Access Key Details
Revenue and Customs || Office of Fair Trading ||
UK DirectGov || UK Dept for Transport
Mental capacity and Powers of Attorney are dealt with by the Office of the Public Guardian, whose website has been closed (2011) to save money, but useful content is now on DirectGov where this link will take you.
UK Government News Distribution Service index of Government
press releases.
Official UK Inflation figures are well hidden from September 2011, here are direct links to the annualised change in some indices-
CPI - CPI (also called HICP) is the new euro standard that ignores housing, and uses price geometric mean instead of arithmetic mean, which yields a lower result (can be dramatically lower) than the arithmetic mean used by all other measures below. This usage assumes that the consumer will shop at the lowest price available, and that the lowest prices are widely available.
RPI- RPI (series CZBH) is the old cost of living index
RPIX -RPIX (series CDKQ) is the one that ignores mortgage interest.
RPIY (series CBZX) ignores mortgage interest rates and indirect taxation (vat, excise)
If you want brief UK company info, go directly to the Company Search page of Companies House. Search for disqualified directors. For help with queries about what a Limited Company is and how it is supposed to work, they have lots of info in HTML and PDF format at Guidance booklets
The Official U K Statistics. Note that from August 2011, as part of the move to open standards (NOT), an increasing number of datasets are being (i) well hidden and (ii) restricted to a commercial format and will not be available in a browser viewable format. The new 2011 web site seems to have a number of coding errors, poor layout and almost invisible stats. The disappearance of some stats is probably due to developer and management incompetance rather than political censorship. Our government openly seeks to increase the use of internet services by departments, but then fails to ensure that content is available, accessible, locatable.
Still available is one elderly book- Living in Britain (last issue was 2002, released 2004)- 900k pdf file.
Recent house sale prices, housing and neighborhood data from Mouseprice.com.
If you live in England, own freehold domestic premises, and pay a chief rent (aka rentcharge) you may find yourself faced with one of a half dozen companies who are out to get money off you by purchasing your charge and then making up very high charges and demanding them from you. They will offer to sell you the rent but at a vastly inflated charge. There is a legal scheme to cancel the rent charge (and all restrictions connected with it) operated by the government. The typical cost is around 15 times the annual rent. All rents will be cancelled automatically around August 2037. The relevant Act is the Rentcharges Act 1977, which prevented the creation of new charges and enabled the cancellation in due course of existing charges. As the information on this is not readily available on the internet, here are the contact details effective from April 2011 following government departmental reorganisation:
National Rentcharge Unit Manager,
Department for Communities and Local Government,
4th Floor, One Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester M1 1RG
Tel: 0303 4444558 (local rate call).
Note that "ground rents" paid by an owner of leasehold property, and management charges paid by apartment owners are not included.
The Financial Services Authority used to have a very clear and useful web site about all financial matters (redundancy, retirement, credit, saving, tax - lots!) that has now apparently been outsourced as part of our governments deliberate removal of helpful internet information. The FSA now link to an apparently independent web site which has struggled a little with its coding, and has links that invisibly go to other domains (use of whole page framesets), some pages may actually require javascript. With a health warning, look at Money Advice Service but DO NOT rely solely on the rate comparison tables, do your own research too.
More secure and sometimes more useful patient information is available from a commercial body that supplies leaflets for GP surgeries- Patient.co.uk.
Mathematics can be fun. Martin Gardner, Clifford Pickover, David Singmaster- mathematicians that have kept me amused. On the internet, an excellent pot pourri of recreational maths can be found at Mathpuzzle.
Copyright? or Copyleft? An interesting article on intellectual property rights.
A remarkable book by a talented decorator is "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" written way back in 1911 the subject material is ludicrously current. RTP is freely available on line - from Project Gutenberg as Text, HTML, Epub, Mobipocket and Plucker; and from the Trades Union Congress, the owners of the manuscript, have the Gutenberg text alongside the page images of the handwritten MSS - with the text fully searchable.
So far I've stayed well away from politics, but with some extraordinary pro-government propaganda going unchallenged, time to ask you to read from some alternative sources please. The following web sites are all worth looking at - note that I do not agree with all they say, but they have the right to say it and to have their views considered. In no particular order. .
Labourstart, links to external news articles. | |
Coalition of resistance against cuts and privatisation.
Trades Union Congress the annual gathering of all unions. || BigBrotherWatch- every minute detail of what you do watched?