Re your interest in poverty Matt.

As you know I have retired from Thanet site blogging. But I just concluded a six month study of one of my tenants (on benefits).

He is Afro Caribbean with a family and he is 32. He has no disabilities.

After six months (and I will detail to you exactly the hand ups I gave him if you email so I can reply off blog) he raved at me on the phone wanting more help.

Social Security did not give him enough etc.

Then he got to gulping a bit as I shut him up and proved to him that his family had 176 quid a week for electric gas water and shopping after rent and rates are paid.

But his family for six months have lost on average £46.21 of that money weekly due to his follies. (I listed them to him).

If he was given more money from benefits I bet his family would still not be lifted out of poverty. His follies would get bigger.

I suggest that he is typical of the benefits dependent.

As we go into 2009 I require his rent weekly. He does not like this as he builds rent arrears rather as if his landlord provides him an interest free overdraft facility (ever growing)

He gave me a bit of lip on the phone after phoning me Christmas Day.

I gave him a time I would be on his doorstep. I was there and he locked himself in and hid up.

An interesting thing is that Thanet Council has the reputation of being the best for landlords to deal with. As soon as a toerag tenant is eight weeks in arrears with rent they are hassle free paying landlords direct.

As soon as direct payments start then Landlord can be held liable, if the tenant is caught fiddling, for repaying overpaid housing benefits. Not only that a council (for landlords with more than one tenant) can recover such fiddled money by stopping the local housing allowance of one of the landlords honest tenants.

This is New Labour. Methods to make the innocent pay the penalty for the guilty.

Do you know the irony ? I enabled the man to go self employed. I told him how to claim working tax credit. If he had done that then his family would have had an extra £18.30 a week from the public purse (above his benefits rates) at least during his first year of trading. Plus what he made in income (if doing well he would have to get the working tax credit adjusted or have it adjusted the following years after he submits accounts.

He stayed signing on.
QED Happy New Year

I heard about the leap second and I had started planning the most productive way to use it but I ended up sleeping instead ;) waste of a perfectly good second!

Rick, the plural of anecdote is not data.

carma, I wonder if it makes us one second younger than otherwise or one second older?