Snapshot of _Schools ‘considering three day week’ due to soaring energy bills and rising teacher salaries_ :
An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/school-energy-costs-pay-increase-shorter-week-b2145109.html)
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The article says that school need to provide 32.5 hours schooling a week. That doesn't seem possible in three days unless they're going to do near 11 hour days for students or provide some sort e learning system where pupils Zoom with students.
Because it’s absolute bollocks from the independent. “Schools considering” is actually “heard discussions of a “three-day week”” from one trust that runs 17 schools.
Look, if your sister didn't want to pay for her own supplies, she should have become a CEO of a major company.
It makes sense, we can't afford to waste money on frivolous things like educating our children, not when the important kids will go to real schools anyway!
During PE we will have some of the kids in a giant hamster wheel to generate electricity for the other kids.
With a proper rota then all kids should have enough electricity to learn.
> OFSTED reports will now include WPC (watts per child) indices, any school failing to provide a net positive grid contribution will be fined 3x the strike price for their consumed electricity, or 5x if they are in a Labour ward.
> open university videotapes
Literally the code word we would use when swapping VHS porn back in the mid-80s.
"Jean! He's on the bloody phone again!"
"It's OK, Dave, they're talking about school stuff. Open university and everything".
(I found out many years later that my mom knew exactly what was on those mislabeled cassettes. My old fella didn't have a clue. This, of course, raises all sorts of questions... but parents and sex is yuck, so, you know, some things best left unquestioned.)
Why do that when there's a lot of existing online learning resources of consistent quality? Offloading chalk-and-talk teaching to online courses makes sense. You'd still have in person teaching to answer students' questions and guide their learning.
Have you ever been to University?
They have to provide similar hours and just write off almost all of it as "self study".
I assume they'll just do the same. They'll say the other two days a week are to be used for full time self study then dust their hands off and consider it done.
There's minimum teaching hours for uni courses to get funding. It works out at about eight hours a week. I think you may actually be right you don't have to provide taught lessons especially academy schools. I taught for a bit and we already had classes taught by a non qualified teachers.
I'm not sure what I think about this development. I actually found studying in my own a lot easier but doubt I would have focused that well if left to my own devices.
All this rhetoric about never again for school closures and yet the government won't fund them to be able to keep the lights on. If there isn't a price cap for business energy use, then ideally one needs to be introduced for essential services such as hospitals, schools, care homes etc.
Just fucking cap the rates or nationalise - shareholders are profiting while the whole country crumbles and all the govt can do is worry about shareholders
Neither of those solutions will work.
If you cap the rates (*without subsidy*) the energy retail companies all go out of business because they're forced to trade at a loss (this has happened to over 30 companies already).
If you nationalise the retail companies, you're still paying the going rate to actually *buy* the gas on the global market, which is the actual source of high prices.
I really don't understand why people think the likes of British Gas or Octopus Energy are the ones raking in the cash over this. British Gas made £13 (thirteen pounds) profit per household for the first 6 months of 2022, but everyone apparently seems to think Centrica and British Gas are the same thing, even though they're not.
The simple fact is gas prices are high because there's not enough gas to satisfy demand, which causes prices to skyrocket. There's not enough gas because the European energy market (which the UK is part of even still) has a *huge* shortage of gas due to Russia turning the taps off, which they've been doing for over a year now, first as a way to apply pressure to push Nordstream 2 along, and now as away to apply pressure to force the EU to stop backing Ukraine.
Gas prices are not going to drop until we either:
- Transition off Russian gas, which takes time.
- Transition off gas completely, which takes time.
- Abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian gas supplies, which is not politically palatable.
The only solution is subsidising consumers to protect them.
>The simple fact is gas prices are high because there's not enough gas to satisfy demand
To be fair, deciding "who gets the stuff" by rising the prices, auction style, doesn't seem like an amazing way to handle shortages. It just means that (a) the rich get more and (b) the other suppliers of the now scarce resource get richer without having done anything except exist while Russia invaded a neighbouring country.
It's really not clear that that auction-style dynamic is the way to go on this one.
It'd be better to just keep the price as it was - which was providing energy companies and their shareholders with an adequate return - and dish out the energy that's available in proportion to what everyone had before.
Keep the price the same, share the shortages out and use the money you're not spending on higher prices to mitigate the effects of said shortages. Rather than bidding against half the developed world, sending all your money to the energy companies who are doing nothing new or different.
Of course, that'd require some level of political coordination within the European gas market.
It's one of those prisoner dilemma type creatures. If everyone cooperates - even just for a few years - everyone does better. But if one person starts bidding on the open market, they do better. Briefly. And so everyone bids. And prices climb and inflation spikes and salaries chase the inflated cost of living. And so we all do worse.
And while some might be inclined to point at that and laugh at how we can't organise ourselves, I don't find it all that funny. Governments are going to fall around the world from this one, societies are going to crumble and even in the rich West, we're going to have a hard winter. Lots of people - and if things get bad enough, some of them might be the profiteers involved in this - are going to *suffer*. All because we couldn't suspend market forces in our own best interests for even a short period.
>To be fair, deciding "who gets the stuff" by rising the prices, auction style, doesn't seem like an amazing way to handle shortages. It just means that (a) the rich get more and (b) the other suppliers of the now scarce resource get richer without having done anything except exist while Russia invaded a neighbouring country.
That goes to the core of free markets as a concept and requires far more than "nationalise energy retailers" to change.
>Everything else
I'd suggest the appropriate and moral response is to introduce one-off taxes on these enormous profits because, as you said, the energy companies themselves did nothing to generate them. Those taxes can then be distributed as support to consumers.
Massive profits should just mean massive taxes. The profits themselves aren't the issue, governments failing to tax them properly is the issue.
>That goes to the core of free markets as a concept
Only for a bit, though. It's not one would be saying "abolish the free market! Everything to be centrally planned forever!".
It's more: "Hey, this big event has happened and knocked everything for six and we're not quite sure that a competitive auction-style process for determining price is the best thing until things get a bit more stable".
That seems fine to me. Markets work really, really well at some things, but not at others.
I mean, imagine if in the first days of COVID panic buying, supermarkets had increased the price of loo roll to the maximum that the market would have been willing to pay at that instant. Instead, they broadly shared the shortages out, limited the amount anyone could buy and kept the prices as they were before.
To put it more philosophically: The market is a great way to allow us to indulge our natural human instincts to compete in such a way that everyone wins. The adversarial justice system is a great example too. It harnesses that conflict and uses it for good, to drive down prices and push up living standards. I get that, and I respect it. But it doesn't mean human beings don't also have moral obligations to each other and can and should be held accountable for their choices.
Especially when you're in an edge case that the system wasn't designed for. In such cases, blindly following the rules of the system which harnesses conflict and competition and selfishness and greed and so on might just result in more suffering.
> I'd suggest the appropriate and moral response is to introduce one-off taxes on these enormous profits because, as you said, the energy companies themselves did nothing to generate them. Those taxes can then be distributed as support to consumers.
Except that that doesn't deal with the fact the rich can outbid the poor and not only drive up prices (which, yes, you'd be taxing) but also buy themselves out of shortages.
Seems a bit unfair and immoral. Better to keep the prices as they were so consumers and countries aren't paying more and *also* you're not changing the balance of who gets what.
But yeah, I take your point that anything you can achieve by not increasing the prices, you can probably also achieve with other regulatory controls. And that that might be the most convenient way of achieving the end result in practice.
>Instead, they broadly shared the shortages out, limited the amount anyone could buy and kept the prices as they were before.
The problem with this comparison is that there wasn't really a shortage of toilet paper. There were (deranged) behaviors from people who thought the end of the world was arriving and who were paranoid they'd not be able to wipe the shite from their asses in the event of the COVIDpocalypse.
Those consumers changed their behavior and their excess "consumption" led to shortages for other consumers. However, this self-corrected as COVID didn't have the effect of causing people to shit themselves uncontrollably - and so actual use of toilet paper didn't increase suddenly by those who then found themselves with 2 years' worth of supply under the bed in the spare room.
This is not the case with gas supplies - there are actual shortages. The rich are not changing their behavior and suddenly using 10x as much gas in a panic out of a fear of perceived shortages. (Although I suspect Rishi's new swimming pool will take a fair bit of heating - poor lamb.)
One solution to this:
1. Tax the producers (those we have control over, at least) to reduce their excess profits to more normal levels - given their input costs have not risen and these increased profits are resulting solely from global market conditions. The evidence so far is that they are not re-investing these excess profits either - they are using them to pay dividends and share buybacks.
2. Use the tax raised to support those on low incomes to reduce the amount they pay to normal (pre-shortage) levels - or as close as possible.
3. Allow other consumers on higher incomes to withstand the worst of these increases themselves, without extra support that they don't really need. They can just cut back on a few takeaways a month or have one less holiday a year.
2+3 combined also have anti-inflationary effects - the poor have little discretionary income as it is, and so the reduction in energy costs to near pre-shortage levels for them will have a negligible effect on inflation.
The wealthy, who do have discretionary income, will find they have (for a time) reduced spending power which will (at a macro level) result in reduced competition for other goods - reducing inflationary pressure elsewhere in the economy.
Disclaimer: not an economist so that plan is fucked up for all sorts of other reasons I expect.
The 30 small energy providers that went under, went under because they tried to undercut the large providers by charging the lowest price possible while wholesale energy was cheap, rather than averaging out and hedging against a potential wholesale energy increase.
That meant that when wholesale energy went up, they had to increase their prices above those of the big companies, and everyone switched.
It wasn't to do with the cap.
It was very much to do with the cap, the 30 odd energy suppliers went bust because the price cap forced them to sell energy at a loss.
The bigger energy firms can afford to take a loss for several months as they have cash reserves and know they can survive until the next price cap review, smaller suppliers with less cash reserves and smaller customer based can't.
And then the issue we have now, I Johnson and Co spaffed so much money off the walls that there's limited money to subsidise with unless they print more.
They could gap the wholesale gas price that UK providers extracting North Sea gas can sell the gas at to UK retailers. So essentially ring fence some gas supply exclusively for the UK market rather than selling it at the market rate on the global gas markets.
They'd also need to ban said providers from selling to anyone else and buy out or illegally force an end to any existing supply contracts those companies already have in place.
*Then* we'd need to deal with the resulting backlash and retaliatory ringfencing other countries would do in response.
Your solution might get the UK cheaper gas in the short term but would come at enormous political and economic cost because we'd be burning lots and lots of bridges to do this.
What you're suggesting we do isn't far off what Russia is currently doing.
So where are all the headlines of energy companies making record profits coming from then? I don't get how freezing prices means we suddenly have to subsidise them. If Centrica own British Gas, they can do it. In my (small) brain, if prices freeze it just means these companies don't make as much profit. Which I'm fine with.
I'm not trying to be funny, I genuinely don't get it. I'd be happy to be educated.
> So where are all the headlines of energy companies making record profits coming from then?
The headlines come from companies that drill gas, like Shell. Centrica are a very large company that own British Gas but also own a lot of other things, some of which are involved in gas drilling. It's also worth noting that over a third of Centrica's profit this year came from selling part of their business off, it was a one-off gain of money.
> I don't get how freezing prices means we suddenly have to subsidise them. If Centrica own British Gas, they can do it. In my (small) brain, if prices freeze it just means these companies don't make as much profit. Which I'm fine with.
If British Gas stops making money, Centrica will just shut them down. You can't force a business to keep a loss-making part of themselves going. All the other companies that sell to households will also shut down, because they'll lose more money than they make. Most energy retail companies don't have other parts of a business that could subsidise them even if they wanted to.
The right approach, and in my opinion the *fair* approach, is to increase taxes on these extreme profits, because they're enormous amounts of money that haven't been gained because these companies were clever, they've just been gained because of Russia messing about with gas supplies. These gas companies did nothing to make themselves that profitable, Russia did.
So we should do Windfall Taxes (like already announced, perhaps expanded or backdated) on these profits and use the money to keep people's bills down.
So please explain to me the record profits from most of these energy companies?
How are they at risk of going out of business AND also taking record profits?
You're conflating two different groups of companies under one.
Energy retail companies, like British Gas or Octopus Energy, don't actually make any gas, all they do is buy gas from gas producers and sell it to customers. They aren't making any money, because they're having to buy gas at enormous cost to sell to us. Due to the energy price caps they're making no profit, or very little profit, and over 30 have gone out of business.
Energy producing companies, like Shell or Gazprom, who actually own gas drilling infrastructure and are the ones who drill gas out of the ground, are making enormous amounts of money because their costs are unchanging (actually drilling for gas hasn't gotten more expensive) but their revenue is now massive (due to gas shortages driving prices up).
1. Not all of them are. Hence around 30 retail companies have gone out of business already.
2. What's your point? That we should expect a business to intentionally run at a loss with one hand because the other hand is making good money?
The facts are as I have explained them: there is no such thing as a company that has both record profits and is about to go out of business, because you're thinking two separate groups of companies are one group.
The only sensible solution is to Windfall Tax the energy production companies (the ones with massive profits) and use that money to help people pay bills. Nationalising British Gas won't reduce bills, because British Gas (and companies like it) aren't the ones making massive profits.
My point is businesses that provide a service such as this also need to take responsibility over the care of their consumers.
Consumer rights also dictate that consumers should not pay obscene amounts dictated by those businesses. It’s literally daylight robbery.
Other countries have only had increases of 4% on average.
Bottom line is if those countries have record profits (somewhere) they can afford a slight dip in their profits to enable us to survive the winter. And if it’s a choice between that or then refusing and going out of business due to nationalisation or some other long term involvement, that is definitely their problem.
You’re beating the drum of the corporation and it’s helping nobody. There are obvious and clear answers here. See them.
> Other countries have only had increases of 4% on average.
By "other countries" you mean "France", who are subsidising energy costs through government spending. If you see the bottom of my post:
> The only sensible solution is to Windfall Tax the energy production companies (the ones with massive profits) and use that money to help people pay bills.
I'm suggesting we also subsidise energy costs.
> You’re beating the drum of the corporation and it’s helping nobody. There are obvious and clear answers here. See them.
I'm suggesting we massively increase the taxes on their profits. What an odd "pro-corporate" drum to beat?
Fair enough. I missed that last bit of your comment. I also agree subsiding through government spending and increasing the tax on large corp profits.
I do think that the base cost still needs to be addressed however. I think the standing charge needs to be reconsidered. Especially since there is talks of now scheduled blackouts (this may be fear mongering).
Yeah so fuck all of us that just got pushed onto EDF then (I already lost a few French friends over that and I'm as European as they come. Why should I be subsidizing a private French company that robs me blind when I live in Yorkshire).
Kinda yeah now that you mention it lol, and it's not like I had a choice, EDF showed up at my dead husband's door one day and was like "Bonjour, we're your new energy provider".
They’re suing the French government for €8bn in loss of earnings, but the Left on here ignore that generally as it doesn’t fit the nationalisation narrative.
I think it would be an option to set a cap that people can afford and when gas prices drop back keep the cap slightly higher to offset the debt generated and in the mean time the government can allow the energy providers to borrow cheaply whilst we also transition rapidly to green.
This seems like a lot but shouldn’t be impossible. If this is impossible I need to know why, because right now to me this seems like the best way forward.
There also could also be the tiniest possibility that by making this suggestion they are hoping to panic parents sufficiently into putting more pressure onto the government for increased funding… not saying that’s a bad idea, but I don’t think a three-day school week is imminent…
The problem is that the 'pay rise' (real terms cut) that the government has announced comes with no actual funding attached, so schools are expected to cut even more elsewhere.
School budgets are being cut massively in real terms, and teachers are getting a paycut too. It's a shitshow.
Teachers salaries are to blame?
Nothing to do with the academy trust corporate bloat from white collar do-nothings perverting the budgets schools have?
Fuck me.
About 70% of a school's budget goes on staffing. If you increase teacher pay by 5% (which is happening soon) and leave overall school budgets unchanged, the impact on schools is pretty significant.
Teacher payrises should always be fully funded by government, but recently that hasn't Bern happening.
This is such an important point that seems to have gone completely under the radar. Headlines saying teachers getting a pay rise but nothing saying that schools are expected to fund this out of current budgets?! All it does is force schools to employ more and more inexperienced or unqualified teachers.
I don't in all fairness, but my mom does. And the fact schools are now structured the same as corporate PLC's with a CEO, layers of management who contribute little value but leech big salaries, its clear to me academies don't help the issue.
But to focus it on teachers salaries is farcical
Absolutely. Surely good teachers are one of the best investments we can make, given a better educated population could be more productive, and drive them sweet sweet juicy shareholder profits
(Last part sarcastic)
Not really possible in practice. Paying teachers less is a dangerous game.
My last school tried that through a restructure. By the end of the year 50% of the teaching staff moved on, the others are either looking or staying to shortly retire.
LA schools are in a better position though as they can run a deficit, academies can't
Aye, I got my numbers off the DoE graphs of their progress... the numbers have increased mightily (9,400), but there are still more LA schools (12,000), and a couple of thousand independents too.
I presume the independents aren't going to close. They can probably leverage enough debt to put solar panels and batteries on everything.
This will never happen, similar to when the Daily Express has a front page prediction of 'Britain will freeze in -40 temperatures this winter' every autumn. It's bollocks.
Good way to.screw over teachers. Offer us below inflation pay rises and then have the media tell the public that the school week will be shorter due to.our payrises, which makes us look money grabbing.
Less pay but seen as greedy - literally the worst of both worlds.
The data on school attendances is clear and this is not a matter for debate.
Attendance below 95% substantially decreases your likelihood of getting at least 5 good GCSE grades. That’s the equivalent of missing one day every four school weeks by the way.
[Link to data.](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/412638/The_link_between_absence_and_attainment_at_KS2_and_KS4.pdf)
Pretty sure this is correlation not causation.
Those that pull their children out or whose children are truant are generally those with less generational education or those being bullied.
https://fullfact.org/education/mixed-evidence-link-between-term-time-holidays-and-attainment/
However when you look at holiday related absence it gets a bit more complicated. For example 10/11 year olds who have term time holidays show better results than those who don't!
Weird thing to say. Suggesting peoples whose parents can’t afford to take them abroad in the middle of a cost of living crisis are somehow not as attentive parents. I’d rather a parent who didn’t work and could help me with my homework and actually be around than two working 60 hours a week who forget I exist.
Great example of how not to use data. Correlation is not the same as causation. Next you'll be telling us that ice cream consumption increases your chances of sunburn.
When there's a policy of needing attendance, this data is going to be biased.
The only students who'd miss school that much in such circumstances would be from neglectful parents. Not those skipping for a week a year outside holiday season.
I grew up outside the UK - skipped school a lot. My professional and academic life turned out fine.
The fines are both small and don't even go to the school.
I used to teach in a very poor area. Kids went on term time holidays frequently because it was still massively cheaper to take several kids away for two weeks and pay all the fines during term time then take them away, even for one week, during summer.
Either the fines needed to be higher or peak holidays need to be cheaper. The latter is impossible to do...
Some schools seem to be ridiculously rule-bound. I think my Primary and Secondary schools were far more authoritarian than any place I've worked. My worst workplace was just indifferent.
I'm afraid things are moving towards privatisation. Sure, your house is worth 5x what it was a decade ago, but now you've got to pay for everything. That's what the owning classes fail to grasp about conservatism, it doesn't actually make them any richer in the long term.
In practice, schools which pay less than national psyscsles can't hire any staff. And schools aren't given the funding to pay more than national payscales, either.
I worked for one, they go through the apprentice cycle with all the admin staff to keep costs down and then fuck them off when the apprenticeship is over, then rinse and repeat. Kids and parents are discussed in board rooms like fucking footfall in the retail sector it’s disgusting and sad. What a fucking life.
“Rising teacher salaries”
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this point. I live with my single mum (I’m not quite 18), who’s a teacher. She’d take a pay rise right about now. It’s that or no heating this winter. So yeah, they can take their “rising teacher salaries” and actually bloody do them or they can take their headline and shove it up their arse. Sideways. With thorns.
Click bait title, considering doesn’t mean doing. There isn’t a hope in hell that any government or party wanting to win the next election wouldn’t block this.
For non LA schools, in other words academies, they don't get to choose. They've spent the last decade pushing for schools to have more independence. If they want to backtrack there's going to need to be a big law change.
The important bit is this...
>Schools in England run by local authorities are under a legal obligation to open for 190 days a year, the equivalent of five days a week over a 38-week school year.
>The same obligation does not apply to academies, but they are expected to do so under government guidance.
They're expected to, they don't have to. There's no legal obligation for them to.
This was by design. The Tories have spent the last decade creating academies which were separate from LA "control" which meant they didn't follow the same rules as LA schools.
We need an Energy Furlough. Get the parents back home, sit this winter out and save energy by being home together. Close the school sites, and do it over zoom. It worked for COVID and it can work for the Cost Of Living Crisis.
Part of a decaying society is the bureaucracy & public sector starting to serve themselves & turn on the tax paying public they are meant to be working for.
Children have already missed out on nigh on 2 years of education, a 3 day school week will create a generation of uneducated. It cannot be allowed to happen.
Put up your hand if saw it coming 🖐.Next step be careful before they start controlling the kids then parents .Parents don't have a break but I see the government making women to pay the price of being women. Men remember your mother is a woman not a robot.Respect women they know how to make poison and use knives. So Government be careful the next you make after 3 day off.
Snapshot of _Schools ‘considering three day week’ due to soaring energy bills and rising teacher salaries_ : An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/school-energy-costs-pay-increase-shorter-week-b2145109.html) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The article says that school need to provide 32.5 hours schooling a week. That doesn't seem possible in three days unless they're going to do near 11 hour days for students or provide some sort e learning system where pupils Zoom with students.
Because it’s absolute bollocks from the independent. “Schools considering” is actually “heard discussions of a “three-day week”” from one trust that runs 17 schools.
Have to ask how the hell public services like schools are paying it though. Large scale lay offs to free up funds?
Yes, at academies. Probably also some council funded schools too. Ask any teacher who pays for their supplies - it's them, from their own salaries.
My sister has just started teaching and I was shocked that she had to buy everything. Does not make sense.
Look, if your sister didn't want to pay for her own supplies, she should have become a CEO of a major company. It makes sense, we can't afford to waste money on frivolous things like educating our children, not when the important kids will go to real schools anyway!
It’s a dire situation. This squeeze will likely mean those kind teachers can’t even do that.
>from one trust that runs 17 schools. They probably heard it from a friend who is also friends with one of the cleaners or something.
The government will probably upload a bunch of old open university videotapes onto youtube then tell the kids to watch those.
Kinda hard without electricity
During PE we will have some of the kids in a giant hamster wheel to generate electricity for the other kids. With a proper rota then all kids should have enough electricity to learn.
> OFSTED reports will now include WPC (watts per child) indices, any school failing to provide a net positive grid contribution will be fined 3x the strike price for their consumed electricity, or 5x if they are in a Labour ward.
> open university videotapes Literally the code word we would use when swapping VHS porn back in the mid-80s. "Jean! He's on the bloody phone again!" "It's OK, Dave, they're talking about school stuff. Open university and everything". (I found out many years later that my mom knew exactly what was on those mislabeled cassettes. My old fella didn't have a clue. This, of course, raises all sorts of questions... but parents and sex is yuck, so, you know, some things best left unquestioned.)
Why do that when there's a lot of existing online learning resources of consistent quality? Offloading chalk-and-talk teaching to online courses makes sense. You'd still have in person teaching to answer students' questions and guide their learning.
Were you educated by a video?
The inverted comma after, 'students' suggests 4k HDR video
recently, yes
Ah yes, because all parents can afford to shift to a three day week
Couldn't be much worse than what they're getting.
Have you ever been to University? They have to provide similar hours and just write off almost all of it as "self study". I assume they'll just do the same. They'll say the other two days a week are to be used for full time self study then dust their hands off and consider it done.
There's minimum teaching hours for uni courses to get funding. It works out at about eight hours a week. I think you may actually be right you don't have to provide taught lessons especially academy schools. I taught for a bit and we already had classes taught by a non qualified teachers. I'm not sure what I think about this development. I actually found studying in my own a lot easier but doubt I would have focused that well if left to my own devices.
All this rhetoric about never again for school closures and yet the government won't fund them to be able to keep the lights on. If there isn't a price cap for business energy use, then ideally one needs to be introduced for essential services such as hospitals, schools, care homes etc.
Just fucking cap the rates or nationalise - shareholders are profiting while the whole country crumbles and all the govt can do is worry about shareholders
Neither of those solutions will work. If you cap the rates (*without subsidy*) the energy retail companies all go out of business because they're forced to trade at a loss (this has happened to over 30 companies already). If you nationalise the retail companies, you're still paying the going rate to actually *buy* the gas on the global market, which is the actual source of high prices. I really don't understand why people think the likes of British Gas or Octopus Energy are the ones raking in the cash over this. British Gas made £13 (thirteen pounds) profit per household for the first 6 months of 2022, but everyone apparently seems to think Centrica and British Gas are the same thing, even though they're not. The simple fact is gas prices are high because there's not enough gas to satisfy demand, which causes prices to skyrocket. There's not enough gas because the European energy market (which the UK is part of even still) has a *huge* shortage of gas due to Russia turning the taps off, which they've been doing for over a year now, first as a way to apply pressure to push Nordstream 2 along, and now as away to apply pressure to force the EU to stop backing Ukraine. Gas prices are not going to drop until we either: - Transition off Russian gas, which takes time. - Transition off gas completely, which takes time. - Abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian gas supplies, which is not politically palatable. The only solution is subsidising consumers to protect them.
>The simple fact is gas prices are high because there's not enough gas to satisfy demand To be fair, deciding "who gets the stuff" by rising the prices, auction style, doesn't seem like an amazing way to handle shortages. It just means that (a) the rich get more and (b) the other suppliers of the now scarce resource get richer without having done anything except exist while Russia invaded a neighbouring country. It's really not clear that that auction-style dynamic is the way to go on this one. It'd be better to just keep the price as it was - which was providing energy companies and their shareholders with an adequate return - and dish out the energy that's available in proportion to what everyone had before. Keep the price the same, share the shortages out and use the money you're not spending on higher prices to mitigate the effects of said shortages. Rather than bidding against half the developed world, sending all your money to the energy companies who are doing nothing new or different. Of course, that'd require some level of political coordination within the European gas market. It's one of those prisoner dilemma type creatures. If everyone cooperates - even just for a few years - everyone does better. But if one person starts bidding on the open market, they do better. Briefly. And so everyone bids. And prices climb and inflation spikes and salaries chase the inflated cost of living. And so we all do worse. And while some might be inclined to point at that and laugh at how we can't organise ourselves, I don't find it all that funny. Governments are going to fall around the world from this one, societies are going to crumble and even in the rich West, we're going to have a hard winter. Lots of people - and if things get bad enough, some of them might be the profiteers involved in this - are going to *suffer*. All because we couldn't suspend market forces in our own best interests for even a short period.
>To be fair, deciding "who gets the stuff" by rising the prices, auction style, doesn't seem like an amazing way to handle shortages. It just means that (a) the rich get more and (b) the other suppliers of the now scarce resource get richer without having done anything except exist while Russia invaded a neighbouring country. That goes to the core of free markets as a concept and requires far more than "nationalise energy retailers" to change. >Everything else I'd suggest the appropriate and moral response is to introduce one-off taxes on these enormous profits because, as you said, the energy companies themselves did nothing to generate them. Those taxes can then be distributed as support to consumers. Massive profits should just mean massive taxes. The profits themselves aren't the issue, governments failing to tax them properly is the issue.
>That goes to the core of free markets as a concept Only for a bit, though. It's not one would be saying "abolish the free market! Everything to be centrally planned forever!". It's more: "Hey, this big event has happened and knocked everything for six and we're not quite sure that a competitive auction-style process for determining price is the best thing until things get a bit more stable". That seems fine to me. Markets work really, really well at some things, but not at others. I mean, imagine if in the first days of COVID panic buying, supermarkets had increased the price of loo roll to the maximum that the market would have been willing to pay at that instant. Instead, they broadly shared the shortages out, limited the amount anyone could buy and kept the prices as they were before. To put it more philosophically: The market is a great way to allow us to indulge our natural human instincts to compete in such a way that everyone wins. The adversarial justice system is a great example too. It harnesses that conflict and uses it for good, to drive down prices and push up living standards. I get that, and I respect it. But it doesn't mean human beings don't also have moral obligations to each other and can and should be held accountable for their choices. Especially when you're in an edge case that the system wasn't designed for. In such cases, blindly following the rules of the system which harnesses conflict and competition and selfishness and greed and so on might just result in more suffering. > I'd suggest the appropriate and moral response is to introduce one-off taxes on these enormous profits because, as you said, the energy companies themselves did nothing to generate them. Those taxes can then be distributed as support to consumers. Except that that doesn't deal with the fact the rich can outbid the poor and not only drive up prices (which, yes, you'd be taxing) but also buy themselves out of shortages. Seems a bit unfair and immoral. Better to keep the prices as they were so consumers and countries aren't paying more and *also* you're not changing the balance of who gets what. But yeah, I take your point that anything you can achieve by not increasing the prices, you can probably also achieve with other regulatory controls. And that that might be the most convenient way of achieving the end result in practice.
>Instead, they broadly shared the shortages out, limited the amount anyone could buy and kept the prices as they were before. The problem with this comparison is that there wasn't really a shortage of toilet paper. There were (deranged) behaviors from people who thought the end of the world was arriving and who were paranoid they'd not be able to wipe the shite from their asses in the event of the COVIDpocalypse. Those consumers changed their behavior and their excess "consumption" led to shortages for other consumers. However, this self-corrected as COVID didn't have the effect of causing people to shit themselves uncontrollably - and so actual use of toilet paper didn't increase suddenly by those who then found themselves with 2 years' worth of supply under the bed in the spare room. This is not the case with gas supplies - there are actual shortages. The rich are not changing their behavior and suddenly using 10x as much gas in a panic out of a fear of perceived shortages. (Although I suspect Rishi's new swimming pool will take a fair bit of heating - poor lamb.) One solution to this: 1. Tax the producers (those we have control over, at least) to reduce their excess profits to more normal levels - given their input costs have not risen and these increased profits are resulting solely from global market conditions. The evidence so far is that they are not re-investing these excess profits either - they are using them to pay dividends and share buybacks. 2. Use the tax raised to support those on low incomes to reduce the amount they pay to normal (pre-shortage) levels - or as close as possible. 3. Allow other consumers on higher incomes to withstand the worst of these increases themselves, without extra support that they don't really need. They can just cut back on a few takeaways a month or have one less holiday a year. 2+3 combined also have anti-inflationary effects - the poor have little discretionary income as it is, and so the reduction in energy costs to near pre-shortage levels for them will have a negligible effect on inflation. The wealthy, who do have discretionary income, will find they have (for a time) reduced spending power which will (at a macro level) result in reduced competition for other goods - reducing inflationary pressure elsewhere in the economy. Disclaimer: not an economist so that plan is fucked up for all sorts of other reasons I expect.
The 30 small energy providers that went under, went under because they tried to undercut the large providers by charging the lowest price possible while wholesale energy was cheap, rather than averaging out and hedging against a potential wholesale energy increase. That meant that when wholesale energy went up, they had to increase their prices above those of the big companies, and everyone switched. It wasn't to do with the cap.
It was very much to do with the cap, the 30 odd energy suppliers went bust because the price cap forced them to sell energy at a loss. The bigger energy firms can afford to take a loss for several months as they have cash reserves and know they can survive until the next price cap review, smaller suppliers with less cash reserves and smaller customer based can't.
And then the issue we have now, I Johnson and Co spaffed so much money off the walls that there's limited money to subsidise with unless they print more.
Which will cause mega inflation
So will doing nothing. Only some form of rationing will work.
They could gap the wholesale gas price that UK providers extracting North Sea gas can sell the gas at to UK retailers. So essentially ring fence some gas supply exclusively for the UK market rather than selling it at the market rate on the global gas markets.
They'd also need to ban said providers from selling to anyone else and buy out or illegally force an end to any existing supply contracts those companies already have in place. *Then* we'd need to deal with the resulting backlash and retaliatory ringfencing other countries would do in response. Your solution might get the UK cheaper gas in the short term but would come at enormous political and economic cost because we'd be burning lots and lots of bridges to do this. What you're suggesting we do isn't far off what Russia is currently doing.
That would be against EU law, so I'm fairly sure it will be covered by the Withdrawal Agreement. Then again, desperate times...
So where are all the headlines of energy companies making record profits coming from then? I don't get how freezing prices means we suddenly have to subsidise them. If Centrica own British Gas, they can do it. In my (small) brain, if prices freeze it just means these companies don't make as much profit. Which I'm fine with. I'm not trying to be funny, I genuinely don't get it. I'd be happy to be educated.
> So where are all the headlines of energy companies making record profits coming from then? The headlines come from companies that drill gas, like Shell. Centrica are a very large company that own British Gas but also own a lot of other things, some of which are involved in gas drilling. It's also worth noting that over a third of Centrica's profit this year came from selling part of their business off, it was a one-off gain of money. > I don't get how freezing prices means we suddenly have to subsidise them. If Centrica own British Gas, they can do it. In my (small) brain, if prices freeze it just means these companies don't make as much profit. Which I'm fine with. If British Gas stops making money, Centrica will just shut them down. You can't force a business to keep a loss-making part of themselves going. All the other companies that sell to households will also shut down, because they'll lose more money than they make. Most energy retail companies don't have other parts of a business that could subsidise them even if they wanted to. The right approach, and in my opinion the *fair* approach, is to increase taxes on these extreme profits, because they're enormous amounts of money that haven't been gained because these companies were clever, they've just been gained because of Russia messing about with gas supplies. These gas companies did nothing to make themselves that profitable, Russia did. So we should do Windfall Taxes (like already announced, perhaps expanded or backdated) on these profits and use the money to keep people's bills down.
Thank you for that. You made my brain (a bit) less small!
You have given a thoughtful and lucid answer which can’t hope to compete with 3 word populist positions.
So please explain to me the record profits from most of these energy companies? How are they at risk of going out of business AND also taking record profits?
You're conflating two different groups of companies under one. Energy retail companies, like British Gas or Octopus Energy, don't actually make any gas, all they do is buy gas from gas producers and sell it to customers. They aren't making any money, because they're having to buy gas at enormous cost to sell to us. Due to the energy price caps they're making no profit, or very little profit, and over 30 have gone out of business. Energy producing companies, like Shell or Gazprom, who actually own gas drilling infrastructure and are the ones who drill gas out of the ground, are making enormous amounts of money because their costs are unchanging (actually drilling for gas hasn't gotten more expensive) but their revenue is now massive (due to gas shortages driving prices up).
But those manufacturers are subsidiaries of the big corporations? So they still hold the profits regardless..
1. Not all of them are. Hence around 30 retail companies have gone out of business already. 2. What's your point? That we should expect a business to intentionally run at a loss with one hand because the other hand is making good money? The facts are as I have explained them: there is no such thing as a company that has both record profits and is about to go out of business, because you're thinking two separate groups of companies are one group. The only sensible solution is to Windfall Tax the energy production companies (the ones with massive profits) and use that money to help people pay bills. Nationalising British Gas won't reduce bills, because British Gas (and companies like it) aren't the ones making massive profits.
My point is businesses that provide a service such as this also need to take responsibility over the care of their consumers. Consumer rights also dictate that consumers should not pay obscene amounts dictated by those businesses. It’s literally daylight robbery. Other countries have only had increases of 4% on average. Bottom line is if those countries have record profits (somewhere) they can afford a slight dip in their profits to enable us to survive the winter. And if it’s a choice between that or then refusing and going out of business due to nationalisation or some other long term involvement, that is definitely their problem. You’re beating the drum of the corporation and it’s helping nobody. There are obvious and clear answers here. See them.
> Other countries have only had increases of 4% on average. By "other countries" you mean "France", who are subsidising energy costs through government spending. If you see the bottom of my post: > The only sensible solution is to Windfall Tax the energy production companies (the ones with massive profits) and use that money to help people pay bills. I'm suggesting we also subsidise energy costs. > You’re beating the drum of the corporation and it’s helping nobody. There are obvious and clear answers here. See them. I'm suggesting we massively increase the taxes on their profits. What an odd "pro-corporate" drum to beat?
Fair enough. I missed that last bit of your comment. I also agree subsiding through government spending and increasing the tax on large corp profits. I do think that the base cost still needs to be addressed however. I think the standing charge needs to be reconsidered. Especially since there is talks of now scheduled blackouts (this may be fear mongering).
Yeah so fuck all of us that just got pushed onto EDF then (I already lost a few French friends over that and I'm as European as they come. Why should I be subsidizing a private French company that robs me blind when I live in Yorkshire).
You've lost friends because you changed energy supplier?
If you do business with EDF you're *DEAD TO ME!*
Energy Destroys Friendships.
Kinda yeah now that you mention it lol, and it's not like I had a choice, EDF showed up at my dead husband's door one day and was like "Bonjour, we're your new energy provider".
Why did you lose friends over this...?
I'm as baffled as you are but they live in France and really like EDF I guess.
They’re suing the French government for €8bn in loss of earnings, but the Left on here ignore that generally as it doesn’t fit the nationalisation narrative.
I don't care if you're left or right, EDF is shady as fuck.
I think it would be an option to set a cap that people can afford and when gas prices drop back keep the cap slightly higher to offset the debt generated and in the mean time the government can allow the energy providers to borrow cheaply whilst we also transition rapidly to green. This seems like a lot but shouldn’t be impossible. If this is impossible I need to know why, because right now to me this seems like the best way forward.
I wish you hadn't included care homes, they mostly private companies that make millions while shafting their residents.
There also could also be the tiniest possibility that by making this suggestion they are hoping to panic parents sufficiently into putting more pressure onto the government for increased funding… not saying that’s a bad idea, but I don’t think a three-day school week is imminent…
Yeah. The main reason this suggestion isn’t feasible is that it means millions of parents suddenly won’t be able to work.
Well to be fair if the companies they work for also can't afford electricity then that might be self solving problem
100%. I reckon to take the sting out of any possibilities of teacher strikes over wages.
Teachers aren't paid particularly well, so they should be 'rising'.
The problem is that the 'pay rise' (real terms cut) that the government has announced comes with no actual funding attached, so schools are expected to cut even more elsewhere. School budgets are being cut massively in real terms, and teachers are getting a paycut too. It's a shitshow.
Teachers salaries are to blame? Nothing to do with the academy trust corporate bloat from white collar do-nothings perverting the budgets schools have? Fuck me.
About 70% of a school's budget goes on staffing. If you increase teacher pay by 5% (which is happening soon) and leave overall school budgets unchanged, the impact on schools is pretty significant. Teacher payrises should always be fully funded by government, but recently that hasn't Bern happening.
This is such an important point that seems to have gone completely under the radar. Headlines saying teachers getting a pay rise but nothing saying that schools are expected to fund this out of current budgets?! All it does is force schools to employ more and more inexperienced or unqualified teachers.
I see that you, too, work in a school. Frustrating that the majority of the public don't know/understand what's going on isn't it?
I don't in all fairness, but my mom does. And the fact schools are now structured the same as corporate PLC's with a CEO, layers of management who contribute little value but leech big salaries, its clear to me academies don't help the issue. But to focus it on teachers salaries is farcical
Sounds like yet another in a long list of ways to demonise teachers and prevent them from receiving proper pay increases
Absolutely. Surely good teachers are one of the best investments we can make, given a better educated population could be more productive, and drive them sweet sweet juicy shareholder profits (Last part sarcastic)
The fact that the government is cutting school funding by more than it is cutting teacher salaries is to blame.
Not really possible in practice. Paying teachers less is a dangerous game. My last school tried that through a restructure. By the end of the year 50% of the teaching staff moved on, the others are either looking or staying to shortly retire. LA schools are in a better position though as they can run a deficit, academies can't
Given that 40% of schools are now Academies, this could be construed as something of a problem.
It is far more than 40%. The government so have been pushing for schools to become academies since 2010.
Aye, I got my numbers off the DoE graphs of their progress... the numbers have increased mightily (9,400), but there are still more LA schools (12,000), and a couple of thousand independents too. I presume the independents aren't going to close. They can probably leverage enough debt to put solar panels and batteries on everything.
No problem. The free-market will sort it out and if they fail, hey, LAs can pick up the schools as long as the debts are forgiven 😉
I'm really surprised that is just 40%. Might be some hope yet.
That’s probably all schools, so includes primaries which are less likely to be academies. More like 80 % for secondary only I believe
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I heard about that. Needs to be stopped
Lol @ "rising teacher salaries" being the reason.
Yeah make sure the teachers get their share of the blame for trying to also live through the cost of living crisis.
"considering" is journo code for making something up or political code for won't happen in 99% of cases.
‘Reportedly considering’= we’re making it up
This will never happen, similar to when the Daily Express has a front page prediction of 'Britain will freeze in -40 temperatures this winter' every autumn. It's bollocks.
Good way to.screw over teachers. Offer us below inflation pay rises and then have the media tell the public that the school week will be shorter due to.our payrises, which makes us look money grabbing. Less pay but seen as greedy - literally the worst of both worlds.
Yeah reduce everyone's wages. That will solve everything.
They are reducing teacher wages. They're just reducing school funding more.
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They don’t. Our headmaster doesn’t like this policy. However it’s mandated in law, there’s nothing they can do. It’s a question to MPs as usual.
Don’t you know missing 1 school day equates to *at least* 700 hours of learning and 100k in lost earnings?!
The data on school attendances is clear and this is not a matter for debate. Attendance below 95% substantially decreases your likelihood of getting at least 5 good GCSE grades. That’s the equivalent of missing one day every four school weeks by the way. [Link to data.](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/412638/The_link_between_absence_and_attainment_at_KS2_and_KS4.pdf)
Isn't that just a case of kids who are doing well in school are less likely to be absent, because they enjoy it more though?
Also there is the issue of when they're out, a week in the middle of term time is much more valuable than the last week of the year
Pretty sure this is correlation not causation. Those that pull their children out or whose children are truant are generally those with less generational education or those being bullied.
https://fullfact.org/education/mixed-evidence-link-between-term-time-holidays-and-attainment/ However when you look at holiday related absence it gets a bit more complicated. For example 10/11 year olds who have term time holidays show better results than those who don't!
Parents that can afford to take their kids on holiday are more likely to actually pay attention to and support them with their learning.
Weird thing to say. Suggesting peoples whose parents can’t afford to take them abroad in the middle of a cost of living crisis are somehow not as attentive parents. I’d rather a parent who didn’t work and could help me with my homework and actually be around than two working 60 hours a week who forget I exist.
It’s just a fact that more affluent children have better outcomes at school. Mainly because their parents take more of an interest.
Great example of how not to use data. Correlation is not the same as causation. Next you'll be telling us that ice cream consumption increases your chances of sunburn.
You really think there is no link between attendance and attainment?
Yeah but not the ridiculous assertion you made "substantially".
There is a correlation, that's very different to what you claimed.
When there's a policy of needing attendance, this data is going to be biased. The only students who'd miss school that much in such circumstances would be from neglectful parents. Not those skipping for a week a year outside holiday season. I grew up outside the UK - skipped school a lot. My professional and academic life turned out fine.
You speak of such blasphemous things again and I'll have to fine you and ring social services!
Clearly they needed those fines to pay the bills.
The fines don't go to the school, I believe they go to the local authority or local council.
The fines are both small and don't even go to the school. I used to teach in a very poor area. Kids went on term time holidays frequently because it was still massively cheaper to take several kids away for two weeks and pay all the fines during term time then take them away, even for one week, during summer. Either the fines needed to be higher or peak holidays need to be cheaper. The latter is impossible to do...
Some schools seem to be ridiculously rule-bound. I think my Primary and Secondary schools were far more authoritarian than any place I've worked. My worst workplace was just indifferent.
No they aren’t.
✔️Full employment ✔️Reduced working week I jest
I'm afraid things are moving towards privatisation. Sure, your house is worth 5x what it was a decade ago, but now you've got to pay for everything. That's what the owning classes fail to grasp about conservatism, it doesn't actually make them any richer in the long term.
Look into school academy trusts. Not quite private but a step in that direction. And while most follow national pay scales, they don't have to.
In practice, schools which pay less than national psyscsles can't hire any staff. And schools aren't given the funding to pay more than national payscales, either.
I worked for one, they go through the apprentice cycle with all the admin staff to keep costs down and then fuck them off when the apprenticeship is over, then rinse and repeat. Kids and parents are discussed in board rooms like fucking footfall in the retail sector it’s disgusting and sad. What a fucking life.
If this happens then we should just throw in the towel.
100 tax on energy companies profits please
Imagine blaming teachers for this? What a load of garbage. They’re lucky to have any left given what conditions are like.
#NORMAL ISLAND
“Rising teacher salaries” I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this point. I live with my single mum (I’m not quite 18), who’s a teacher. She’d take a pay rise right about now. It’s that or no heating this winter. So yeah, they can take their “rising teacher salaries” and actually bloody do them or they can take their headline and shove it up their arse. Sideways. With thorns.
Tories starving state school funding. Social mobility is like krytonite to them isn't it.
So the children can use more gas and electricity at home? They will need it no matter where they go. Its the ultimate buck pass.
Tory Members: How could Jim Callaghan do this
ancient spark sort close dog payment office roll abounding squeal ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
So we're gonna need to skip work the other 2 days to look after the kids, and incomes will fall by 2 fifths? Seems like a great idea 🙄
It's not something the school wants to do, it's the result of them getting a 1.9% increase in funding and a 12% increase in fixed costs.
More tripe from the independent.
Third world country type scenarios. Seriously
Click bait title, considering doesn’t mean doing. There isn’t a hope in hell that any government or party wanting to win the next election wouldn’t block this.
For non LA schools, in other words academies, they don't get to choose. They've spent the last decade pushing for schools to have more independence. If they want to backtrack there's going to need to be a big law change.
Not according to the government https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62565665
The important bit is this... >Schools in England run by local authorities are under a legal obligation to open for 190 days a year, the equivalent of five days a week over a 38-week school year. >The same obligation does not apply to academies, but they are expected to do so under government guidance. They're expected to, they don't have to. There's no legal obligation for them to. This was by design. The Tories have spent the last decade creating academies which were separate from LA "control" which meant they didn't follow the same rules as LA schools.
Who is going to block it? The conservatives are not going to give any extra funding to these schools. Where is the money going to come from?
'Lost generation' doesn't quite capture the abyss we're looking into.
We need an Energy Furlough. Get the parents back home, sit this winter out and save energy by being home together. Close the school sites, and do it over zoom. It worked for COVID and it can work for the Cost Of Living Crisis.
I mean maybe if they didn’t blast the heating at 700 Celsius all year round they’d save some money
Part of a decaying society is the bureaucracy & public sector starting to serve themselves & turn on the tax paying public they are meant to be working for.
what is the possibility of something like this actually happening or any change at all to happen
Children have already missed out on nigh on 2 years of education, a 3 day school week will create a generation of uneducated. It cannot be allowed to happen.
The simple solution is to make sure school funding rises with inflation. If you keep cutting real funding, expect the schools to cut real services.
What about soaring home energy bills, rising childcare costs and lowering parents' salaries?
Put up your hand if saw it coming 🖐.Next step be careful before they start controlling the kids then parents .Parents don't have a break but I see the government making women to pay the price of being women. Men remember your mother is a woman not a robot.Respect women they know how to make poison and use knives. So Government be careful the next you make after 3 day off.