changes. Otherwise we’re doomed to repeat this process ad nauseam.

26/09/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bath tub. We are not worthy

I confess that I had never heard of Piddington. Indeed if you’d told me that it was a place name invented purely for a work of fiction, I’d probably have believed you. Yet I discovered I’d actually walked within ten miles of it. A quiet place, the area is pleasant countryside.

It is in a new constituency, Bicester and Woodstock. This was formed in 2024 and the Libdems hold it with a majority of just under 5,000. But in the same area, before boundary changes, the Conservatives had a 14,000 majority. It’s one of the areas that could change hands again. I wonder if this will colour the political rhetoric.
And little Piddington is now shaking the towers of the great. They are a village with a population of about 350 that is connected to the rest of the UK by roads so narrow there are no white lines painted on them. And the government, in its wisdom, has decided to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers nearby. So they had a referendum on leaving the UK. There were 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, 26 voted no, and one ballot paper was spoiled.

Whilst votes for independence are uncommon, rural communities feeling put upon is not. At the small rural village of Wethersfield, it was decided to house another 1,200 male migrants. The problem is that Wethersfield is rural and bus services are sparse. As an aside that is one thing that irritates many in the rural population when government proudly announces that they have cut the bus fare from £3 to £2. It would be great if we had buses.

But this lack of buses serving the migrant camp has not gone unnoticed by the Home Office. They have provided “A fleet of minibuses and shuttle services, free at the point of use.” According to the Gov.uk website, “Transport is provided where necessary to enable access to services not available on site.”
One major problem we have when tackling poverty in rural areas is that people need to travel, to enable access to services not available within walking distance. (Which in all candour is pretty much all of them.) Yet rural bus services have been steadily declining, whilst urban bus services continue to be subsidised. When is the government going to provide the same level of support to the rural poor as it does for others?
One problem we face is that government (by which I don’t mean this or that political party) seems to have lost touch with the electorate. Not only that but we seem to be ricocheting between short term fixes (who thought dumping 1,200 young men in a camp in the middle of the countryside with nothing to do, surrounded by other young men with whom they have little in common, was a good idea?) which are hastily scrapped when they become politically unpopular.

So the populations of Piddington, Wethersfield, and other villages soon to be so blessed are left feeling not merely marginalised and unheard, but of being unworthy of consideration.
But there is hope for Piddington. Apparently there are newts. And not merely newts, but Great Crested Newts. Indeed there are rumours that barbastelle bats have also made their home on the site. If there are newts and bats then all plans will be halted. It is a pity that newts don’t need regular bus services into the nearest market town, then a village could have newts and be worthy of a bus service. Because newts are important. The rural population, and especially the rural poor struggling to get by, less so.

19/09/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bath tub. Trust in parliament.

I realise you’ve been worrying yourself sick, but fear not. I saw a comment in one of the papers that MPs who have to stay in hotels as part of their duties will not be left out of pocket by the tourist tax, their expenses will be increased to compensate. So that’s all right then.

To be fair it’s one tax that isn’t going to hit the poor particularly hard. Although I note that the Scots already levy the tourist tax on people staying in Youth Hostels. But because you don’t have a full room, they charge so much per head.

I’ve been pondering the fact that, at the moment, people still trust parliament. So when we have two crypto millionaires give nearly £70 million between them to support a political party my cynical self was impressed. They actually felt that they could get meaningful change through parliament. Given the sort of money they were throwing about, they could have hired mercenaries and launched a coup d’état instead. In all candour I don’t think crypto millionaires have the necessary skill set, but still I was torn between congratulating them on their trust in our institutions or marvelling at their naivety.
And yet, in spite of the ostentatious mediocrity of many of our politicians, a lot of people still trust parliament. The problem comes when the trust starts to seep away.

Take the NHS as an example. Unconditional love for the NHS is almost mandatory. Yet I know one hospital where I just wouldn’t go and I know people who have rescued family members from it. A friend of mine mentioned that people of his parent’s generation go in fear of one local hospital because people of their age go in for something minor and never come out.

Slowly, very slowly, people are drifting out of love with the NHS. Yes I am happy with my local hospital, but then the hospital trust wants to remove Intensive Care and shift it to another hospital over sixty miles away. I know a lot of really good people who work for the NHS, but they are often the people who tell you the tales of what really happens.

And in reality, this all hits the poor hardest. If you’ve got money then it’s no big deal to have some minor procedure done privately at your convenience. Probably for less than you’d spend on your summer holiday. If you’re poor you take what you’re offered, where you’re offered it.

The police are also in a position where they could see trust trickle away. We had the scandal of grooming gangs where poor young girls were largely ignored. On BBC report recently a young woman told of how, when she was 15, social services reported her case to the police. She spent hours in interviews, but officers stopped focusing on her abuse once she mentioned gang drug houses. Detectives wanted information on drug dealing instead of investigating her rapists. How to subtly convince somebody they don’t matter?

On the other hand we saw Graham Linehan arrested for a twitter related hate incident. He has money which means lawyers. Sharp elbowed prosperous people can get justice and the police have apologised and paid him £25,000. One comment I saw was that if they jailed everybody who said stupid things on twitter, we’d have to just write off a couple of counties and call them a prison.

Perhaps parliament is going to have to be careful. The easy way for our longest standing political parties to keep parties like Reform or the Greens from gaining power is simply to be competent. Rule fairly for all the people, treat the electorate with respect, and stop trying to bribe us with our own money and finally balance the budget without trying to do it by sneaking in endless extra taxes.
If they cannot do that, people will start to ask why politicians came into politics in the first place?

12/09/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bath tub. Learning a trade?

A farmer older than me once told me (He’s still alive, in his nineties, so we’re not talking ancient history here.) that at one point when he was farming, and here I guess he means the late 1960s, he needed a new tractor. So he sold three milk cows and bought one.

I mention this because I was sent a flyer where an agricultural engineer has a tractor for sale. It isn’t new, it was manufactured and first sold in 2002. It has four wheel drive, with a loader, it is rated at 100HP and only 819 hours on the clock. So it’s a more capable vehicle than you could have bought back in the 1960s, but it’s probably the sort of entry vehicle that you really need nowadays. Yet this second hand tractor, which looks in decent order, is nearly £37,000, plus VAT. So that’s at least ten cows, rather than three. In all candour I haven’t the nerve to ask how much a new tractor would cost.

The reason I mention this is that it gives you a fair idea of how far behind farming prices and incomes have fallen. It also explains why farmers tend to run with as few tractors as they can manage.

Now this story came to mind because I was at an event where the discussion was about young people in rural communities. They have a lot of disadvantages, merely getting to education can be an issue, and then finding a job and travelling to it can be a nightmare.
But because of the group I was part of, we tended to look at things from a more agricultural viewpoint. So most of us round the table were self-employed and always had been. So rather than wonder about how you get a young person to the job, what about the young person being their own business?

I’ve already pointed out how expensive farm machinery has got. This means that a lot of farms now run with as little equipment as they can get away with. Also because labour costs are high, effectively they run short staffed as well. So when certain jobs need doing, be it silaging, or carting slurry, or whatever, you pick up the phone and phone a contractor.

Now agricultural contractors are an interesting group of businesses to look at. In this area there are a couple that might be regarded as ‘established firms’ who might even have an employee or two. But they too run with minimum equipment and staff and when they need more people they phone round and put a team together.
So the young man (it’s still a predominantly male trade) might be carting slurry for his own clients this week. For the next two weeks he’s part of somebody else’s silaging gang, being paid for his time and his tractor. Then later in the year he might be cutting road verges for the local authority, or hauling a trailer on a building site.
The same person might have picked up small parcels of land to rent, and is running his own small sheep flock or suckler herd. Indeed I know lasses who work as shepherds for a couple of farms, do lambing on others at the right time of year and even help out with calf rearing and relief milking when they have time.

As for training, in all honesty a lot of them are already trained. During covid we phoned a contractor to cart slurry. He turned up driving the tractor and slurry tanker. He was accompanied by his wife and twelve year old son in the family car. The son stayed and carted slurry (because it wasn’t road work so didn’t need a licence) and wife took the contractor back to where he had another tractor and tanker and he worked on that one.
During the whole of lock down, that lad, who was barely as tall as a tractor front wheel, was putting in full time hours, and earning a full adult wage. Having watched him take a tractor and tanker across a bridge that was just wide enough, I’ll vouch for the fact he was fully competent. He was doing a man’s job, we just treated him as an adult. But he did comment a couple of years later that going back to school and being treated as a child again was pretty hard.

So you have a population of young people willing to work. They are ‘self-starters', and they are already trained up. If they need more education it’s in the technical things. The more advanced details of animal husbandry. A good solid grounding in the maintenance of the equipment they have. Keeping accounts and budgeting would probably be useful.
If the state actually wanted to help, make sure there are appropriate courses out there. Perhaps giving them cheap loans to get started would help a lot of them. Then just reduce the paperwork and then keep out of the way and let them get on.
But it’s not just a rural issue. I’ve known a lot of lads who have struggled to get proper trade apprenticeships. I knew young people who were sent on a course and it would only last for six months! It qualified them to do nothing. I can see the need for some college training in the course, but it needs to include hands on, ‘doing the job’. Also doing the job being watched and guided by somebody who is competent. We need training provided by people who are competent in their trade. We do not need training provided by organisations who are good at filling out the paperwork and pocketing their share of training grants.
If we can get this apprenticeship side of things sorted out we’ll have young people who are earning money and on a full adult wage and out of their time before they’re twenty-one. With no university loan debt hanging over their heads.

05/09/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bathtub. How much do we owe?

Some are lobbying for people in the UK to start paying reparations for the trade of enslaved people. The part this country played in the slave trade that kicked off in the 17th century, give or take a generation is clear. Now purely fortuitously I know what my ancestors were doing back then.

My lady wife is interested in genealogy, and because my family stayed in the same, well documented area, she could trace me back to my five great’s grandfather. But then it turns out that he had two sons, and the son I’m not descended from was an architect and was locally important. So somebody did a master’s degree tracing him back. Obviously once they got to his Dad, they’re tracing me back as well. I can trace my direct family back to Cockermouth in 1600. In all the years since, they’ve never lived more than forty-five miles from Kendal. And always ‘This’ side of Kendal. Never ‘That’ side of Kendal. And what have my ancestors been?
We’ve been farm workers, quarry men, stone masons, miners, occasionally got a small farm on a tenancy, sometimes doing a bit of fishing as well. But effectively we’ve kept our heads down and got on with it. Whenever there was a hard, underpaid, unregarded job to be done, one of my ancestors seemed to end up doing it. That was doubtless our privilege.

So in the family there was no great accumulation of capital, no lucrative investments. I’m not sure how many of them warranted a headstone. But at this point I’m forced to ask exactly what my family gained from slavery. Our only contribution towards the furtherance of the British Empire was being called upon to fight in the Great War. Another privilege graciously awarded us.

But there are people who have benefited from institutions enriched by the trade in enslaved people. Take the universities and similar, many of whom have generations of funding from ethically dubious income streams. Given that my sole post 18 qualification is that I have a certificate from the fire brigade saying I am competent to escape from a burning building, I don’t have a dog in that fight.

But if there is a feeling that money should be paid in reparations, then aren't these the places we should look to? I was going to suggest that we recovered money from anybody with a degree from an ethically suspect university. (Thinking about it some schools could fall into this category as well.) The problem is, people have got degrees in universities with no direct connection to slavery but who were taught by people who did go to those unethical universities.
So in the interests of simplicity, I suggest that all those people with a university degree get to pay an extra 5p in the pound extra income tax once they earn more than £50,000. If they’re paying back a university loan push the threshold up to £75,000. This money can be paid directly into a reparation fund. For current students I’d not impose the extra tax. Given that a lot of those leaving university now are going into entry level jobs at little more than minimum wage, I’d suggest they’re exempt.

Obviously vested interests will moan about this system, but if the money is just paid out of general taxation, it’ll be found by cutting government spending and as usual it’s the poor and disadvantaged who will lose out.

29/08/2026

Existential thoughts I had while in the bathtub. A roof over your head.

Housing is interesting. Expensive but interesting. However here are a few numbers to get your head round. Back in 1976, the average UK house price was approximately 3.8 times the average annual salary. Even that was up a bit on what it had been ten years earlier. Now, in 2026, the average UK house price stands at approximately 6.8 to 8.2 times the average annual salary. So when young people say they have no chance of getting on the housing ladder, they’re not being snowflakes. It’s tough.

Now the maths is going to get speculative. I’m going to assume that households have a house (flat or whatever) to live in. No matter how good or bad it is.
So let us look back. In 1976 the UK had 19,616,000 households. Now in 2026 the UK has 29.0 million households. So in simple terms, we need an extra 9,384,000 houses. So have we built enough? Well getting the figures is tricky, but between 1976 and 2026, we built approximately 8.5 million to 9 million permanent dwellings across the United Kingdom.
So the gap is somewhere between half a million and a million houses.

To an extent there are social factors coming into play. The average number of people per household in 1976 in the UK was approximately 2.76 persons. Compare this with the average number of people per household in 2026 in the UK which is approximately 2.36 persons. If we’d kept the same number of people per household then our population would have 25 million households and we’d have needed about 4 million houses fewer. In fact if we build like we have done, in this scenario we’d have houses to spare.
The rate of family breakdown may have come into play here but there are probably other influences as well.

But what other factors are there? What about second homes and holiday homes? Here the figures get even more confusing. Some sources, often linked to the holiday industry, estimate that there are 300,000 to 330,000 dedicated holiday homes and second properties used for holidays across Great Britain, including approximately 147,000 commercial holiday lets in England and over 250,000 registered second homes. On the other hand according to the English housing survey 2021-22, there were 809,000 second homes owned by households in England. (So that’s England alone, not the inhabitants of the UK) but only about half of these second homes were in the UK. I don’t think we can count homes abroad in this exercise.

It seems like our core problem is that we have a shortfall of somewhere between half a million and a million homes needed to get us back to 1976 levels of house availability for households. Hopefully if we get back to the 1976 levels house prices will fall relative to wages and will become more affordable. Mind you how many people want that, and instead want to cling to a grossly high valuation that they’ll never feel the benefit of?

But could we cut that housing deficit? After all, we also have anywhere up to half a million holiday and second homes which are probably not included in the households figures. So if pushed, we could perhaps put another half a million houses on the market which with work could be suitable for household occupation. The problem is these are almost certainly in the wrong place. After all, it’s great to have a holiday in Langdale, but how exactly do you expect to earn a living. Remember a lot of rural areas have pretty rubbish broadband so ‘working remotely’ may not be possible.
Then there’s the houses that people are living in that aren’t fit to live in.
According to the English Housing survey 2023-2024 https://bit.ly/4gnjdt1

“In 2023-24, around 1.3 million households were living in damp homes and, of those, over 600,000 had at least one member with a health condition. The proportion of households where at least one occupant had a health condition varied across tenures. Households in housing association and local authority homes were more likely to have an occupant with a health condition (62% and 61%, respectively) compared with those in private rented and owner-occupied homes (both 35%).”
So in crude terms, we could bring some second homes back into the market, but a lot are in the wrong place, or don’t have the facilities needed to be homes, so we’re probably a million houses short. But on top of that then there are at least another million which need serious work (in some cases demolition and rebuilding by somebody competent) to make them decent homes.
I’ll now step back out of the way whilst people fight like ferrets in a sack over why these houses shouldn’t be built anywhere near them.

22/08/2026

Re: Existential thoughts I had while in the bathtub. Who is subsidised?

Over the last two generations or so, government has got itself into a right mess. Currently the government spends £111.2 billion on interest payments on the money it has borrowed. That’s over 8% of its income. So suggesting government borrows more money to pay for stuff is starting to sound a bit silly. That way just leads to you borrowing money to pay the interest on the money you borrowed.
Where has all the money gone? Well remember furlough during covid? It cost £70 billion, which rather puts the £15 Billion blown on PPE in perspective. I am not going to say furlough was a good idea or a bad one, but it was just money government spent. Similarly government spent over £40 Billion in energy subsidies alone in 2022/23. Now whenever there is any sort of crisis, the electorate seems to expect government to revert to Father Christmas mode and shower money on the populace. Yes we expect to be bribed with our own money. Also note that this isn’t money being used to help the poor. Most of this money is going to people who’re doing OK.

But it’s not just the populace. Without us realising, we have drifted into the situation where a lot of businesses are subsidised. Yes I know there are various grants and similar, but there is another level of subsidy. Government, or rather the tax payer, is being called upon to make up some employees’ wages.

I came across some interesting figures. About 32% of those claiming Universal Credit in the UK are in employment. So their employers don’t pay a living wage, they pay them less and let the tax payer make up the difference. About 16% of PIP recipients are also in employment. Again their employer isn’t paying a living wage. The employer gets cheap labour subsidised by the state. Indeed the situation is perhaps worse than it appears. Thirty percent of people referred to foodbanks are from working households. Even with state subsidies, the companies paying poverty wages end up being further subsidised by charities just to ensure their employees can eat.
So who are these Gradgrinds, these very fat men who are watering the worker’s b**r?
Well according to https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/get-britain-working-labour-market-insights-october-2025/get-britain-working-labour-market-insights-october-2025
Human health and social work activities is the largest sector of employment for people on Universal Credit. (17.2%).
Then there is the ‘Wholesale and Retail Trade (including motor vehicle repair)’: This is the second-largest sector, driven by low-wage retail positions.
Third comes ‘Administrative and Support Services’: A sector seeing large workforce flows from those transitioning onto Universal Credit.
Finally there is ‘Accommodation and Food Service Activities’: Particularly prominent among younger Universal Credit claimants under the age of 25. [But thanks to changes government brought in with increases in rates, minimum wage and NI, this could be a diminishing problem as the number of jobs in this area seems to be falling.]

Somewhat embarrassingly for government we have organisations like the GMB pointing out that ‘thousands of NHS staff, school support staff, and care workers increasingly rely on Universal Credit due to wages falling behind inflation.’
Now I’m going to be generous of my definition of who government is responsible for. Given that they set budgets for much of the public sector, and incessantly tinker and reorganise, I’m going to assume that government is responsible, in broad terms, for public sector wages.

Given the government is skint, couldn’t we do things more efficiently here? Rather than the State paying poverty wages, and then setting up an expensive organisation which expects the state induced poor to jump through stressful and humiliating hoops to make up their wages to a somewhat less derisory level, would it not make more sense for the state to just pay people a living wage to start with? Apparently Universal Credit administration costs over a billion pounds a year, and the PIP system isn’t cheap to run. It also seems that government expects charities to step in to help make up the wages.

According to https://www.florence.co.uk/resources/blog/cost-of-living-survey
“A full 14% of nurses and carers said they’d begun using food banks.”
My dark suspicion is that governments generally have the sort of spending habits normally seen in Premier League football managers. On top of that, nobody ever seems to do what a sensible organisation would do and try to see the bigger picture. My fear is that at some point the whole system is going to get too expensive and the electorate, sick of endless taxes, is going to put in a government what will fix things. Almost by definition it will be the poor, with no voice and no influence who will suffer.

South Lakes Poverty Truth Commission

04/10/2026

26/09/2026

19/09/2026

12/09/2026

05/09/2026

29/08/2026

22/08/2026

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