Windfall

I have been thinking some more about the crow's foot at reference 1. To the point where I remember that Simon Jenkins suggested, some months ago now, an alternative form of quantitative easing. Vis, you just give every man, woman and child in the country £100 to spend on whatever takes their fancy. Which would amount to about £6 billion plus costs. Or whatever other amount makes up the desired total.

We suppose that we want to set this up at fairly short notice.

My first bet is to go for that great British institution, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). They have the command structure, the cash handling skills and the branch network needed to deliver.

My second bet is to go for fingerprinting to regulate the distribution. All recipients are finger printed on receipt to deter fraud. Finger prints are checked online to make sure that the recipient is not coming for seconds. Helpful recipients also give in their postcode and any other identifying details they might fancy to make any subsequent distribution easier - the idea being that if you give your postcode, the computer only has to check the finger prints at that postcode to find you, rather than checking through all 60 million of them - or whatever it has now got to. You should apply to the Population Estimates Unit at ONS if you need to know.

The guideline we give to RBS is that they should be able to manage the whole distribution in 100 working hours, or 360,000 working seconds, say 500,000 or half a million. So their finger print tracking system needs to be able to deal with around 100 transactions a second. I have no idea how big a computer this would need. Maybe they would need to take down the holes in the wall for the duration. A bigger snag might be that this represents a transaction every 10 seconds at each of 1,000 branches, which might be challenging. Probably need to have 10 queues, with appropriate delivery & protection staff at each.

Maybe privatising the operation was not such a good idea after all. Maybe it would have been better to restrict the distribution to voters and then to use the tried and tested electoral registration system. And what is more, the people who staff that system up do not get paid the £1,000 a day that RBS are likely to charge their people out at. Plus VAT.

And, in case you are wondering, we allow half rations and personal delivery to persons unable, because of age or infirmity, to make it to the distribution points in person. No proxies as that would be too complicated to organise in the short time available.

I leave checking the sums as an exercise for the reader. Being a bit blunder-prone, it is more than likely that there have been a few slips of the decimal place.

PS 1: Jenkins is clearly my favourite columnist. A search of the blog reveals lots of him, plus one or two wed herrings, although not this particular suggestion.

PS 2: another snag would be that an operation of this sort, under EU rules for public purchasing, would have to be the subject of a competitive tender run under the auspices of the European Institute of Accredited Purchasers (EIAP). A tendering which, while, generally speaking, is a good idea, can soak up a lot of time and effort. Perhaps, in view of the national emergency, the chaps in Brussels could be persuaded to issue a waiver.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/common-sense-doesnt-cut-it.html.