Burbage

The fact that ordinary homes don't have fire exits doesn't mean that ordinary exits shouldn't work as exits when there's a fire, and landlords have a duty to keep common areas that act as exits, even if they're not fire exits, clear. That applies even when the landlord can claim to be 'resident', the tenancy isn't assured, the home isn't either a purpose-built flat or a house of multiple occupation and the lousy council can't even be bothered to run a register or organize routine inspections (it's not, admittedly, a legal requirement. Not outside most civilised countries, at any rate). Where the landlord is right is in that bicycles are not a particular risk in a fire - the tyres aren't likely to burst explosively, and most bicycles don't burn very well. But we're not talking obout the risk they pose in a fire, it's the risk they pose in a fire exit. I am sure the landlord won't have consciously worded the question so weaselishly, but that sort of occupational habit becomes quickly ingrained. The problem is what to do about it. The first bit, complaining to the landlord, has been done. In the old days, you would next complain to the environmental health department who would send a letter to the landlord requesting an appointment, at his or her convenience if it wasn't too much trouble, and when they hadn't got a reply then, with the full force of the law behind them, would forget the whole thing safe in the knowledge that, in the meantime, the landlord would serve a notice to quit, pocket the deposit and stick the rent up in time for their next victim. That happened to me twice. Environmental health aren't even that useful now. And housing offices have their own death traps to sort out. The fire brigade might helped once, but they're now targeting 'vulnerable' people, and aren't likely to see view lives of ordinary tenants as a particularly high priority. The best I can find is a reference to a 'private tenancies team' on the council's website. They claim to offer advice, though it's not clear if that's just for people in private tenancies obtained through the council, or for those suffering with their own money, too. I doubt their advice will be very helpful, unless the tenants haven't already thought of moving house, but it's probably worth trying. They're coy and confusing about contact details, but they're supposedly on 020 7525 4113.

Have a look at public.londonworks.gov.uk, which exists to inform the public on such matters and, presumably as an unintended consequence, stop them bleating. According to which: Location: East Dulwich Grove, London. footway and carrigeway o/s 49&49a east dulwich grove Reference: XW025W108148457-00852 Status: Works In Progress Works owner: Southern Gas Networks, 0845 026 0015 Street authority: Southwark Start date: 15/01/2012 End date: 27/01/2012 Description: Emergency Gas Escape is in Progress I'm not an expert on either emergencies or gas, I've been lucky enough to have seen this sort of activity before. Although a week might seem pessimistic, it can take them a while to find and fix the leak and reinstate everything. Happily, they don't spend all that time drilling and hammering, but it does vary according to how many holes they have to dig before they get one in the right place and how many attempts are needed to get the reinstatement adequate. Non-emergency works are being encouraged to take place "off-peak", which includes weekends and overnight, to to minimise the impact on traffic, according the Mayor's Code of Conduct for Roadworks. Overnight work happens fairly regularly with road resurfacing, but it still seems unusual for other sorts of work, presumably because it's more expensive and dark. The Code does have a paragraph in it about avoiding disturbance to residents, but I can't be sure how robustly it stands up to the several paragraphs about avoiding disruption to traffic. In the meantime, TfL and some boroughs are valiantly trialling lane rental schemes, designed to reduce the overall time of road closures by charging utilities by the hour for each lane they close, making it more expensive for them (or, more likely, their customers) to dawdle. If it does work, then it might increase the likelihood of overnight working, If it doesn't, it'll just put the bills up. But, almost thrillingly, it's too early to tell.

I ate (a bit of) one last Christmas that came from the butcher's opposite the Plough. It was just as Dorothy described.

Much the same as everyone else, really. As a route, it's great. As a service, it's lousy.

LadyDeliah Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > So I thought I'd ask the lovely folk of ED what > they think of this and whether struggling with > monogamy is natural or not. Good luck. As $$$$ points out, humans don't just have the ability to love each other. Other emotions exist, such as jealousy, hate and murderousness. That's not to say you can't live in a delightful kaleidoscope of passions. Or 'play the field' as our ancestors would have put it. But in the end, these things tend to go wrong fairly badly, and that's when you'll discover that nobody owes you anything or has much nice to say about you. Although we're well past any addiction to Victorian morality, committment still means something. Mostly, it means being able to rely on someone when you're out of work or money or can't walk to the shops or wipe your own arse. Polyamory, I'm afraid, tends to end in reliance on the council, and that's not quite as nice as the Daily Mail would have you believe. If you've got the money, go for it. But if you're in any way normal, it's probably unwise.

Apparently, proof of address (e.g. rent book, driver's licence, utility bill, BT bill or bank statement) should be enough. Or you can do without any identification at all, and sign up online

bugsbgone Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It drives me insane, day after day of estate agent > leaflets and letters.. the problem is it must work > if they keep persevering.. > > There must be something that I/we can do?? Move to a grubby flat in an undesirable block. I did that, and get hardly any junk at all. The only thing I can remember was a copy of Southwark Life, and that was three years ago.

With a piece of string, a kipper and a paperclip, you could turn a washing machine into a phone charger. Add soap and water and they wouldn't smell so much, either.

An interesting result. Looking at the map at the Guardian, it seems as if AV won only in the London boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth, Camden, Islington, Hackney and Haringey - and in the cities of Oxford and Cambridge. I wouldn't dare suggest the correlation that springs to my mind, or whether it seems borne out by this debate. But I don't feel as bad as I might have done.

silverfox Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > So translating that to an AV election: > > Child A cannot make preferences 1 and 2 for KitKat > and Twix because those candidates aren't standing I think you've inadvertently hit the problem with FPTP. At the moment, FPTP elections attract a limited range of candidates in both senses of the word. Nobody in their right mind stands as an independent, as they clearly have no chance, and the dross we have served up by selection committees is directly proportional to how safe the seat is. In any case, your vote is taken not as an endorsement of a particular candidate but as a wholehearted agreement to be bound hand and foot by every weasel word in a manifesto. As the parties relentlessly hurtle towards the mealy-mouthed middle, there's increasingly little to choose from and the only certainty is that whatever we end up with will appease the banks, bungle foreign policy and pass the buck for their incompetence to local councils and services, while claiming their 'mandate' has given them no choice. The benefit of AV isn't so much that the system is fairer, but that it opens up the possibility that a non-useless candidate might chance their arm. It's not guaranteed, but it's a chance worth having, nonetheless. Making seats less obviously 'safe' has another advantage, too. Instead of being able to rely on whip-toadying careerists parachuted in to safe seats, governments might have to allocate posts on the basis of merit and genuine experience. That wouldn't just make governments better, it might make the candidates better, too. As for the complexity, we're in London. Here we have at least three different voting systems already, including a properly proportional one, and they seem to work well enough. Turnout is still lamentably low for some of them, but that's because a lot of people think their vote doesn't count. Under FPTP outside marginals, most of them are right.

Administrator Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Unfortunately telling us to "don't put it in the > lounge please" will not keep it out the Lounge. > Without reading the questionnaire we have no idea > if it is relevant, perhaps you could expands so we > know why? I've had a look and a play, and I think admin's made the right call. It belongs in the Lounge, at best. In brief, it's a badly-designed, spavined mess of a box-ticking exercise that doesn't work, from the unlabelled columns on the first screen to the broken form on the thirteenth. It's very nearly a metaphor. I'm not blaming PeckhamRose for not checking the survey before posting it, but whoever released it should have made at least an attempt to see if it worked. The only good thing you can say about it is that standards don't seem to have slipped. Unfortunately, it's junk like this that has earned Plod the better half of its reputation. It not useful, it's not intelligible, and it's not even a amusing waste of time and money. It's incompetent and slovenly. And, as you'd expect, there's not even a link to report problems through - and this a survey about communication.

It's back!

DJKillaQueen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm with Pearson. The vitriol aimed at cyclists on > this forum has been shocking at times. Some numbers. In 2008, there were 236 pedestrian casualties in pedal cycle incidents* In 2008, there were 4,699 dog bite casualties** According to Battersea Dogs Home there are 8.3m dogs in the UK*** According to Chris Boardman there are 20m bicycles**** That makes a dog around 30 times more dangerous than a bicycle. It's not vitriol, it's guilt. * DFT (pdf) ** NHS *** Battersea Dogs Home **** Guardian

Possibly. But there are many ways to calculate risk, and sex is just one of them. Besides, that angle isn't in effect yet. As far as I can tell, referral fees seem to be a stronger suspect - as alluded to here, and dealt with in considerably more depth in the 2009 Civil Litigation Costs Review. What's happened is that accident claims are now big business for all sorts of people - solicitors, repairers, courtesy-car hirers, claims managers etc. - and they're all paying, or being paid, to pass the work around. These are the referral fees. And the higher the fee, the better chance of getting the work. Better still, as one insurer or the other picks up the tab for all of it, there's no reason to stint on the bungs. Add to this the cost of 'after-the-event' insurance (the insurance that solicitors take out to cover their losses in no-win no-fee cases, which isn't cheap) and the 'success fees' (which they get if they win, and aren't small) and a teensy bit of whiplash can end up costing an insurer a fair bit. And sure, insurers can insure against that, too, but by then you're just stirring the same puddle, and as it's all been robbed from your premiums in the first place it would make no practical difference. The 2009 report broadly recommended the abolition of referral fees, and also recommended that ATE insurance premiums and success fees shouldn't be recoverable from the loser. And fine recommendations they are too. It's nice to see that the government is thinking about considering them, at last. But I don't suppose anything will happen. Not before the legal industry has found a suitable workaround, at any rate.

I don't think you need a boycott. First, Lockheed are going to get the money anyway. They've won the contract. All a boycott would achieve is to distort the figures, one way or another, and give them even more work to do, which is what you're presumably trying to stop. Second, there might not be another census. Censuses aren't particularly reliable, and relative figures for area can be guessed at from other sources, so it doesn't matter whether they come out smelling of roses or the other stuff. Third, they don't actually need accurate data. They need to know roughly how fast the population is growing or shrinking, and roughly what it is in relation to other areas, so that the fixed pot of government money can be allocated fairly. But most of that information can be derived from council tax forms, birth registers, schools and health authorities. A census boycott wouldn't achieve anything at all unless it included significant numbers of people, and differed significantly and unpredictably from one area to another, and there's no reason to suspect that it would. Fourth, it's all very well saying you'll boycott the census, but what happens if you do that? The answer is that a small army of underpaid and temporarily-employed minions will have to phone you up or come round to your house. Making a stand against an arms-dealer is one thing, but making a stand against a neighbour working for pin-money is another. Fifth, there are other ways to boycott Lockheed. For example, you could pledge never to take a flight that uses their Air Traffic Control systems, never to send a letter by Royal Mail, or never to call the Police. Better still, given that, as a taxpayer, you're the one buying all these weapons, why not boycott taxes? I'm sure Mr Sainsbury will understand when you ask him to take the VAT off. It's not that I'm a warmongerer. I proudly joined the millions in our futile march to stop the ogre Blair. But, if we do have to go to war, I see as little point in making our Heroes go to Tripoli via Lille as forcing them to borrow and aicraftless carrier from France. It may seem cheerfully ironic that the nation's defence policy is as dismally counter-productive as the boycott but, in the end, both of them are a waste of your money. And, more importantly, mine.

Sue Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How on earth could an owl fall off a roof? > The expression "boiled as an owl" didn't come from nowhere.

sedgewick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Bent coppers get caught all of the time, its > nothing new. > > Yes, but they usually get given an amnesty.

prdarling Wrote: > Don't get why this could take 5 years...what is > the problem? Sadly, I think I know this, too. After I got their promise, I got a follow-up, as pasted below, which seems to hold some clues. At the time, I wasn't expecting anything to happen till Summer 2010, so I didn't read it too carefully. But, reading it again, and given GinaG's leaflet, it looks like I should have done. In February 2008, TfL had published a big list of surveyed junctions without pedestrian phases (of which the Grove Junction was one), and a pledge to deliver an implementation 'framework' by the Spring of 2009. Because that framework hadn't appeared by June, I asked the Transport Scrutineer about it, and got a brush-off. So I wrote to TfL and councillors and things, and then I got TfL's first reply. Given their promise, the fact that the junction had been surveyed and prioritized and that funding was available, I thought it would happen. I thought the bit about the Six-Year Plan just meant their documentation was redundant, not that they'd cancel live-saving work they claimed to be already doing. I even stopped bothering councillors about it. It now seems I was wrong. But if my new interpretation is correct, TfL's response to Boris' plans was to scrap the previous work, and start it all again more slowly. If so, that's odd behaviour. When you consider the list of junctions ran into hundreds (many of them worse) and the work was prompted by national guidelines from the Department of Transport, surely it would have sparked a city-wide scandal if they really had ditched everything? Perhaps the emergency services had a good reason to keep the junction as it is. Perhaps it's been difficult to schedule works around the non-stop pipe-bodging that's had that end of Lordship Lane in bits for the last three years. Or maybe I'm just rubbish at holding TfL to account. Does anyone fancy having another go?

Pugwash Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > When are we going to see improvements to the > traffic lights up by the harvester - Lewis > Robinson did mention last year that TFL (I think) > we going to improve safety at this dangerous > junction, I know the answer to this. It goes, or went, as follows:

SeanMacGabhann Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > But ORDERING you to stop it? Stop... what... They're not. What they've they've stated is that they'll annoy their MP with a whinge about the conduct of a councillor, though why they've write to the councillor first is not easily discernible. In an ideal world, the MP wouldn't be interested and local politicians would be free from the interference of national politicians, except through parliamentary Acts. However, although it hasn't been an ideal world for a long time, the councillor's correspondent is still on futile grounds, unless success can measured in terms of an intern's boilerplate. What Anonymous Ed should do is first work out if Cllr Barber's behaviour is a breach of the Code of Conduct and, if it is, complain to the council's Standards Committee, who will assess the case and decide whether or not it should proceed to the national Standards Board, or filed somewhere dark and hollow. As Cllr Barber has unaccountably forgotten to include the details in his necessarily public reponse, complaint form and code od conduct can be downloaded from this page on the council's website. If Cllr Barber is not in breach of the code of conduct, any vague feelings of miffedness or entitlement can be addressed in the normal fashion at the next council elections. It's why we bother having them.

rubsley Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > even when I say "I find it a tired and boring > argument" I'd like to be understood as just > expressing my own personal thoughts Mine too, thanks. But even though theological debate remains as tired and boring as it was in Swift's day, that doesn't make it pointless. God is a concept. Much like the Theory of Everything, Consciousness or the Easter Bunny's Magic Basket. As an explicatory models for the currently-inexplicable, it's fine. And if you can derive useful reasons for living a more socially-acceptable life from it, so much the better. As a concept, God indubitably exists, though in as many forms as there are people, whether they 'believe' or not. In the absence of facts, we use rules of thumb and inventive fantasies to model our world, and this will always be the case, even for bits of it that don't exist. Scientific evidence will always limited by our methods, our knowledge and our reach. We don't, ironically, even really know what 'thought' is. But that doesn't stop our imaginations being infinitely greater and weirder than any set of rules or processes we can create with them. There are lots of things we can't explain and we haven't evolved to cope with uncertainty very well. Presumably because the forces of natural selection have starved and eaten those possible ancestors who put navel-gazing above the making of soup or spears. Even now, our fear of half-glimpsed shadows helps prevent us getting mugged. A belief in the supernatural can be useful. But so can disbelief, which tempers both the divine right of kings and the less savoury attentions of those who explot the belief of others (it's worth remembering that a faith in the unworldly does little harm. It's having faith in humans who claim to be unworldly that does the damage) We are also gloriously free to share our ideas. Doing so is a social adaptation akin to mutual grooming and, though debate is not as immediately beneficial as having the fleas licked from your ears, the advantages are similar. It's no coincidence that Bertrand Russell, the celebrated atheist, reckoned that the rituals, meetings and support offered by organized religion did more good than harm. As a species, our survival relies on the exchange and evolution of ideas, even though the majority of ideas exchanged are not necessarily productive or useful. Ideas evolve in us like swine flu evolves in pig's guts (Morphic Resonators may disagree on this point, but only in terms of the mechanism). For every billion doomed and pointless ideas, there'll be one that'll catch on like the pandemic or the paperclip. In that sense, concepts have an existence that are independent of us as individuals. They are omnipresent and reach beyond our individual understanding. Thus, even a tedious and acrimonious debate between 'atheists' and 'theists' serves a purpose that's above and beyond the participants or the milieu in which they froth. So, although it doesn't matter, and you'll never reach a conclusion, it really is a good use of your time.

Thanks, reggie. Worked a treat.

No.

I don't think so. Tupe's point is to ensure that redundancies aren't made because of a transfer, and employment continues on much the same terms. Employees being transferred don't automatically have a choice, other than to resign. The three month bit is, I think, the maximum consultation period for normal redundancies, in which volunteers may be sought. But that's a separate issue and, as far as I know, nobody has a right to be made redundant when they choose, and it wouldn't normally apply to people whose jobs were being transferred. It might be different in specific cases, depending on your contract, and the outcome of any negotiations during the consultation period with either employer. But you'd need to get advice on that, as it's not covered in the TUPE rules and will vary from place to place.

Redress? I don't think you have any. The point of TUPE is to protect the employment rights, and the pension rights acquired up to the point of transfer, of employees who are being transferred from one employer to another. The new employer is required to offer a pension scheme to transferred employees, and it must meet a minimum standard, which makes it a lot better than usual schemes, but not as good as a final salary scheme. It's not perfect, but it does mean that you don't get treated as a new employee with respect to joining the scheme, or in terms of sick pay, holiday entitlements etc. The new employer should honour your existing contract, but there may be good reasons for them to offer a new one. If they do, make sure it really is a better deal, and consult your union or a lawyer before you sign anything. As for 'disagreeing' with the transfer, that doesn't matter at all. The transfer is not your decision, and neither the old employer who's handing you over, or the new one who's never met you, will care what you think. You have no legal power to stop a transfer, and no rights to redress just because you don't like it. What matters, however, is whether you formally 'object' to being transferred. To formally object, you write to either the new or the old employer to say so. But objecting is the same as resigning, and if you do object, your employment will cease. It would be very silly to object, especially in the current climate. It is no fun being unemployed, and even less fun if you're 'voluntarily unemployed'. Resigning without a good reason doesn't go down well at the job centre, and may affect any benefits you might have been entitled to. It also annoys banks, lenders and insurance companies, and makes potential employers suspicious. The only good reason for resigning as far as they, you or anyone else is concerned, is because you've found a better job. TUPE isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing and a lot better than redundancy. If you really dislike your new employer, find another job first, and then resign. Unless, of course, you have independent means and no need to work for a living, in which case I've just wasted my time. In the meantime, either keep your head down and talk to your union or, if you haven't a union, just keep your head down.