The news that parts of Wales have the highest number of mortgage repossession claims in Britain is a sure sign that the Welsh Government must review the rules and the funding of their flagship mortgage rescue scheme.
Fewer people in the UK are now expected to lose their homes this year after a decline in repossessions in June, but Rhondda Cynon Taf, Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil top the league table of mortgage repossessions, highlighting that this is still a major problem in Wales.
The £9 million mortgage rescue scheme put in place by the Welsh Government has exhausted its funding less than halfway through the financial year and although an additional £2 million has been found for it, the new rules that have been put in place mean that very few people will now be eligible for help.
New criteria states that the applicant (or a member of the household) must have a disability and that their home must have been adapted before they can benefit from it. Yet, information from the Welsh Government reveals that only 16 of the 336 approved applications since 2008 would have met the new criteria leaving open the prospect of a huge underspend on the new money whilst families have their homes repossessed.
This extra money has been an empty gesture from the Welsh Government,” said Mr. Black. “People with adapted homes may need support, but so do many other struggling families. The new narrow eligibility criteria means that money will be sat unused when families are facing homelessness.
There needs to be a fundamental rethink by the Welsh Government as to how this scheme operates and how much money is put into it. It is unacceptable for this £2 million to remain unspent whilst families are losing their homes and it is wrong that such an important scheme has to be frozen so early in the financial year when there is such need for it.
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Excellent points raised by Peter Black AM; Wales needs more help dealing with repossessions.
But at the heart of this problem are jobs; good paying jobs in Wales or rather a lack of them.
As noted many times now, Wales is sitting on a job-creation machine so huge yet still largely untapped.
As noted by Prof. Dylan Jones-Evans, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has fewer students than Cardiff University (CU) and thousands fewer students than CU and Swansea University combined, has had great success in generating jobs and businesses: “… its (MIT) success in commercialising research is unrivalled globally. For example, it has been estimated the 25,800 currently active companies founded by MIT alumni employ about 3.3 million people and generate annual global sales of £1.5 trillion, producing the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world.” (Nov 21 2009 by Dylan Jones-Evans, Western Mail.)
Simply translated MIT has produced more jobs than the number of adults in Wales and yet MIT has fewer postgraduates than Cardiff University.
How so?
Because the foundation of commercialization at MIT is patent protection; with patents MIT secures inward investment – venture capitalists obviously are very reluctant to invest their money into projects that lack patent protection. Only daft idiots do that – and WAG comes to mind as they have pumped money into Sir Martin Evan’s new company (CT) even though CT has no issued patents on adult stem cell technology and has, I believe, failed to carry out due diligence before parting with public taxpayers money; specifically, did not carry out an IP audit as part of due-diligence, the bioscience sector is IP rich, so investing in parts that lack IP is nuttier than a nutty fruit cake, but that seems to be WAG’s policy of late.
Swansea’s ILS (Institute of Life Sciences) has a supercomputer – how many issued patents has that huge investment in hardware generated for Wales? As far as I can tell, ILS has no issued patents in the largest market for patented goods and services in the world (USA).
As noted by Simon Gibson: (chief executive of hi-tech venture capital investment company Wesley Clover): “… it is great ideas and companies that should come first and not investment in buildings – with the hope of then attracting IP rich companies.” (“Top civil servants and Techniums in the firing line”; Jul 23 2010 by Sion Barry, Western Mail.)
A research group at MIT made came up with some great ideas of fast-tracking recharging batteries like car and cell phone batteries, they used computer simulations to discover modifying lithium ion batteries in a certain way vastly improves recharging times. The scientist who heads up this group did what? Oh, he filed with MIT help at least one meaningful patent. How do I know? Well it’s a reasonable assumption given that he has already filed several patents on his inventions.
This recharging improvement, while very important is not as profound at the discoveries made by the father of embryonic stem cell research (Sir Martin Evans) who failed to put his name on a meaningful patent, and just like the MABs (monoclonal antibodies), a British discovery that was not patent protected led to loss of an enormous job creating engine. MAB production is worth billions worldwide, companies like Abbott Labs in the USA have made boosted their profits based on specific MABs that they could manufacture (and patent) without having to cross-license with a British holder of the MABs pioneering patent, because there was no meaningful patent filed by the British publically sponsored team and guess what, the NHS ended up paying a lot of money to use the patent protected specific MABs for detecting specific diseases in patients such as glandular fever “Mono”.
As noted previously by the likes of Simon Gibson, Wales is sitting on a gold mine of IP. Meaning, Wales is sitting on a job creation engine but for lack of leadership to tap that fantastic resource.
If MIT with fewer postgrads can generate such enormous job creation numbers – why can’t Wales that needs just half of that number and yet has far more postgrads can’t ‘get it on’?
The answer lies with WAG, and especially with the Deputy First Minister, Ieuan Wyn Jones who also heads-up Wales’s Department of the Economy and Transport – the economy bit is under investigation, e.g., Technium.