The temperature this morning seemed pretty mild so it appears that we are in for a spell of fair weather as the month runs out. Not surprisingly, the Budget delivered on Wednesday is continuing to occupy a lot of attention. One particular feature of it was to limit the amount of benefit that employees (and their employers) could gain from a salary sacrifice scheme. I have not heard an analysis of this by the various pundits but my own searching on the web has conformed my view that it is sort of middle class scam to avoid tax. Without going into the figures too deeply, the holders of a private pension can ask that some of their salary be paid into their pension pot. This reduces their liability for tax and National Insurance on their remaining income so that an employee with a salary of about £40k who sacrificed £5k would end up paying £200 a year less tax and their employer about £345 less. So the Budget was attempting to address this particular arrangement which meant a loss of income to the Exchequer. About 30% of private pension schemes utilised this facility and I suspect that it was even more beneficial to higher rate taxpayers as well- obviously no such scheme was offered to those employees, generally lower paid, who were part of a public pension scheme. The budget is being attacked for breaking the manifesto pledge that income tax would not be raised but as rates of tax have remained the same but allowances have been cut resulting in a higher tax bill then it becomes a question of semantics whether the Labour manifesto pledge has been broken or not.
Some terrible news has emerged from Hong Kong overnight. Fire broke out in a high rise building and quickly spread to adjacent buildings. The use of bamboo rather than steel as a scaffolding material contributed to the severity of the disaster. At least 70 people have been killed in a major fire engulfing public housing apartments in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district – and more than 250 are still not accounted for. Officials on Thursday morning said the fire was under control in four out of seven affected buildings, and they hoped to quell the remaining blazes by the evening. As the fires subside, questions are now mounting as to how the blaze initially started, and who should be held accountable. By way of comparison, the death toll at the Grenfell tower block in London resulted in 72 deaths and it seems likely that the ultimate death toll in Hong Kong may exceed this. Incidentally, the Grenfell fire was more than eight years ago and the issues arising from it are not fully resolved. I suspect that there is a considerable volume of remediation work yet to be undertaken. Approximately half of the required work has been completed and Of the 5,176 buildings identified with unsafe cladding, 2,482 (48%) have started or completed remediation works, of which 1,754 (34%) have completed remediation works. This includes remediation progress on high rise (18m+) and mid-rise (11-18m) buildings in height.
The day unfolded in quite an interesting direction. By doing my shopping on Wednesday afternoons, this releases Thursday mornings for me to do other things. I was a little tired throughout the day because I had some acid reflux in the middle of the night (my own fault, as I had eaten some biscuits and cheese in the late evening) so was up for a bit whilst it settled and then had a strange dream where I was wondering around a strange castle after a party with ‘artistic’ folks that went until dawn and then I couldn’t find my way out (and thought I had lost my wallet as well) It was one of those dreams where you are glad to wake up and discover that you are not lost after all. I did my customary Tai Chi and afterwards had a coffee and toasted teacake with my good friend, the one-time banker from Stoke. There are about three men in the class and the other 10-12 are ladies who, quite naturally, commune with each other after our class. Then I came home to carry on conversations with our domestic help who had made it her cleaning day today. My Droitwich friend texted me and we were wondering who was going to visit who in the late afternoon/early evening. I was going to wait until my son could assist me in getting all of the Christmas decorations down from the loft as this is often a two-handed job but he is going on holiday next week so I thought I had better put some preparations in hand now. So I utilised our long aluminium step ladders to get everything needed out of the left. Over the years, we have learned to always have the Christmas things together in their own pile and near to the loft aperture but I managed fairly easily to get all of the stuff out where it is gracing our upstairs landing but I will not attempt to start the decorations for a day or so yet when I will have people to help me. I received a text from two of Meg’s erstwhile carers, plus a boyfriend, who are calling to call round to see me tomorrow evening and we can start to make some active preparations for the party that we anticipate holding in about ten days time on Monday, December 8th. We intend to make it an all afternoon and evening affair to fit in with shift patterns and I have high hopes that it will be as successful as last year’s Christmas party (and, evidently Meg’s last social event, as we knew that it would be) It does seem rather strange to be making preparations for Christmas when it is not yet quite December and the first Christmas without Meg is bound to be tinged with a certain amount of sadness. Last night, as I was going through some old texts, I rediscovered a website that I had put together just after Meg had died with two links in it, one being the eulogy I gave at her funeral service but the other being a whole series of photographs which more or less covered the whole of Meg’s life from the age of about 4 until just before she died. The last photograph was poignant in the extreme and showed Meg sitting alone on a park bench wrapped in her very warm goose-down coat which she wore almost constantly in the cold weather.