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November 20-December 2, 2013
It's time for online holiday shopping! For 13 days only, you can get incredible discounts-up to 50 percent-on some of your favorite products! This is the perfect time for you to stock up on some of your favorite items or for you new customers to give Stampin' Up! a try.
And make sure you don't miss out on our 24-hour-only doorbusters happening on the first day of the sale-30 percent off the Stampin' Trimmer, Simply Scored Diagonal Plate, and Many Marvelous Markers!
You can visit my Online Store to see all discounted products or view the flyer by clicking the Holiday Sale photo at the top of this post.
The details:
*Discounts range between 20 and 50 percent-awesome!
*Discounted products are available both through me and online for your convenience.
*Hostesses can still earn a 50%-off item. (Discount may not apply to an already-discounted product.)
*There's no minimum purchase required to participate in this promotion. Sale on!
*You can buy additional products from any of our current catalogs on the same order.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad


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This is a sponsored post by Ron Taylor of SignCollection.com.
There are many things that can help make life easier for people with disabilities. Among those things are changes that should be made by establishments to help give people with physical or mental incapacities easy access to employment facilities, services and consumer products. While these changes and additions to public establishments are mandated by the ADA, some businesses are actually exempted from having to comply with these guidelines.
If these exempted establishments exact these changes, regardless of their eligibility for exemptions, they would not only be doing people with disabilities a favor but they will also be doing themselves a favor. This is because of the fact that more and more people are finding themselves with these disabilities as they grow older. This means that the people who are your patrons today can be people with disabilities tomorrow.
Despite the added cost involved with becoming ADA compliant, some business owners do care enough to give equal opportunities to persons with disabilities by removing obstacles and barriers that limit accessibility. Providing persons with handicaps easy access to your establishment will also mean increasing customer loyalty and more revenue from these individuals through the years.
With that said, what can help make life easier for people with disabilities when it comes to establishments that they frequent? Here are few things to consider:
- Signs that are compliant with ADA guidelines – These signs, when created following the specific rules set by the ADA, can and will help people with sensory and mobility impairments to find their way around a facility easily. These signs can also help direct people to where there are accessibility tools they can use, like ramps, elevators and toilets for the handicapped.
- Accessibility tools like ramps, elevators and aisles wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs – Business owners who want people with mobility handicaps to be able to move around and shop freely in their stores should make a point to consider wheelchair access in every area intended for customers. Hallways should be wide enough, elevators should be big enough to fit into, ramps should always be offered as an alternative to steps and support bars should be installed in toilets. This gives persons with locomotor handicaps a sense of independence which will give them a more fulfilling shopping experience, leading to a better mood to buy.
- Parking spaces reserved specifically for people with disabilities – These parking spaces need to be marked clearly, should be sized according to compliance rules and should have a curb ramp right next to it. The facility should also make sure that people who don't have handicaps don't intrude this exclusive space and make things hard for people whom it's intended for.
ADA compliant bathrooms – These stalls should also have parallel grab bars, outward swinging doors that self-close and enough space in the stall for the easy maneuvering of wheelchairs. Going to the bathroom may be a mundane thing to most people, but for persons with disabilities, it can be a big challenge when a facility isn't prepared to accommodate people with these conditions.
These are just a few things that can make a huge difference in the lives of people with disabilities. Aside from providing them with the facilities, handicap signs and accessibility options that can help them get around better, you will also send people with handicaps a clear message that you consider them with your store's every plan and they're welcome to come in any time just like the rest of the population.
About the Author
Ron Taylor is a blogger and an advocate for the rights and welfare of people with disabilities. He currently writes for the blog of SignCollection.com.
if you like my content why not help me out by joining my mailing list its free Click Here to Subscribe you will receive a email from me and a free gift just for signing up! and every time i post an new blog post you will get an email for that too.

subset: commoncrawl


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Publication Details
Title:Additional geochemical data from the Nabesna C-4 and D-5 quadrangles, Alaska
Authors:Matson, N.A., Jr., and Richter, D.H.
Publication Date:1972
Publisher:U.S. Geological Survey
Comments:This publication was reclassified with a new publication number in 1975; see below for the updated classification number.
Ordering Info:This publication is out of print. Reproductions may be available. USGS Publications Warehouse
Bibliographic Reference
Matson, N.A., Jr., and Richter, D.H., 1972, Additional geochemical data from the Nabesna C-4 and D-5 quadrangles, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Open File Report: Technical Data Unit classification number 532, 5 p.
Publication Products
- This publication has been superseded by OF 72-250.


text: Built originally in 1970, this traditional ranch style home has undergone multiple renovations. Located in North Columbus, this home recently underwent a complete redecoration and backyard remodel in the hopes of updating the classic style. The owner of the home is all about finding great steals and deals. She said she had the best time finding all the unique pieces that fill her home. When recounting her antiquing adventures, she told SVM about a beautiful painting she found for only a fraction of its actual value. Pieces in the house come from all over the world.


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A mini teacup pig requires sufficient amounts of water, a commercial pig diet and a place to root in order to grow up healthy and strong, states Pawnation. It can also be housebroken and crate-trained to live comfortably in a home.Continue Reading
A mini teacup pig needs a consistent source of water and plenty of moisture, says Pawnation. Not only does it need water to combat heat, but it also needs to drink plenty of water to prevent urinary tract infections, to which it can be prone. An owner should keep a plastic swimming pool filled with water outside during the summer so that the teacup pig can bathe and play in it. A pig can be housebroken like a dog as long as it can have access to an outside run or fenced-in backyard where it can defecate and urinate.
Another important aspect of mini teacup pig health is diet, explains Pawnation. The pig needs commercial miniature pig food. An owner should avoid feeding it table scraps, although fruits and vegetables are okay in moderation. Because a pig naturally roots, the owner should prepare a place outside where he can safely do this. The pig needs to be spayed or neutered before it reaches puberty at 4 months. A pig without one of these operations tends to become aggressive, and an unneutered male pig will grow tusks.Learn more about Barnyard Mammals


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Mar 8 1971 - 1989
1994 Dickson AR-Hiwasse AR
Dana Lenell Stidham was born March 8, 1971. She
was the daughter of Lawrence and Georgia Stidham
and a sister to Larry Stidham. She was a life long resident of Hiwasse and a graduate of Gravette High School.
On July 25, 1989, Dana left home on an errand to
a nearby grocery store in Bella Vista but never
returned home. Early the following morning her
car was found on Hwy 71 north of the Bella Vista
Town Center. As days and weeks went by, personal
items were also found. Her body was discovered
by a hunter on September 17, 1989, in a remote
wooded area of Bella Vista. Our worst fears had
come true. Dana was the victim of a brutal murder.
Our community and surrounding communities were in shock! Horrified and angered, we struggled with the thought of why anyone would take the life of this beautiful young girl.
Family, friends, local industries and small
businesses throughout the county helped raise
$20,000 as a reward for anyone who had information that might help find her killer.
Violent crime was new to us in this small
community. But as tragedy often has in the past,
it brought us together as neighbors and as friends.
Dana was laid to rest October 29, 1989, at
Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. She was 18. This remains
as unsolved mystery.
Submitted by Friends of Dana Stidham
Gravette, Arkansas
March 8, 1971
Gravette High School Gym
October 20, 1989 - 3:00 PM
Gery Swink
Mt. Pleasant Cemetery
Hiwasse, Arkansas
Mike Roark - John Stephens
Bruce Soule' - Rod Edwards
Vernon Wofinbarger - Dwane Bunch
Callison-Lough Funeral Homes
405 East Atlanta
April 28, 1992
Clue #1 The Girl: Stabbed in the Neck
Clue #2 The Car: Abandoned by Killer
Detective Sgt. Danny Varner has a special reason for his dogged determinationto bring the kidnap-killer of 18 year-old Dana Lenelle Stidham to justice. He was aclass- mate of her parents, and he watched the petite 5-foot-2, 105-pound beauty grow up."Dana was a friendly girl, a lot of people around here thought an awful lot of her," the investigator for the Benton County, Arkansas, sheriff's department told The Examiner."It's a terrible shame that something like this had to happen."Other residents of the tri-state area snuggled in the far northwest corner of Arkansas, near Missouri and Oklahoma, share Sgt. Varner's feelings about the tragedy. So Dana's friends and neighbors got together to raise $20,000 as a reward for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of her killer.
Dana Stidham vanished on July 25, 1989, only minutes after leaving a grocery store at the Town Center in Bella Vista Village.She wasn't found until nearly two months later, on September 17, 1989. A squirrel hunter stumbled on her skeletal remains buried in a shallow grave scraped out of a dry creek bed.The Body was too badly decomposed to determine if the girl had been raped. But she was nude when she was buried. Her underclothes were buried nearby.Curiously, the only things still missing were Dana's denim purse, a ring that had been her grandmother's and the groceries she had bought. Ominously, a strap on her bra had been slashed, indicating it was cut from her body. A pathologist with the Arkansas State Medical Examiner's office in Little Rock determined that the girl died after being stabbed in the neck.Authorities first learned the teenager was missing about 9:30 p.m. when her older brother, Larry, telephoned the sheriff's substation in Bella Vista and told Varner his sister hadn't returned to the apartment they shared with two girls."The last time Dana was seen by anyone who knew her, she had just leftthe parking lot of the Phillips Food Center, where she went to pick up groceries and a box of Alka Seltzer for her daddy," Sgt. Varner said.The detective issued a BOLO (Be On the Look Out for) report that was immediately relayed to law enforcement agencies throughout northwestern Arkansas, with a description of he missing girl and her gray 1984 Dodge Omni. A woman officer spotted the Dodge early the next morning along side U.S. Highway 71. A battered pickup truck with an attached camper was parked behind it. The passenger door of the truck was open and a man was kneeling beside the Dodge, as if he were changing a tire. But the cop didn't know about the missing girl or the BOLO, and by he time she returned to the scene with Detective Varner, the truck and the man were gone. And there was no sign of Dana. Police could find no blood or other evidence of violence. The keys were in the ignition, the window on the driver's side was partly rolled down and the left rear tire was flat. The officer who had driven past the two parked vehicles submitted to intensive hypnosis in an effort to recall more details about the truck and the mysterious man kneeling by the car. She recalled a three-tone Chevrolet Ranchero, with a medium green top and a dark, wood-grain insert in the middle. The lower half of the truck was painted white. The state license plates were black and white. Working with Texas Rangers, Varner quickly traced the truck to a Texan who had sold it in 1987 to a former Navy buddy who was stationed in Florida. Florida authorities reported that the black and white Texas plates were turned in at a license branch there.Than a man out for a stroll found several items from Dana's purse scattered on a road a short distance from where Dana's blouse and shorts had turned up, along with a girlie magazine.
Two days later, a dog showed up at a house with Dana's wallet clamped in its jaws. "Robbery wasn't the motive," said Varner. "Everything points to a sex crime. "Somewhere there's somebody who knows something, and I just want them to call me or to get in touch."There's a dead girl, and she had a family who loved her very much. We want to find who killed her."
Friday, July 17, 1998
John T. Anderson
Stidham case continues to haunt investigators
Much like the almost decade-old murder case itself, the small white rock - about the size of a piece from a jigsaw puzzle - remains near the etective's consciousness,
representing the most troubling unsolved murder case in Benton County history.
For Detective Mike Sydoriak, the rock - plucked from Dana Stidham's grave years age and now taking up a place on his desk - serves as a constant reminder of the 1989 murder case that remains unsolved.
In all, there are seven unsolved murders on record in rural Benton County - ranging from the 1981 discovery of a badly decomposed, unidentified body in Garfield to the latest investigation that began on Feb. 1, 1997, after authorities found the body of a Hispanic women, later identified as Socorro Moran, in a suitcase near rural Pea Ridge.
The Stidham case, though, is unique in many ways. July 25 will mark the nine-year anniversary of the day 18 year-old Dana Stidham disappeared after leaving for a trip to the Phillips Food Center in Bella Vista to purchase Alka-Seltzer, sugar and dish soap. She was seen alive for the last time in the parking lot of the store shortly after purchasing the items. Her family reported her missing that evening. Her car was found the next morning, abandoned on U.S. 71 just north of Bella Vista's Town Center.
Her disappearance triggered a massive search and clues as to her disappearances. The skeletal remains of Stidham's body were found on Sept. 16 by a squirrel hunter in a wooded ravine east of Bella Vista near the intersection of highways 340 and 94. At least seven different Benton County detectives have headed up the investigation of Stidham's death over the years. In addition, national expects and Arkansas State Police investigators have also been called in. Literally hundreds of people have been interviewed by investigators during the years. A four-drawer file cabinet at the Benton County Sheriff's Office has been dedicated to nothing but information regarding the case.
"We pulled everybody on this," said Sydoriak, a 19 year veteran of the sheriff's office and the initial lead investigator on the case.
For Sydoriak, the case is particularly frustrating, for he feels he knows who the killer is.
A couple of years ago, Sheriff Andy Lee even stated publicly that an arrest of the suspect was imminent. That arrest never occurred. Lee now says that public comment was "part of an investigation scheme" that didn't pan out.
"Sometimes, you have to do things that don't seem under-standable to the general public to flush out the killer," Lee said last week. "There is nothing that sits on my shoulder more than that case. I truly believe we know who did it. We just have to find that one missing piece of the puzzle,"
Sydoriak agrees, saying he and other investigators, namely Detective Danny Varner of the Bella Vista Division of the Sheriff's Office, have put together a case that points toward one man.
That evidence includes one initial polygraph test that proved inconclusive and a later polygraph test that the suspect failed, Sydoriak said. A national expert on analyzing statements from suspects also believes the suspect in question is the killer.The suspect, now a resident of Broken Arrow, Okla., repeatedly asked Stidham for dates and was repeatedly turned down, Sydoriak said.
Within a week of Stidham's disappearance, the suspect joined the Navy after putting off recruiters for months previous to the murder, Sydoriak said. While on leave from the Navy, the man took Stidham's grave marker. He was later arrested, charged and found guilty of taking the marker, Sydoriak said.
"He said he loved her," Sydoriak said,"... One of his girlfriends told us he would...go out to (Stidham's) grave at midnight and cry."
Sydoriak said the man had been seen by witnesses driving around in the Bella Vista area at 3 am the day after Stidham was reported missing. The man gave investigators the name of a girl who he said would provide an libi as to his whereabouts during the time of the murder. When questioned, the girl denied any knowledge of the man's whereabouts that day, Sydoriak said. A second girlfriend as then named by the suspect. That woman at first, supported his story.However, under intense questioning from investigators, she, too, said she had no knowledge of his location at the time of the murder, Sydoriak said.
The suspect's family members, crime experts, even acquaintances from the military, were questioned during the investigation, Sydoriak said. Most of those interviews supported investigators' instinct of the man's guilt. The fact that the suspect still carries a photograph of Stidham in his wallet, but not one of his wife, adds to the mountain of circumstantial evidence. But the "missing piece of the puzzle" was never found.
"We tried everything, ... We even talked to guys he had been in the brig with (in the Navy)," Sydoriak said.
Georgia Stidham, Dana's mother, has little to say about the case today. She said she feels investigators - Sydoriak and Varner in particular - have done all they can. Now they wait.
"They know who did it. They just have to get the proof." she said. In previous interviews, she has spoken openly of the pain the murder - and subsequent wait for the killer's arrest - caused the entire family.
Today, she has resigned herself to wait, something she and other family members are now used to. Dana Stidham's tombstone bears no exact date of death, just the year 1989 is printed on the stone. When the crime occurred, detectives told the Stidham family to wait to put the date of her death on the stone. Wait until more facts are collected. Wait until the killer confesses to the exact date of the crime. Today, the Stidham family still waits.
Two years age, the case was kick started when DNA testing was conducted on the vehicle the suspect had driven at the time of the murder.
Investigators hoped to find physical evidence - hair fibers, skin or blood - indicating Stidham's presence in the vehicle. Years had passed since the crime, and no evidence was located as a result of the testing, Sydoriak said.
The missing piece of the puzzle remains to be found. For now, the rock remains on Sydoriak's desk.
Tuesday, August 3, 1999
Ten years later, authorities continue to follow leads in Stidham Case. byKirby Sanders
Dana Stidham has been dead for a decade, but the search for her killer continues, according to the Benton County sheriff's investigator in charge of the case.
Deputy Mike Sydoriak said new information uncovered within the past fewweeks may help resolve the case, but certain evidence must be analyzed to determine whether it is helpful.
Shortly before her disappearance, Stidham, then 18, had moved from her family's home in Hiwasse to an apartment in Centerton that she shared with her brother. On the day she disappeared, she had gone to her parents' home to do laundry, then to a grocery store for her father.
Stidham went to the Phillips Food Center at Bella Vista Town Center shortly before 3 p.m. on July 25, 1989. At 3:17 p.m. she checked out at the store, having purchased sugar, dish washing soap and a box of Alka-Seltzer. Immediately thereafter;witnesses saw her in the parking lot of the store. That was the last time anyone saw Stidham alive.Reported missing.
The girl's parents reported her missing that evening. Authoritiesfound her car the following morning. Benton County sheriff's deputy Karen Myers noticed the dark gray 1984 Dodge Omni on the shoulder of U.S. 71, just north of Wellington Drive, as she went to work about 6:30 p.m.
When the vehicle was still there that evening, Myers checked the license-plate numbers and determined the car was Stidham's.
Investigators believe the car had been abandoned shortly before Myers first saw it. Officers patrolling the area, near the Bella Vista Country Club, did not notice the gray Dodge Omni during the late-night hours of the preceding night.
The keys were in the ignition, and the car's gas tank was half-full. The left rear tire was flat.
No signs of a struggle were found in or around the vehicle, but Chief Deputy Don Townsen, then a sheriff's detective, said other aspects made it appear unlikely that Stidham disappeared of her own volition.
Stidham remained listed as a missing person for several days after her disappearance.
On July 29, sheriff's deputies enlisted a private tracker and his dog to search for her after several items, believed to be from the laundry she had in her car, were discovered along Ealing Circle in Bella Vista.
Deputies and the tracker searched the area, a rough and uninhabited gravel road at the time, but found nothing.Suspicion of foul play.
During the first week of August 1989, however, officials became even more concerned that foul play was involved in the disappearance.
When Stidham's car was found, her purse was not among the contents, which left authorities believing she may have taken it and simply disappeared. But, on Aug. 5, searchers discovered a pad of Stidham's bank checks, her driver's license and several other personal items a few miles north of where her car was found. A pet dog belonging to a resident of the area apparently had found some of the items and carried them home. The dog's master notified authorities.
"(The) new evidence...has given us a bit of a scare," said Sheriff Andy Lee in a newspaper account at the time. "We know, when she left the car, she took her purse with her. Butwe don't believe she would be throwing personal items out."
Several items believed to have been from Stidham's pursewere found strewn along roadways in the area of Chaucer and Hanover roads. Most were found near the roadside, leading authorities to speculate they were thrown from a moving car.
Leads and offers of help continued to filter in to the sheriff's office. At one point, two psychics from Rogers offered their assistance.
"We will listen to anybody that has an idea or theory as towhat appened, "Lee said at the time.
Divers searched a former gravel pit on Aug. 12, "eliminating any doubt that she might be there, "Lee said.
Divers also searched Lake Norwood, southeast of where Stidham's car was found, to eliminate the possibility that she was killed and her body dumped in the lake.
Searchers also combed a remote "party spot" near Newbern Lane,just inside the state line. Newbern is just west of the intersection of Arkansas highways 340 and 90 in northern Benton County.
Deputies investigated the possibility that a purse found at the Bella Vista tourist center might have been Stidham's. It wasn't.
By Aug. 15, 1989, authorities offered a $ 5,000 reward for information leading to Stidham's where about. The reward was offered by an area corporation that asked to remain anonymous.Remains found
Stidham's body was found on Sept. 16, although the discovery went unreported until the following day. According to the sheriff's office, a squirrel hunter discovered the remains near the Newbern Lane area that had been searched a month earlier. The hunter did not notify authorities of the discovery until the following day because he said he was unaware of Stidham's disappearance; he thought the remains might date from Civil War activity in the area.
Deputies recovered the remains on Sept. 17 along an area about 100 yards from where people had searched the month before. Authorities said they believed the remains were buried in a shallow grave, unearthed by early September rains, and then scattered by animals.
The recovery of the remains, positively identified from dental records as being Stidham's, brought more questions. The remains were only about 90 percent complete, however, and a key bone that would have aided the state medical examiner was missing.
Autopsy results released in October 1989 stated that a sternum bone was not recovered. Deputies mounted a separate, unsuccessful search for it.
According to the medical examiner's report, a nick on Stidham's left shoulder blade indicated she might have been stabbed, but the sternum bone was critical to that determination. Without the missing bone, the medical examiner was unable to provide any conclusive cause and manner of death for Stidham.
Early in the investigating, Lee made a statement regarding the case that proved sadly prophetic. The case seemed difficult to crack from the beginning, leading Lee to state on Aug. 15, "Every time we get a feeling we're headed in the right direction, something new pops up."
A suspect
The case has languished, unsolved, for 10 years. Sydoriak, a 20 year veteran of the sheriff's office, and Lee believe they know who killed Stidham but, so far, have been unable to prove it.
They key suspect is a spurned suitor whom Stidham declined to date. The man reportedly told police he was with a girlfriend on the day of Stidham'sdisappearance, but the woman contradicted his statement. He was seen driving about Bella Vista in the early morning hours on the day of Stidham's disappearance. He also leftn North-west Arkansas immediately after Stidham's death, joining the Navy after having put off recruiters for several months.
As late as 1998, Lee noted, "There is nothing that sits on my shoulder more than that case. I truly believe we know who did it.We just have to find that one missing.
Over the years following Stidham's death, the suspect has reportedly gone to her grave late at night and wept. He also was arrested, charged and convicted of taking the marker from her grave.
Now, there is some newly developed information about the case that Sydoriaksaid came up in mid July. He declined to discuss specifics. He said the case appeared to be "stuck" without some strong new developments.
"We've gotten as much as we can, but it isn't enough to file, according to the prosecutors. We're waiting for anything that might come up, and we will move ahead when something does."
Dana's grandparents are buried here they are Delmas D. and Edith Stidham. Also her cousin Danny Stidham is buried here.
Cold Case Sample Sent To State Crime Lab
Last updated Friday, January 4, 2008 7:13 PM CST in News
By Melissa Sherman
The Morning News
ROGERS — A cold case could have a hot lead with the help of advanced DNA testing, officials say.
The case began when Dana Stidham, 18, went missing July 25, 1989. Her body was found almost two months later in a shallow grave near the junction of Arkansas 340 and Arkansas 94 east of Bella Vista.
Stidham is believed to have been slain but no one was ever charged in the case.
Capt. Mike Sydoriak of the Benton County Sheriff's Office said Friday the Arkansas State Crime Lab contacted the sheriff's office to request the Stidham evidence undergo new DNA testing. The sheriff's office sent a few pieces of evidence to Little Rock this week, Sydoriak said. He declined to specify what items were sent.
The new testing and DNA fascinates Sydoriak. Technology in 1989 can't compare with what is available now, he said. He was unable to provide details as to what type of testing will be done.
Calls to the crime lab were not returned Friday.
Sydoriak said he's baffled with the circumstances of Stidham's disappearance and death. Then a sergeant with the sheriff's office, he worked on the initial case.
Time passed, and when Sydoriak was reassigned the case, he again began looking for answers. He and other investigators conducted polygraph tests to clear suspects, he said.
Stidham had been shopping and an 1984 Dodge Omni was found abandoned on U.S. 71 north of the Bella Vista Town Center. Her purse and some personal checks were found scattered just south of the state line.
The worst part of the case was recovering Stidham's body, Sydoriak said.
Her body was not found until hunting season a few months later when a man found her skeleton in a shallow grave in a creek bed. The skull was intact. Dental records later proved it was Stidham.
The medical examiner who performed the autopsy was later discredited, leaving the cause of death undetermined, Sydoriak said. It could have been an accident, a stabbing or something else entirely, but those questions remain unanswered, he said.
Sydoriak said a man was questioned and his vehicle studied at a forensics lab in Texas. The man, an admirer of Stidham, was never charged, he said.
Sydoriak still believes the department had the right man. The man now lives in Pineville, Mo.
Sydoriak's phone will ring two to three times a year with a person providing possible leads about the Stidham case. He said he's working on a new lead he received just this week.
Contributed on 12/21/08 by flwillingham
Email This Contributor
Record #: 126162
On this site you can upload gravestone photos, locate ancestors and perform genealogy research. If you have a relative buried in Arkansas, we encourage you to upload a digital image using our Submit a Photo page. Contributing to this genealogy archive helps family historians and genealogy researchers locate their relatives and complete their family tree.
Submitted: 12/21/08 • Approved: 12/29/08 • Last Updated: 8/30/12 • R126162-G126161-S3


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Today's Sunday Inspiration: Bad behavior isn't excusable, but when someone is having a lousy day or is feeling down, they may be facing some tough challenges. So, be kind – always.
Alex Blackwell is the author of Letting Go: 25 True Stories of Peace, Hope and Surrender, which includes 10 free Peace and Balance tools.
Web | Inspiring Things | Free eBook: How to Love Consciously


text:
Looking for Eileen Werth (Person who posted on this forum)
Eileen Werth,
A piece of information you mentioned on here about your family could really help me with a school project of mine this semester (for history.) Would you be willing to communicate via email?
If so, please reply to this message or email me at hotcrossbunnys@gmail DOT com.
Thank you so much!


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Members present:
Mr Martin O'Neill
Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, examined.
(Ms Hewitt) Thank you very much indeed for inviting me along this afternoon and thank you for that question. I made it very clear I think when I was appointed 15 months ago that I did not think we had given, or that we had been seen to have given, enough attention to manufacturing. I think that we did quite inadvertently let the impression grow up in our first term that we were much more interested in the so-called new economy than in the so-called old economies such as traditional manufacturing. As I have said repeatedly, I think that that distinction between the so-called new and the so-called old economies, which we hear rather less about now that the dot-com bubble has burst, is simply misleading and ignores the fact that it is manufacturing industry that is at the forefront of the application and creation of the new technologies that are transforming the entire economy. I readily accept and agree with the view that certainly this Committee and I have expressed that we needed to sharpen up our focus on manufacturing. By working together with industry, business, manufacturers and union leaders, we put in place a manufacturing strategy some months ago, on which your Committee has very helpful reported. We are now working to put that into practice because the strategy itself, which is the first Government strategy for manufacturing for over 30 years, has been very widely welcomed, but the real issue is what we do about it. A lot of the implementation is going to fall to the regional development agencies and other regional institutions. Alan Johnson, my Industry Minister, and I have been working with the RDAs to ensure that in every region, depending on the exact nature of the manufacturing base in that region, we have an effective partnership and effective delivery to support particularly the SME manufacturing. Part of that of course is being done through the new regional centres for manufacturing excellence, most of which are now up and running, while three are about to come on stream. Also, of course, we have a role nationally not only to ensure that the national environment is as good as it can be for manufacturing, but also to focus on innovation. That is where the reorganisation of the department that came into effect in April is so important because we have now created for the first time an Innovation Group within the Department. Simply by brining together all the different teams of officials who were working on innovation across the Department previously, we are already getting a much sharper focus and much more effective relationships with business. I hope the Committee is aware that we have now appointed a new Director General of the Innovation Group, David Hughes, who has come to us from a long career in industry, most recently from British Aerospace. That group and David himself will have the task of building on the work that we have been doing on the science base and the investment in that science base to get far more existing businesses partnering the science base and helping to apply the new technology to their own products and processes. That is going to be a key focus for the DTI over the next three years as we try and raise the determination and therefore the levels of competitiveness and productivity in British manufacturing.
(Ms Hewitt) You are talking about the output numbers and predictions?
(Ms Hewitt) What I am hearing all around, and I am hearing it directly from manufacturers as well as from these surveys, is just enormous uncertainty about what is happening in very significant parts of the world economy. That is crystal clear in America where uncertainty is the word you hear over and over again. It is certainly true in relation to many of our continental European partners. When you have, frankly, very sluggish growth and uncertainty in two major economic blocks and Japan still suffering recession, inevitably that has a knock-on effect on the performance, but also on the perceptions and expectations, of manufacturers in Britain. We have delivered, I think, in the United Kingdom a remarkable record of macroeconomic stability and manufacturers all the time are saying to me, "Gordon Brown did exactly the right thing." We have low interest rates. We have a macroeconomic climate that we have never previously had, but we cannot completely insulate the United Kingdom, which is a very open trading economy, and rightly so, from what is happening in so many other markets. So companies which trade in particular with Germany, for instance, or with America or in the past with Japan, are suffering. Those which have other markets, in south-east Asia for instance, are often doing better because those markets, and of course the Chinese market, remain robust. But, in terms of the United Kingdom itself, we, as you know, are expected by the OECD and IMF to be the fastest growing major European economy in 2002, but we cannot completely protect our manufacturers from the problems that they are encountering in those other markets, nor can we protect them from the problem that is caused for them at the moment by the weakness of the euro. Those two factors are very difficult for a number of our manufacturers.
(Ms Hewitt) No, I am certainly not talking lightly at all about it, Chairman, because many of our manufacturers are taking very tough decisions indeed, but of course they are also dependent not just on the state of health or otherwise of major overseas markets but on the health of the UK market, and the fact that the UK economy is continuing to grow faster than other industrialised countries and that consumers remain confident is very important for many of our manufacturers who are selling directly into that market. As far as other countries are concerned, as you rightly say, all the major industrialised countries have seen and are seeing a reduction in manufacturing output. I think it is actually a bit unfair to our manufacturing industry to suggest that we are in a completely different position. In fact, if you look at the percentage of national output, this is going back to 1999 and it is difficult to get the most up-to-date figures, that was the starting point: in fact UK manufacturing output was 19 per cent of our total; in America it was 16 per cent; in France it was 18 per cent; in Germany it was 22 per cent. All major well-off industrialised countries have a manufacturing base that is a minority of their total output. For all the reasons that this Committee has said and I have discussed and put in the Manufacturing Strategy, that sector is incredibly important to the health of the whole economy. My concern is that we should not repeat the experience we had in the mid-1990s when recovery came and our manufacturing industry did not grow dramatically compared with the manufacturing sectors of Germany, France and the United States which did. That is a very real concern, particularly given the drop-off in manufacturing investment that we are seeing at the moment.
Jonathan Djanogly
(Ms Hewitt) I am certainly not shooting from the hip. This is very much part of the strategy. In the strategy document itself, you will see that one of the pillars was this whole issue of best practice. If you look at the reasons why our manufacturing sector lags behind Germany and France in productivity and output per hour, one of the reasons for that is the poorer take-up, on average, of best practice and weaker adoption of manufacturing techniques. I think that is the responsibility of management. Of course, another of the pillars of the Manufacturing Strategy was skills. Everyone thinks of skills as being about workforce skills and, yes, that is hugely important, but the reality is, as we have said on a number of occasions, that a better skilled individual can only actually make their full contribution if the entire team and the entire organisation is well-managed. My comments are not directed specifically towards manufacturing. What I said recently was that the best of British management is the best in the world, and that is undoubtedly true, and they are running a number of world-class companies, based here or in other parts of the world, but the average is well below the best. As the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership recently pointed out, we have a long tail of under-performing management, some in parts of the SME sector, some in middle management level. It is an issue that is of enormous concern, particularly to the leaders in manufacturing. That is where it fits within the strategy, and that is where it fits in our analysis of the productivity gap.
(Ms Hewitt) It is one of the issues. In the much more detailed document that we recently published, the report from the Council and our response on management, you will find the whole thing is about the skills of management in order that they can actually get the best performance out of the best skilled workforce. They go together.
Richard Burden
(Ms Hewitt) First of all, at a regional venture level, as the Committee is aware, it took us longer to get these funds off the ground because, in order to get state aid approval, we effectively had to persuade the Commission to rewrite the state aid rules. We were inundated in terms of European policy but it delayed the start of the funds. What those funds will do is to start meeting fully a real gap in the market that we identify, which is more venture capital investment in growing firms below the half million mark, which is where the private venture capital sector typically comes in. Although the venture capital funds are not restricted to manufacturing, there is no doubt that they will be particularly valuable sources of funding for the smaller and medium-sized manufacturing firms, particularly the more innovative firms that are looking to grow. One of the things that has held back British manufacturing is that it is often so difficult for them to get reasonably long-term serious funding. You are very well aware of this in the West Midlands. I am very struck to find how often the really successful, medium-sized firms that I visit, which are making huge investments in the new equipment, which they have to do to stay at the leading edge, are private firms, family-owned firms where the family is willing to make the long-term investment; in some cases they are firms that have gone public, found that it was not working for them because of the pressure for short-term results, and gone back to being a private firm via a management buy-out or employee buy-out, or whatever. Regional venture capital funds, are quite rightly being run by professional management, and will help both to fill that gap and to meet strategic objectives of the RDA economic strategy for that particular region. In terms of the centres of manufacturing excellence, we have got the West Midlands one up and running and they and several of the others have already opened for business and are taking clients and advising clients. The remaining three, which are London, Wales and the East of England, will come up in the next month or so.
(Ms Hewitt) I am not aware of the most recent proposals of the Work Foundation on this. In terms of how we should evaluate their success, the first key benchmark was: could they raise the additional funding from the private sector? They were always constructed as public/private partnerships where we would put in a significant amount of taxpayer funding but the balance of more than £100 million would come from the private sector. That has been achieved already. The next key indicator for me is going to be how successful they are at finding real, good quality investment propositions. It is no good having money to put in the bank. That will be the next stage. So far, from the informal reports I have had, they are very encouraging but actually in looking at the portfolio of investment and seeing how quickly they can get the money out, it will be the next stage where we can make sure we are on track. Then, thirdly, we will want to look at the success of their investment. I would not expect every single investment they make to be successful; that is not in the nature of venture capital. But we will obviously be looking for firms to grow and succeed as a result of this venture capital investment which might well not have done so otherwise if we had not come in.
(Ms Hewitt) This is very much about a network. It is about getting really practical advice and expertise into the hands of manufacturing SMEs. Although some of the centres have got a physical presence quite often in the building of one of the partners in the consortium that is running it, this is not about expecting manufacturers to come to a centre, which may be a very difficult thing for them to do. This is about having a network of specialist and expert advisers who can go out to the manufacturer, do an initial diagnosis of what it is they actually need, and then make sure, either directly or by calling on the right kind of expertise, that they get that help. That obviously involves a lot of marketing, and we are trying to do that with direct mail, business links, through other intermediaries, the trade press and so on, but it is certainly beginning to work. To give you one example from your own region, the centre of manufacturing excellence got a phone call approach, I think it was, from an SME manufacturer that wanted advice on how they could improve the quality of their suppliers. They were totally dependent on local suppliers; they wanted to have more of a choice. The adviser went out to them and sat down and got to know the company. He began to understand their needs. The upshot is a much more exciting piece of work than simply saying, "There are some other suppliers that might be useful to you", and which actually involved working with the company on new products, one in particular, and improved processes right down into their supply chain. That is a nice example of the kind of expertise that can be brought in. Behind the centres is, as it were, the Manufacturing Advisory Service, which is a network of centres of expertise in manufacturing that is all around the country, often based in academic institutions, specialising in technical textiles, for instance, can be called on to help a particular textile firm, wherever it is located, get the expertise that it may need.
(Ms Hewitt) The work is very well advanced on this. What we have done is to say to each of the RDAs that we want them to work with local partners, industrialists and trade unionists in particular, to develop their approach to manufacturing. They all have a manufacturing context within their broader regional economic strategies, but it has not been brought out and discussed with the manufacturing community of the region as a manufacturing document. They have all been doing that and in some cases in fact they have already held regional conferences on manufacturing before I held our national summit last December. We will be publishing all those regional manufacturing documents. I will shortly be meeting all the chairs of the regional development agencies to review where they have got to on that. We will then be able to set a benchmark for each of the regions. We will be setting benchmarks within those documents and we will be able to measure progress on that. For all of the regions, the crucial component is going to be work on innovation and getting the manufacturing base partnering with the science base, so that we not only get new spin-off companies out of the science base, but we get the existing companies benefiting from the work that is going on in the science base. The North-West RDA has been making real progress on that with the science partnership they have set up in the north-west. The West Midlands RDA, with the technology corridors, is beginning to show some real success, for instance in Malvern, the centre where I opened an extension recently, and again we are seeing that in other regions as well. But we need to get each RDA focussed on that. We need the partners in each region understanding what it is the RDA is committed to, getting involved in those efforts and then holding them to account.
Sir Robert Smith
(Ms Hewitt) This is a hugely important issue because I do think our ability to attract inward investment is a real measure of our success as a government, but also as a country. If you take something like the car industry, which is now hugely successful in terms of volume of production, volume of exports and productivity as well as the excellence of so many of the models produced here, and you look back over 25 years, it is inward investment that has really driven the turnaround in the British motor car industry. I set great store by that. Over the last 18 months or so, we have suffered more than other European countries because we have been by such a long way the number one destination for America's inward investment and for inward investment in the electronic, telecommunication and IT sectors, and those two things of course overlap in that sector. The collapse of that sector, which is really what tipped the American economy into recession, has hit the United Kingdom as a destination for inward investment very hard indeed. On top of that, there have been a couple of very large mergers and acquisitions in Germany and France, which have also improved their figures. We have to go on working extremely hard on this to make sure that we remain, as I think all the benchmark indicators say we do, a very attractive environment for business and in particular for inward investment, but we also have to recognise that the problem of the exchange rate and the whole issue of the single currency is undoubtedly a factor, it is not the only factor, but it is a factor in the investment decisions that are being made now. For that of course we will await the assessment that we will be making before June next year of the five economic tests and the possibility of euro entry. These are certainly factors in some of the investment decisions that are being made now that will show up in the figures in future.
(Ms Hewitt) It is important to distinguish different points here. The point I was making is that changing the exchange rate and, over a period of 50 years, progressively moving to a weaker and weaker value for sterling has not solved our productivity problem, and indeed if you look over the long post-war period where the pound against the Deutschemark devalued progressively over decades by an enormous extent, the productivity figures moved very sharply against us. Our relative productivity simply continued to deteriorate. I was simply making the point that you cannot expect a relative improvement in the exchange rate from the point of view of exporters to compensate for the underlying problems we have in the productivity and performance of many, by no means all, of our manufacturing companies. That is an issue. Of course there is a separate issue about what happens not only to inward investment but to location divisions generally where we are part of what will be, with enlargement, an enormous single market, bigger than the USA and Japan combined, but not at the moment part of the single currency. That is a factor; it is not the only factor. In a sense, we have to redouble our efforts at the moment on all the other factors.
(Ms Hewitt) I understand the Liberal Democrat policy on this issue, which has always seemed to me to involve joining the single currency quite regardless of whether or not it is a good thing for the economy. I think the really important thing for us to do is the evaluation of the five economic tests. Of course, work on that has now begun and a decision on that will be made by June of next year and we have said repeatedly that that will be the basis for the decision about entry into the single currency. Of course, if we decide that is in all our interests for the longer term, then we will move speedily and decisively to a referendum, but beyond that these are really not matters that are for me.
(Ms Hewitt) Let me just stress that this issue of the currency and single currency membership is only one of the factors that inward investors are taking into account. Certainly in my visits abroad and my discussions with inward investors and potential inward investors, what they are also very interested in is our outstanding science base, the fact that we still have this supply of superb engineers. Those two factors are very important and the fact that we have a very attractive tax and regulatory environment compared not with some mythical ideal, although we all move in that direction, but with the reality in the other countries that they are also considering for possible inward investment. That is why even in these very difficult times when inward investment is way down around the world, we are continuing to attract some very good inward investment projects.
Jonathan Djanogly.
(Ms Hewitt) The Prime Minister has made the position absolutely clear, and we will continue to be the strongest voice arguing for radical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy within the European Union. The agreement that was reached over the weekend certainly does not match our ambitions for Agricultural Common Policy reform. It does, however, open the way to enlargement, which is important. We will continue on the basis of the mid-term review and proposals that were made in that, which we still want to see strengthened, to argue for radical reform and in particular for the de-coupling of certain income subsidies to farmers from production subsidies. That, I think, is the absolutely crucial issue from the point of view of world trade. As the Prime Minister, Clare Short, Margaret Beckett and I have all been saying recently, we well understand, even if not all of our European partners do, that delivering on the promise of the Doha Round depends to a critical extent upon the European Union grasping the nettle of agricultural policy reform. So we will just go on making that case. I am delighted that I have the wholehearted support of all parties in the House of Commons in making that case because we have got in Britain a very effective mobilisation of faith groups and the NGOs and so on. We saw that at the recent March for Trade and Justice. There is huge public support in Britain for trade justice and for the Doha Round and therefore for Common Agricultural Policy reform. What I hope the faith groups and voluntary organisations can do is, in a sense, extend their reach and build effective relationships with their counterparts in the rest of the European Union, as well as in the United States, so that, as we are making the government-to-government argument with the European Union, we are also getting a more public-to-public argument and broader support within civil society and much better understanding on the Continent of what our export subsidies are doing to low income farmers, desperately poor farmers, in their own home market, let alone what we are doing by looking at our own.
(Ms Hewitt) On the argument about 2006, which is where the financial horizons ran to, not as I understand it 2016, of course we are not going to sit on our hands and give up on the argument.
Roger Berry
(Ms Hewitt) I am very sorry if I have given that impression because I have said on repeated occasions that there would be very clear potential advantages, particularly to our manufacturing sector, to be gained from joining the single currency, subject to the five economic tests and all the rest of it, which very much mirror the concerns of manufacturing. I have also said, and indeed in my response to the Chairman's first question, that one of the reasons why conditions are so tough for so many manufacturing firms and manufacturing workers at the moment is the weakness of the euro and the difficulty even of highly productive firms coping with that exchange rate if the eurozone is their major market. We know that that is a huge problem for many motorcar manufacturers, even some who have got world class and world beating levels of productivity. Of course there is an issue there. That does not mean the Government can wave a magic wand over the levels of the exchange rate.
(Ms Hewitt) First of all, on the specific point about the supply chain, I think we are all very conscious, particularly in the motor car industry, that on the one hand we have had enormous success in attracting inward investment, and you mention specifically the Micra plant in Sunderland, and we certainly wanted that and we were jolly pleased to get it, but that has been coupled with a globalisation and a Europeanisation, if I can use the jargon, of the supply chain. More and more component manufacturing is being done within the eurozone, or indeed in Central and Eastern Europe, in accession countries. It is a mixed picture in terms of the manufacturing base we have kept and the part of the manufacturing base that is reducing at the moment. In terms of enlargement, perhaps I could let you have a note because we have done some work with fairly high level numbers. The bottom line is that of course the candidate countries, the accession countries, offer very low wage costs and non-wage labour costs, in many cases highly skilled people, to manufacturers who are making decisions about where to locate or where to expand. Of course, that is a competitive challenge to us and it is certainly a competitive challenge to other countries, other existing Member States, which have much higher wage and non-wage labour costs than we do. At the same time, enlargement, as I think you have indicated, is an enormous opportunity. In a sense, one looked back at what happened when Ireland and then Greece and then Portugal joined the European Union and the huge advances in living standards that people made in those countries, which then of course makes them purchasers of our exports. We are clear that the benefits from enlargement outweigh the difficulties and costs that may come. I will certainly let you have a note on that. For individual companies, perhaps those owners are meeting those location costs but for those competing against companies in countries where they can see a competitive advantage, it can be very difficult. My officials have been working with the Commission to ensure that, as far as possible, there is a level playing field on accession. We certainly have concerns about state aid in steel, for instance. It is a matter of huge concern to Corus and some of our other steel manufacturers. I raised this matter with the Polish Government when I was there a couple of weeks ago. We are still waiting for the Commission's judgment on the restructuring plan that the Polish Government put forward, but there are also concerns from coal manufacturers about, for instance, lower standards on environmental protection and health and safety, and we are continuing to discuss those with the Commission, so that there is not an unfair advantage for companies in some of those accession countries compared with our own.
(Ms Hewitt) No, the stretch is bigger, and it is also true that, for instance in the Czech Republic, there is a very long tradition of engineering and technical excellence.
(Ms Hewitt) The southern European countries compared with us at the time, yes, had lower skills, lower productivity, but also clearly significantly lower wage and non-wage labour costs. It is a different picture with the accession countries but still that issue of a challenge undoubtedly to our manufacturers, a further challenge to us to raise our game on productivity and on innovation because that is where we will compete. We are not going to compete against Poland or the Czech Republic, or against Morocco, Indonesia or wherever, on the basis of low wages, low margins and low value-added goods. It is very much about innovation and quality and moving our manufacturing companies up the value-added chain, which is why we are doing all the stuff we set out in the strategy, and the fact of accession in 14 months time just makes the rest of this work all the more urgent.
Linda Perham
(Ms Hewitt) First of all, we have the Inland Revenue, Customs and the Small Business Service working very closely together - and this will broaden out into other government departments as well - to make sure that here is single seamless advice for somebody who wants to start up in business. We are making some real improvements there. For instance, we are just about to announce, and you have pre-empted something that Nigel Griffiths, my Small Business Minister, has been working on with Shell to run the Livewire Scheme for young entrepreneurs. We are working on a single, simple, start-up pack for young entrepreneurs. We are working, as I say, with Inland Revenue and Customs to ensure that both electronically and in hard copy, which some people still prefer, we have the advice that people need when they are starting up in business, and as simple as we can possibly make it, so that people know from the outset what they need to do, for instance to comply with employment law, if they are going to start immediately employing somebody, but also the support and help that we can offer them. We have tried to make that as simple as possible. I do not know if you have had a chance to look on the latest version of the UK-Online website, but there you will see that we have a section on starting as a self-employed person. That is what we are trying to do much more broadly. As well as that, we have got the Phoenix Fund, which is very successful, and I got another £20 million for that out of the Spending Review. With the Phoenix Fund we are supporting a whole range of initiatives and organisations which are working either in the very disadvantaged, low income community or working with groups that are under-represented in business, particularly some of our minority ethnic communities but also women, older people and so on. Those are starting to show results and we are tracking that through. I have also made it very clear to all business links operators that we expect them not just to work with the customers as they have always worked, but to reach out to minority communities in their particular area to get out there and find the women entrepreneurs whose potential is being lost. We have reminded them of the OECD study, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Study that recently came out, which said that the fastest and most sensible way to raise the start-up rate in an economy, to raise the entrepreneurship level, is to target women. America is one of the very few countries where half the start-ups are coming from women. In Britain it is about one-third. In many other European countries it is less than that. We can be quite confident that there is a lot of entrepreneurial potential out there and we need to reach it. Indeed tomorrow I am helping to launch an organisation called Prowess, which is specifically about support for women entrepreneurs. We will be measuring the business links in part on their success in getting out into those under-represented groups.
(Ms Hewitt) No, I do not think so at all. The SBS is still a relatively new organisation. Their first challenge, which was quite huge, was to reorganise, slim down and sort out the entire Business Links network. That was very much where they focussed their work. The cost-cutting review, for which I was a travelling minister, and the SBS was very closely engaged in that, has been hugely helpful. It gives the SBS the position it needs to act right across government and ensure that instead of different government departments having different channels to SMEs and all bombarding them from different directions or offering so many different initiatives that nobody could find their way through them, it is all done in a simplified, streamlined way with the SBS. The test for that change is just bringing it all together.
Andrew Lansley
(Ms Hewitt) I completely agree with you about the cumulative effect, and that is very much the issue. Of course, I recognise that. As far as I am concerned, in a sense, the whole of the cost-cutting review was about how we make it easier for small firms to do business the market, both in terms of compliance - paying employment or paying taxes and so on - but more importantly in terms of gaining support from government to make it as easy as possible and to raise the chance that those businesses will be successful. Out of that cost-cutting review comes the work that the SBS is taking forward with the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise initially but gradually with a much larger range of agencies. That has been very important, but of course we also have the work of William Sargent in his new role as Chairman of the Small Business Council, and David Arculus, the Regulator of the small business task force and panel. In terms of what the answer to the problem is, one of the difficulties is that of course when you ask a small business where are the worst problems, they say that it is the cumulative effect. In order to deal with the problem, you have got, as it were, to cut the elephant into bite-sized chunks, so that you have to deal with individual regulations; you have to sort out weights and measures, for instance; you have to deal with the complex set of regulations that affect small businesses in the food and restaurant trade, for instance. You do have to deal with it chunk by chunk. But what you can also do is make it much easier for small businesses to get the information that they need and not to flood them with information that they do not need. That is very much what this joint project is about: it is making sure, particularly using electronic means, that an SME, for instance in the hotel and restaurant business, gets information about regulations that affects it, but does not get irrelevant stuff or, worse still, it does not find itself inadvertently not complying with something because it simply has not heard about. I think we can make it much easier to get the right information to the right business at the right time.
(Ms Hewitt) One has to be quite careful about this business of simply saying that exempting small businesses is the answer to the problem. In some cases, it is entirely appropriate. For instance, we have very substantially raised the threshold for statutory audit and we have exempted a lot of small businesses or small companies from the need to do a statutory audit as a result of that. Gordon Brown has continued to raise the VAT threshold - and we have one of the highest in Europe - so that we do not burden the smaller companies or the smaller firm unnecessarily with VAT. We have been pressing very hard, for instance within the European Union, on the Waste Electrical Directive for an exemption for the large number of small producers and retailers who are responsible for a very small part of the waste. We have not won that argument yet but we continue to make it. We exempted a very large number of small firms with employees fewer than five from the shareholder pension requirements. Each of those was absolutely the right thing to do. Indeed, after consultation, we were happy to agree to that Directive, in part because it did not apply to any business with fewer than 50 employees, which of course was the vast majority of business in our country. But I am not in favour of a blanket exception for small firms, either from employment regulations or anything else, not least because small firms themselves are telling us they do not want that. Most of them are quite worried about the idea of being badged as a sort of second class employer or suddenly coming to a threshold where perhaps they go from five to six or from ten to eleven, or whatever, and they then have to take on everything at once. I think the case-by-case approach to exemption is a more sensible one, coupled with what we are doing to simplify different packages of regulations, and to simplify the way in which Government and small businesses do business with each other and the information and compliance procedures we give them.
(Ms Hewitt) We do it through the regulatory impact assessments, so that we have not perfect but better than most other countries regulatory impact assessments on every proposal. Of course, we can see what the cumulative burden is. As we spread the whole philosophy of "think small first", which is very much the philosophy we are trying to ingrain right across Whitehall, we want to change the regulatory culture so that we are sitting down with small businesses in the sector or of the kind that are most likely to be affected, at quite an early stage to discuss what is the problem for which a regulatory solution is being proposed; are there better ways of dealing with this problem; and, if regulation is being envisaged, either by our own Government or by the European Union, how can we do this in the most sensible and light touch way possible that gets the results we want without damaging the competitiveness and growth of small firms? The other thing I would mention is that one of the very regular complaints we got from small firms was about the complexity of maternity pay and leave. Most small firms only deal with this once every few years, so they learn to do it once and then forget about it and then it comes along again. It is appalling, if you have ever had to deal with it; it was very complicated. We have radically simplified maternity pay and leave regulation as part of the reform package in the Employment Act that has just gone through. That will come into effect next April. By raising the threshold, in other words by bringing far more small businesses into the net for the 105 per cent rebate we give them on statutory maternity pay, we have actually doubled the number of small businesses which qualify for that enhanced rebate at the same time as we have hugely simplified the administrative burden for them of dealing with an employee on maternity leave.
Ashok Kumar
(Ms Hewitt) That is very helpful feedback. We clearly need to explain it better, and we will think about ways in which we can do that. The Regional Innovation Fund is only one of a whole number of instruments that we have got to drive up innovation and performance within the economy. Some of it, a great deal of it I hope, will be done within regions, led by a regional development agency. Some of that will be done pretty much within an individual region. For instance, we have got at Sheffield an RDA-backed Centre of Metals Excellence, building on the work of the Metallurgy Department at the University of Sheffield, but bringing in Boeing, one of our key inward investors, who came precisely because of the excellence of that university. We now see a centre of excellent with a business park around it and so on. That was very much done within that region and linking the strengths they had within that particular sector and expanding it. There are many other examples of that. In other cases, we have several RDAs working together because a particular industry, a particular sector, may well be important to a number of different regions. One example of that is the Motor Sports sector, which Mr Burden has a particular interest in, which crosses two or three different RDAs. They are now working together with the Motor Sports Panel that I chair to look at what we need to do really to exploit the excellence that we have in that cluster and also fend off some of the threats perhaps to that position. In textiles, we have I think four RDAs collaborating. They all have important textile sectors; they are all interested in the transition to technical textiles and higher value-added goods. Across the piece, we do indeed get all the RDAs working together in order to ensure that they are sharing best practice, they are learning lessons from mistakes, but they are also learning lessons from success, and in particular, they are not reinventing the wheel and they are not setting up isolated initiatives for the same sector where one centre of excellence will do very well and can serve more than one region. As far as the Regional Innovation Fund itself goes, perhaps I should have explained that more clearly, and I am sorry it is not in here, but that has now been absorbed within the single pot that we have given the Regional Development Agencies. Instead of the RDAs having to bid for or use all these different streams of funding, which just made life very complicated and constrained them quite unnecessarily, we have given them the freedom and the increased funding of the single pot, so that they can now, in line with their strategy and in line with the targets they have agreed with us, deploy their resources to what they think is going to be the most important and most effective investment. They will, of course, be accountable for achieving the targets, and we are going through their business plans at the moment. A final point I would make comes back to the national dimension of the innovation strategy. Part of what the Innovation Group and David Hughes and his team will do is to focus on the real breakthrough technologies that are going to transform different sectors and companies in ways that we are only just beginning to imagine. One of those is nanotechnology. We are putting a lot of money behind the exploitation of nanotechnology, with the creation of academic centres of excellence and also the new Nanotechnology Application Centre. Some of the most exciting developments are going on in Britain but, if we do not exploit them in the form of new products and new processes, we will simply miss the boat on the new sources of prosperity.
(Ms Hewitt) Okay.
(Ms Hewitt) It is not this fund that we will be evaluating because we are moving away from having all these different funding streams and all these different schemes and evaluating each one individually, it is just a mess and we have been sorting it out. The way in which we will measure the success of the innovation strategy, which is what matters here, there are a number of different measures. First of all the spin-offs that we get out of the science base. We have seen a huge increase, trebling over the last three years, a massive increase and we want to see that continue to go up. Secondly, we will want to look at the number of existing manufacturing companies who are entering into new partnerships with the science and technology base in order to raise their own rate of innovation. Now we can measure that partly by just looking at the companies and what they are doing but there is a very powerful measure, also, it is in the manufacturing strategy, which is the proportion of revenue for manufacturing companies that comes from products introduced in the last three years. That is a pretty key benchmark. We perform quite poorly compared with the European average. It is a pretty good rule of thumb that our best companies are retiring their old products, they are creating new products and new production processes and we will want to measure that and see if we can get that driven up. Then, obviously, we have touched on much broader issues like inward investment but, in part, our inward investment success will reflect our success in innovation as well.
Mr Djanogly
(Ms Hewitt) Absolutely. The skills issue is an enormous problem and because we have been so successful in bringing unemployment down, we have got a very tight labour market in many parts of the country, it is a real challenge to employers very often to get the skilled people whom they need. Now what I find in my own visits to manufacturers is that they hugely welcome and many of them are using modern apprenticeships. I think we are getting very good feedback on the modern apprenticeships programme. What we need to do, of course, is to drive up the numbers of people going into modern apprenticeships so that it becomes really a very big part of the route for young people who are not going on to university. Certainly we have got more to do there, which of course DfES is in the lead on. As far as schools go, as you know we have been looking at the whole of the 14 to 19 curriculum because as a country for a very long time we have been much, much better at the academic track than at the vocational track. They were going on about this 150 years ago and we do not want them going on about it for in another 150 years' time.
(Ms Hewitt) There are.
(Ms Hewitt) Well, I do not accept that for a minute. I see it in my own disadvantaged council estate neighbourhoods where nobody in those schools has ever gone to university. Then you meet people, as it were the older generation from those estates, who through adult learning opportunities have got degrees. I was at Jaguar yesterday and they were talking about this very issue. The plant manager was saying "What we are putting in place is a system which will enable a shop floor worker to go right through to a masters degree and, indeed, for that matter, to PhD level as well." They have shop floor workers who never got the chance to go to university when they were at school who have now got degree level qualifications. There is a huge wealth of unused talent in this country which has frankly not been used because of our past system. Of course those people should be going to university and we should be celebrating the fact that we are getting far more of them to university now but we have to be equally good at the vocational route and creating the technically qualified people because that missing middle is one of the very big reasons for our productivity and prosperity gap. That is very well illustrated I think in the table in the strategy. As David Miliband said recently we have still got a lot more left to do on this 14 to 19 curriculum reform. That work is in hand, there is still a long way to go.
(Ms Hewitt) Yes, of course we are, just as we have been working with the Department for Education on links between business and schools because what we have, as the Howard Davies review showed very clearly, is a plethora of schemes - often very, very good, there is some wonderful practice going on in these schools - but it is patchy and it is inconsistent. We need to build more effective relationships so that every school is welcoming business into a school, it is forging those relationships which in turn means that young people, particularly through good quality work experience, can see the job opportunities, including the job opportunities in manufacturing, that are out there and then pursue an appropriate route to the qualifications that they need. I do welcome the fact also that as well as DfES and ourselves and Treasury we have got a growing number of businesses partnering with us and doing some very innovative things. Transco, for instance, particularly in Reading, have found it impossible to get gas fitters and they are desperate for gas fitters. This is a matter of some concern for safety reasons as well. What they have done is to create a partnership within that community where they get youngsters who have effectively dropped out of school and embarked on a life of possibly lucrative crime and they are taking them through the New Deal and through a training programme with a guarantee of a job at the end if they qualify. The starting rate for that gas fitter job is £22,000 a year. As the Chairman said, it is enough to get them off drugs and drug dealing.
(Ms Hewitt) Absolutely.
(Ms Hewitt) Yes, I do not think we have settled on the publication date but my own Department is involved very closely in that and we are building on the work the Strategy Unit did on Workforce Development. We have a very direct interest in it, both from the point of view of businesses that are being held back and from the point of view of Business Link who of course deliver programmes like Investors in People for a number of SMEs.
(Ms Hewitt) Thank you for that invitation. We certainly live in interesting times. Starting with your very first point, a relatively minor issue, as far as BNFL is concerned we pursue a very deliberate policy of leaving the management to get on with running the company. We made it very clear to BNFL during the summer and the earlier negotiations with British Energy that BNFL and its board should take a view on what was in the commercial interests of BNFL as a company and in doing that I believe we were acting properly as a shareholder, not trying to second guess management or run the company on a day-to-day basis but preserving the interests of the shareholder, in other words taxpayers. The same goes for continuing discussions between BNFL and British Energy. As far as the Climate Change Levy goes, as I said recently we have no plans to exempt nuclear power from the Climate Change Levy. The whole policy rationale for the Climate Change Levy was set out very extensively, indeed when I was Economic Secretary at the Treasury, for the introduction of the Climate Change Levy. It is absolutely designed to encourage investment in new good quality renewable plant. The much larger issues about carbon tax, the European Emissions Trading Scheme and so on, are all, of course, issues that we are looking at for the Energy White Paper which will come out at the turn of the year. We are looking at these very large issues but they are not being driven by the particular events at British Energy. As far as British Energy is concerned, and as you rightly say this is a sensitive issue, I decided to give a very significant financial facility to British Energy for two very simple reasons. One is because I have the responsibility as Secretary of State of ensuring that nuclear generation remains safe, a responsibility that of course I share with the regulators, and I also have responsibility as Secretary of State jointly with the regulator, with OFGEM, for maintaining security of electricity supplies. British Energy cannot, therefore, be treated just like any other energy company, as some were urging us to do, because on the one hand it has nuclear power stations and we have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of those stations and, secondly, because it is generating, supplying, some 20 per cent of the total electricity market, so there are significant security of supply issues there. We decided for that reason to put in place a short-term loan, initially for four weeks while we entered into discussions with them, and then, as I announced recently, extended until 29 November to secure those two objectives of safety and security of supply and to put in place or to make the initial decisions on the longer term restructuring plan. I do not at this stage know what those decisions are going to be, we still have some weeks of intensively hard work to go, but obviously before 29 November when the current facility runs out I will be asking the Speaker's permission to make a full statement to the House on this subject. Of course, Brian will be delighted to come along and discuss all that in detail with you. Let me stress that this is a facility that we have put in place. We have not handed over taxpayers' cash to the company. We have put in place a facility and we have put in place extremely tough controls on the use of that facility so that our accountancy advisors, Deloitte & Touche, actually check any use of that facility. Quite a bit of it is being used simply for counter-party guarantees so that British Energy can continue to trade on meter because otherwise parts of our electricity supply would cease. Where there is a question of paying invoices, for instance, all of that is checked by us before funds are released from the special account that has been set up to handle the funds. This is not a question of my signing a single cheque for a frighteningly large sum of money and then leaving the company to get on with spending it, it is nothing of the kind. In addition, of course, both originally and when we extended the facility we succeeded in taking security over the assets of the companies involved, the holding company and the various subsidiaries, to ensure that we became the number one creditor in the queue of creditors that are involved in this situation.
(Ms Hewitt) No, I regret to say, Chairman, that it would not. They are commercially confidential and it would be up to British Energy to decide whether it wishes to make the details public. If there are further detailed questions that the Committee has on the issue of controls or how we are protecting taxpayers' interests then I will be very happy to do a separate note and to give you as much information as we can without breaching the commercial confidentiality or damaging the commercial position of a company that is continuing to trade.
Chairman: We may well take that up. We will have to discuss that. We are grateful for the qualified response which you have given us to that question. We would like to move on briefly to employer liability and insurance. We would like, if we have time, to touch on the Post Office and company pension schemes.
Mr Lansley
(Ms Hewitt) I think we would say we have got a two-fold interest. One is obviously to ensure that there is a competitive and well functioning market in the supply of insurance to employers and companies. The other is to ensure that the business voice is heard loud and clear in the discussions and in the review that is going on and that is why we are working so closely with the Treasury on this matter. I am sure that every Member of this Committee has had the experience that I have had in my own constituency, as well as the conversations I have had as Secretary of State, with companies who are facing the most appalling increases in their insurance premia. Unfortunately this reflects some very large difficulties in the insurance market that will no doubt be compounded by the events of the weekend and the claims to which that is going to give rise, the storm that we have had. It is very difficult in the insurance market at the moment. We are very concerned about what is happening to companies but, of course, because it is financial services it is a matter on which the Treasury leads and we are simply working very closely with them to see what, if anything, can be done.
Chairman: If it happened in some industries that would be called cross subsidisation.
(Ms Hewitt) I think the problem that we have got is, first of all, one very large insurance company has gone out of business, secondly the insurance companies have been affected, as many others have been, by the downturn of the stock market, thirdly in some sectors there has been a very significant increase in claims and fourthly, a lot of the insurers are reporting a general increase in claims and in litigation. All of that is being reflected in various proportions for different companies and different sectors in the rise in the premiums that employers are facing now.
Mr Lansley
(Ms Hewitt) That is true, certainly. Fundamentally here we are looking at the financial health of the companies as well as the number of companies who are competing in this market. Of course a number of employers are finding that their broker, however hard they try, can only get one company to give them a quote.
(Ms Hewitt) No. I think there are some real issues there.
(Ms Hewitt) Of course we are looking at that. As I said we are doing it with the Treasury which has to look at the overall state of the insurance market but we are concerned also about the overall state of the market because it is very clear, or at least the story we are hearing from more and more employers is that competition is not working in some sectors of this market and they find themselves trapped or simply reliant on only one company which is prepared to offer that particular company in that particular sector employers' liability insurance and the price is a 200-300 per cent, whatever, increase in the premium. There is a real concern there and we are trying to get to the bottom of it and see what appropriate action might be.
Chairman: Doubtless we will return to this issue but we have a couple more questions. Roger.
Mr Berry
(Ms Hewitt) We are making good progress on the universal bank, in fact rather than use that phase "universal bank" I think it would be more accurate to talk about banking at post offices. This has really got three strands to it. One is the basic bank account, which we have got all the banks signed up to effectively, and of course it is inherent in the basic bank account that it is accessible at the post office and that agreement has been reached with all the banks concerned. That is the basic bank account. Then we have the Post Office card account which the Post Office itself will be launching before April of next year. Then we have also ordinary current accounts which for many banks, not all banks but many banks, can also be used at the post office so you can draw your cash out and pay your cheques in, do your banking using a regular current account at the post office. The introduction of ATMs into 3,000 post offices in the fastest roll out of ATMs that has ever been done makes it easier for even more customers to do a significant part of their banking at post offices. All three routes to banking at the post office will not only generate direct payments, transaction payments, to the sub post masters and mistresses but will help also to keep up the foot fall that they rely on to buy the other products that they are selling in those shops.
Mr Berry: I think given the time I will leave it there.
Sir Robert Smith
(Ms Hewitt) We will make an announcement on that very, very soon. I am afraid I cannot pre-empt it this afternoon but it will be good news for rural post offices and particularly rural communities.
Linda Perham
(Ms Hewitt) This is an enormous issue and obviously a very complicated issue as we look at how Government, employers and individuals share the whole challenge of making proper pension provision in a time when life expectancy is growing really very rapidly and, particularly for men, working lives have been shortened. There are a number of issues there and of course we are working very closely with Andrew Smith and his team who are in the lead on this issue. We will address a lot of those issues, I think, in the Green Paper that Andrew will be publishing later this year. Of course we are looking at how this particular issue of occupational pensions fits within the employment relationship as a whole but are very conscious of the fact that we have to balance here the objective of getting a good pension provision and adequate savings levels for people's retirement against imposing excessive burdens on business. It is an issue that we are looking at very carefully but of course I am aware of what the TUC and others have been saying on the collective bargaining issue.
Linda Perham: I shall wait for the Green Paper.
(Ms Hewitt) Thank you, Chairman, for the opportunity. I cannot give you the whole figure at the moment because we are still working on it but when we counted all the schemes we did find about 186/183, a very large number. Rather than simply look at which of those we can cut off we have actually started from a blank sheet of paper and said "What are the objectives here? What are the ways in which we can help companies become more productive and more successful? What is it appropriate for us to be doing?" Then we will simply put in place much simpler ways of delivering to those objectives. That new system will gradually replace all of those existing schemes. What we are doing, by using the evaluation that has been done on many, not all but many of those schemes, we can really build on what works so that, for instance, on something like the Smart Scheme, which has been hugely successful, grants to companies, to small firms to prototype new products, that has been responsible for the survival and growth of many world beating manufacturing companies that we have got now, we are going to keep the essence of Smart but it will become something much bigger.
The team that I have got working on this have been making fantastic progress and, again, I expect to make an announcement on that certainly before Christmas. I would be delighted to come back and share the details of that with you but I will certainly, if I may, accept your invitation to write to you with the details as soon as I make that announcement.
(Ms Hewitt) I shall look forward to it. Thank you very much.


text:
As he proposes an 8 percent cut in Miami-Dade's police payroll, Mayor Carlos Gimenez repeatedly notes the reductions won't affect patrol officers.
"You're going to have the same number of police officers on the street as you do today," he said in a recent interview. "This is a department of over 3,000 cops. You really can't tell me you see 3,000 cops on the street everyday. A lot of them are behind desks."
A look at the numbers behind the mayor's austerity plan shows many of the targeted desk jobs belong to plainclothes investigators charged with solving crimes. The county's budget office reports that of the roughly 230 police-officer positions slated for elimination, about half can be considered either investigators or officers assigned to work cases.
The spreadsheet used to tally the department's job cuts lays out the reductions in the county's investigator ranks: 10 from the economic-crimes unit, 17 each from the robbery unit and the domestic-violence unit, and 35 from the drug-and-gangs unit.
"This is what he calls desk jobs," John Rivera, head of the county's police union, said of Gimenez. "They sit at a desk part of the time. Because they're doing computer work. Then they're out on the street."
The proposed police cuts offer some of the most emotional fodder to critics of Gimenez's $6.2 billion budget, which faces a key vote Tuesday before county commissioners. Gimenez proposed a collection of fee increases and service cuts that would allow Miami-Dade to keep property-tax rates flat, and commissioners are slated to vote on whether to raise the county's tax ceiling in order to allow for higher rates.
Commissioners are under pressure from unions, library advocates, charity-grant recipients and others to overrule Gimenez and lift the county's current ceiling on tax rates.
Gimenez and his allies portray the debate as a false choice, with the proposed cuts avoidable if unions agree to concessions during ongoing labor negotiations. Gimenez's budget proposes eliminating 674 jobs across the county bureaucracy, layoffs he said are needed only if Miami-Dade absorbs a series of union benefits set to automatically kick in when the next budget year begins Oct. 1.
The so-called "snap-back" benefits would cost $113 million for 2015, with $40 million coming from departments largely funded by property taxes, according to budget estimates. Gimenez also wants unions to agree to new healthcare plans that bring down the county's overall healthcare costs by 15 percent.
"The budget I proposed last week was a worst-case scenario, and I don't support the worst-case scenario," Gimenez told reporters gathered outside his 29th-floor office at County Hall. "I hope the commission gives a clear signal to our labor unions that they are firm and they don't want our services cut."
On the eve of Tuesday's meeting at downtown Miami's Stephen P. Clark government center, Commissioner Lynda Bell released a statement slamming the idea of raising taxes. "We must put an end to the culture of entitlement created by labor leaders,'' she said. To solve Miami-Dade's budget woes, "public servants should be treated no differently than any other hard-working taxpayer who receives a well-earned salary and benefits. No more no less."
Commissioners are slated to set six different property-tax rates that generate more than $1 billion of Miami-Dade's $6 billion budget. Four rates fund operations: one for countywide services, one just for unincorporated Miami-Dade, and one each for the fire and library departments. Another two fund bond payments for county debt approved by voters, which is scheduled to cost an additional $1 billion next year.
The first four rates are up for debate, with the debt-service taxes considered automatic. Gimenez proposed slight reductions in the countywide and fire rates, with a corresponding increase in the library tax to ease a looming funding crisis in the system. Library advocates want a higher tax to boost the current $50 million budget to $64 million, while fire and police unions are balking at the plan to siphon even a little bit of revenue from their agencies to libraries.
While tax rates would stay flat in the Gimenez budget, fees paid by residents would increase. Among the proposed increases: boosting transit fares by 25 cents to $2.50 per ride; charging $35 for vaccinations currently free at the county's animal shelter, and imposing lot fees at some parks where parking is free.
As Miami-Dade's largest department, police were bound to take a large hit in any budget-cutting exercise. In all, the department's 4,000-position payroll would shrink 8 percent, with a loss of 87 civilian workers and 228 officers. Of those officers, 115 are considered investigators or officers working to solve cases, according to a summary provided by the county's budget office.
The cuts come from Gimenez's push to pare down the county's specialized investigative units, and transfer their case load to investigators assigned to general duties in the various precincts around Miami-Dade. But department administrators predict consequences from the proposed investigator cuts.
With a loss of 17 investigators, the county's Special Victims unit forecasts delays in interviewing witnesses and hold-ups in assisting social workers who relocate victims of domestic violence, according to internal budget documents. The unit handles cases related to sex abuse, domestic violence and child welfare. The robbery unit claims success in "combating violent felonies" and "it is likely that such incidents would increase with these reductions," department administrators wrote in the budget summary.
While average police response to emergencies is forecast to increase to 8 minutes from this year's budget of 6 minutes and 45 seconds, the non-emergency response time more than doubles, from 13 minutes to 30 minutes next year.
Acting Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez called the proposed cuts a worst-case scenario that "we can't afford."
"Nobody wants their house broken into, and it taking a detective twice as long to look into it," he said. "Hopefully something can be resolved. We can' afford this."
At his Monday press conference, Gimenez noted that none of the county's special-investigative units would be disbanded under his plan, but their ranks would be reduced. And he criticized Rivera, the union chief, for using fears over public safety to make the case for what Gimenez characterized as a compensation play.
"Mr. Rivera wants you to pay more so he can put more money into his members' pockets," he said. "We can have all of those investigators back … simply by extending the concessions and reducing the cost of healthcare."