Freesteel

A complete waste of time was had one morning recently, following a Decision Notice document dump that came through the post shortly before we set off for France.

The government wants to improve the structure and development in the national high-tech economy, which it knows is dysfunctional on account of there being so many successful and utterly incompetent large businesses, while at the same time small competent businesses that should grow and displace them are not able to survive.

Hint: why not stop giving huge failing contracts to these big businesses, and break them up into a scale where it can be done by small suppliers, like it says in the manifesto?

Instead, what the government did was consult with the experts in business capital finance who are responsible for the situation, and they persuaded them to bail them out with a public subsidy on the basis of what they called the equity gap.

My interpretation of the logic is as follows:

• Only companies above a certain size of £x millions are able to thrive — for various reasons, such as the unnecessary largeness of government contracts, the need to support a legal team probably larger than the programming team, and so forth
• The only way a new company could expand to that critical size is through capital investment of at least £y millions, because doing business at a smaller size was not an option.
• However, the venture capital industry is only willing to put money into companies of a certain size of at least £z millions, because they need to live off a healthy cut of the business.
• So there is an equity gap between the value of the entrepreneur selling their own house for £0.q millions and £min(x, z) millions which creates a barrier that protects the larger companies from any effective competition.

The answer was, among a lot of other programmes, Capital for Enterprise staffed entirely by people from the finance industry. I learnt about it only when Vero Software got bailed out by a benefactor of this fund.

I read up about some of the bureaucratic arrangements in the programme and found this part of the guidance.

Hm. I wonder what these Investee Summary Sheets look like, and what they’re doing with them?

Apparently nothing. They wouldn’t give me any. And the Information Commissioner concurred that they shouldn’t give me any.

Also, the ICO confirmed on the record that There Is No Database:

The National Audit Office made a report last year, with the summary:

“These venture capital funds help small, often innovative, businesses that otherwise may have struggled. And there is evidence that some businesses have benefited from this support. But, in the absence of clear objectives and baselines from the start, coupled with poor financial performance to date of early funds, the Department’s programme cannot currently be said to demonstrate value for money. Finally, there is no information publicly available about the funds. BIS should be more transparent, without compromising confidentiality.”

It’s worth reading the report which confirms my evidence that the Department is not even internally conducting any analysis whatsoever about how all their bailed out venture capital companies are performing, in terms of extracting bloated fees, or their habit of overlooking viable businesses on the basis of their bogus financial models — hence the whole nonsense about the equity gap.

At the very least, they should be capturing enough information to prove or disprove the truth of the equity gap myth, and whether this intervention is actually filling it — if it exists.

So, the Investee Summary Sheets are filed in a box somewhere and completely ignored. And no one is allowed to see them.

What are the “Findings of Fact”:

Oh, an Information sheet — JUST FOR ME!

How exciting.

I can’t wait to see what it looks like:

Hm. That’s not very informative.

And the reason why no one is allowed to see any of these Investee Summary Sheets is…

So, to be clear, if the ECF decides in their infinite wisdom that a company who has applied for funding is not up to the job of accepting investment, this determination should be kept secret in the commercial interests of the that company in case they are able to con money out of some other investor who would otherwise be more wary of parting with their money if only they knew.

In other words, the ECF are saying that they want people to put money into companies they know are bad investments.

Either that, or they don’t want their investment decisions ever to be scrutinized. Because, as we well know, the business itself perfectly well knows what’s what; it’s all passing around the grape vine among the same crowd of people; because when an application from a company lands on your desk, you will of course ring round your colleagues to see if anyone has heard of it; and they will tell you; that’s how business gets done; and if one of your friends who is acting as an agent for that company has polished it into a professional standard application, so much the better.

Anyhow, just to draw this to a close, the logic obviously doesn’t apply to companies that we do know have applied.

Accordingly:

Please can I be sent:

1) A copy of the Investee Summary Sheet for Vero Software plc, as disclosed in its loan agreement press release 2009-12-04.

2) A copy of the Investee Summary Sheet for Documentric, as disclosed in an article dated 2009-09-29.

3) A copy of the Investee Summary Sheet for Qire, as disclosed in a press release on 2010-06-01.

4) A copy of the Investee Summary Sheet for Monumental Games, as disclosed in a press release dated 2009-12-16.

5) The number of Investee Summary Sheets that have been received by ECF in 2009 (the year of establishment), 2010 and 2011.

6) The name of Capital for Enterprise Fund portfolio company described in Paragraph 33 of the Notice, which suffered adverse publicity resulting in a noticeable aversion by investee companies.

Reverend Billy made an appearance in Martin’s street!

I encountered this guy when he came to Liverpool in 2003 and caused people to do a shopping intervention in the local John Lewis store.

Big stuff going on back home while I mince around on silly bike rides and caving trips in the south of France.

Too much to do. Too little gets done to make any difference. Life just whips by.

Went to Berlin for the last week of June to OKCON 2011 to give a ScraperWiki talk about how it can solve all your open data conversion needs.

Foolishly, I took the hard seat option on the train from Cologne to Berlin, which was a harsh night. I was unable to upgrade it on the way back, so faced another night in a bolt upright seat in a six person cabin next to some chinese women telling me to put my shoes back on because my feet were too smelly. Smelly feet is a sign of discomfort, and with just about every other part of the body in uproar by 3 o’clock in the morning, so the shoes were coming off inevitably. At my age I’ve lost my youthful flexibility so every contorted posture in a seat attempting to get my head down on its side results in ligaments and joints setting like dry wood ready to snap when I try to bend them back.

At 6am in Cologne train station I got surrounded by police who wanted to see my passport — as they explained — for no reason whatsoever.
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I have had some long running FOI disputes about the handling of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) because they are pointlessly kept confidential, unlike the amount you paid for your house, the name of your mortgage company, or any planning applications you have taken out on your property.

My campaign took a turn when I went to an afternoon talk by Luciana Berger MP about government climate change policy and what was going on with the new Energy Bill. I read the text of the Bill off my phone while the meeting was getting going.

Bingo!

Here is Clause 73:

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Cross-posted from ElectionLeaflet blog where there are some interesting angry comments. An FOI request has been made to the Electoral Commission to see if they can account for their policy.

I cannot put into words how pissed off I am with the FPTP electoral system which requires me to choose between wasting my vote on the candidate I like, or casting it for the second most disagreeable candidate on the ballot sheet knowing that it will be counted as an endorsement for every rotten policy they stand for.

For me, the Alternative Vote referendum was a brief ray of hope before it was buried under a land-fill of lies — not helped by the mind-blowing incompetence of the Yes campaign whose organizers and paymasters (who chose those organizers) should hunted down and pilloried.

I am so disappointed.

I thought to myself yesterday: “Sod this. The FPTP system offends me so much I am just going to vote as though I had an alternative vote by numbering my preferences on the ballot form.”

Then I’m going down to the overnight Count to see what the Government does with my vote.

I thought I was going to be the only fool in the country to carry out such a stupid idea.

Turns out loads of people had done it. There were ballots with numbers on them in the spoil tray for every single ward across Liverpool City. I don’t doubt it was the same everywhere else in the country.

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May as well copy here the words I sweated over from my submission before they take it off-line or something. I’ll bet this years winners are even more amazing than last years’.

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As you would expect from the background of the NoToAV campaign director, Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, it’s going to be about shameless misrepresentations of costs in order to distract attention away from any of the substantive advantages.

Oliver Wright of the Independent spotted these discrepancies last month, but the ads are still going up.

I’m going to refer directly to the source document put out by the NoToAV campaign.

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Photo dated 21 February, Bold Street, Liverpool. My dad getting his feet cleaned by fish.

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Everyone is overwhelmed by the new police crime mapper this morning, which cost £300,000 to develop, according to the BBC.

Readers with a memory of more than a hamster will recall the announcement in January 2009 where all the police forces had made their own individual crime mappers.

And how I *reported* that the Metropolitan police had spend £300,000 on their single force version, including £134,000 for AKAMI facility for web-hits to be ‘held’ at high use times so that the website didn’t crash when it was launched, because they had so little confidence in their contractors Cable&Wireless to deliver a functioning website for the money.

Their website http://maps.met.police.uk/ is at least still in operation.

In October 2009 I *reported* on the National crime mapper technology launched that day by the Policing and Crime Minister David Hanson:

BBC: So the scheme is this on-line crime mapping is obviously popular, it keeps crashing
Hanson: Yes it is popular. We’ve had an enormous number of hits due to the publicity, but I assure people that on a normal day people will be able to access it really easily and it will really help what’s happening in your area right down to the ward level and the streets where you live.

This was built by Rock Kitchen Harris who had won about 30 of the contracts for the local police forces, so it shouldn’t have cost as much as it did to stitch it all together.

But that was then. Here’s what that 2009 link http://maps.police.uk/view/ looks like today on 1 February 2011:

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Since July 2008 I have been in pursuit of the Liverpool City Council’s crappy IT outsourcing contract which has delivered several hundred million pounds of local money into a pockets of large multinational company whilst spilling barely a crumb of business to the local IT sector that certainly has the capability of providing a cheaper, home-grown, more beneficial service.

On 20 May 2009 I got first sight of a heavily redacted copy of this bloated contract.

Here, for example, is Clause 22:

(For reference, you can get this copy from someone else’s FOI request where the files aren’t zipped.)

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