Foreign aid budget is about £15bn of which the home office spends about £4bn on refugees in the UK.
As for pension credit the government is frequently running campaigns to get people to claim it. I’m not sure there is a way to know who qualifies until the claim is made.
Turns out it was 4 times before he realised they were all laughing at him.
Embarrassing
Yeah not great but Sunak also claimed they left the economy in a “robust position”
They laughed at that as well.
I’m really not a fan of how the uk does politics and ultimately how it governs itself. I’m becoming @cynicaloldgit mk2
I worked in fire resistance testing for many years. Never saw a test jimmied, Standard altered, testing method conveniently written or fundamental physics blatantly ignored. Nope, never.
“A” problem is that every rated product can’t be tested in every situation. For example a fire door. They’re rated by time by being built into an 3m2 frame in a fire resistance furnace that’s then driven through a specific time/temp curve (depending on the standard) with all temps and propagation monitored. Great. Standard test for a standard product. But in the real world, what’s in the room? A sofa? A bed? Carpet? Tile? Wallpaper? Granted this is internal not external but the same’s true for cladding. How it performs in a standard test should be known but unless you test it in every single installation, you can’t know for sure. And you can’t because every installation is different because of the changes in the actual building.
Worked on a project once where a 3 bed detached building was built 3 times with 3 different furnishing types. My advice? Be really REALLY careful with sources of ignition near a 3 piece foam couch 
Please don’t. Fight the urge. One is more than enough.
It’s worth seeing the report, because there has been dishonesty all round.
Kingspan is the market leader and they have a product called K15 which supposedly fire resistant to a standard that could be used but in reality was not suitable for this use.
Celotex is a rival firm that had tried to compete and sold a similar board that they claimed was fire resistant, but this only passed the test when used with fire-resistant magnesium oxide boards. This information was not passed on to the contractor.
Additionally there were two similar fires in Dubai which the Arconic, who made the panels, knew about but didn’t change their products.
All of this comes down to people doing things on the cheap, and this is rife in the UK construction industry. I suspect that, for the most part, they know that they will get away with things because fires like these are rare. It’s just that when they do occur, the results are catastrophic. Safety standards are there for a reason.
Yep. That and inept politicians.
I saw a series of tests on a door set that first lasted well over the required time. They cheapened the design several times to get it to last 31 minutes. Business is business.
There is an old saying that, “When a metric becomes a target it fails to be a good metric.”
Absolutely correct. The shocker for me was involvement of the BBA. When specifying materials a BBA cert was certainly one thing you’d look for and trust.
Eric Pickles should get at least a custodial sentence for this
I still unfortunately smoke. I have not been able to kill the habit yet. Its not something I like to talk about really.
I would also like to be able to drink a beer and smoke, of course, everyone does. A confined area outside a pub with some warmth is very nice imo, and does not harm others.
However your easy solution is a very bad one. Back when there was smoking wagons on trains, do you think smokers prefered to sit in those for long journeys over an hour ? No, very often smokers entered the smoking wagon, sat there for a couple of smokes or more and then left to the non-smoking wagon. This is just not a personal anecdote, it was regarded as typical, at least in my country. Even smokers don’t enjoy sitting in a sour smoking wagon for very many hours if its too smokey. If its too confined, the smoke gets too uncomfortable tick even for smokers and if its too ventilated its gets too cold.
To demand of smokers that they are subjected to tick smoke absolutely all the time isn’t particularly kind. Its not as easy as if “either you smoke or not”. Degree of smoke is an issue even for smokers, as are the health related problems caused by it…
Have anyone told you that you have a tendency to pander very easy solutions for most political issues which may not work as well as you might think, if you sit down and think through actual consequences and include nuances? I think you have such a tendency.
I am afraid it’s symptomatic of modern business. Bend the rules, no integrity in order to make money. All the talk about purpose and social impact goes out of the window when shareholders call or it’s bonus time.
I know I have been a partner in a major management consultancy for years.
The language is nonsense, the intent skewed. I am all for free market but with integrity.
I cerainly question whether theres any integrity left in construction now after this. How can any designer specify something now? The whole system has been undermined.
I’m wondering if this is a serious post. I remember being a smoker in pubs that were absolutely thick which was fucking ace as I loved smoking. Everybody came home stinking of it. I’m advocating the ability for any pub to be the same again if they choose, just have a big sign outside. Your story might be of your experience but in mine in England, every club and pub at night was a solid cloud.
As for easy solutions, you might not like them but everything has an easy solution. Ask Thanos.
Oh my…
https://x.com/Eyeswideopen69/status/1831459090729726249?t=S3-uoUcvlXO3Yu68bXXUiA&s=19
The state of the right-wing media in the UK is deadset un-fucking-believeable.