The price of fuel (gas in particular) is going up rapidly. There’s a lot of concern that people won’t be able to afford the higher prices. In particular, there’s concern that higher heating costs will hasten the deaths of tens of thousands of pensioners who won’t heat their homes properly as a result.

To monitor the situation, the government measures what it calls ”fuel poverty”. A family is fuel poor if adequately heating its home would cost more than 10% of its income. (For next time your family argues about what to set the thermostat to, for non-pensioners “adequately heating your home” means heating your living room to 21 degrees and other rooms to 18 degrees.)

Because this definition ignores how much money people have left after they’ve paid for their heating, being fuel poor is neither necessary nor sufficient for being poor. Some households might be left short of money having spent 8% of their income on fuel; others could be left with plenty having spent 12% on fuel. There’s no ’poverty threshold’ that’s crossed when and only when your heating bill reaches 10% of your income.

Because of this, we need to be careful about using fuel poverty figures to draw conclusions about poverty. Following a rise in fuel prices, it may be that some of the newly fuel poor can afford to spend more than 10% on heating and aren’t poor at all. Certainly some of the newly fuel poor will already have been poor before their heating bill went up and so aren’t newly poor. And although there will be people who are newly poor but still not fuel poor, there’s no reason to think that this number will exactly match the number of newly fuel poor.

What all that means is that a rise in fuel poverty needn’t mean a corresponding rise in poverty.

Some people aren’t careful enough in how they use the figures. This is how This is Money reported on new fuel poverty figures in March 2007:

The number of households facing a choice between heating and eating has almost doubled in the past two years. Spiralling gas and electricity bills have left nearly 4m having to spend at least 10% of their disposable income on heating and lighting – the definition of ‘fuel poverty’. This is an increase of more than 1.7m…
[This is Money, Millions in 'Fuel Poverty' Trap]

To be fair, the article does give a definition of fuel poverty, and the definition is almost correct (fuel poverty relates to income, not disposable income, but at least they had a go). However, it reasons that because the number of fuel poor has gone from ~2.3 million to ~4 million, the number who have to choose between heating and eating has almost doubled.

This reasoning only makes sense if being fuel poor and having to choose between heating and eating are the same thing (if they aren’t, then why think that a near doubling of one would mean a near doubling of the other?). We saw above, however, that they aren’t the same thing. The result of the passage’s conflation of fuel poverty and facing a choice between heating and eating is therefore that the statistics don’t support its main claim.

There’s been a spate of strikes recently over pay. Teachers, postal workers, and fire-fighters have all walked out over in protest at the pay deals they’ve been offered. On Wednesday, several hundred thousand council staff became the latest disgruntled employees to down tools, resulting in schools and libraries closing, flights and driving tests being cancelled, and bins being left unemptied, among other things.

BBC journalist (and Dragons’ Den presenter) Evan Davis explains on his blog how the argument goes whenever he interviews union representatives in the midst of industrial action at the moment:

I put what I think of as the obvious points about strikes: “we have to avoid wage price spirals”; “if the money isn’t there for a pay rise, it isn’t there”; “there’s no entitlement to an inflation-matching pay rise” etc.

But on each occasion, the answer comes back that chief executives have not shown the same level of restraint, so why should workers?

Davis admits to being perplexed about how to take things from there. He seems to find the union representatives’ argument persuasive.

He shouldn’t. The union officials aren’t disputing the argument that he offers for pay restraint. Instead, they are attempting to justify workers ignoring the argument on the ground that executives have ignored it. This is a tu quoque. Just because the executives have taken more than they should doesn’t mean that everyone else can too. Pointing the finger at someone else who has done something wrong doesn’t get you off the hook if you’re doing it as well.

Admittedly the situation is a bit of a mess. The economy can’t sustain the pay rises that the unions are asking for, but the unions won’t stand for workers having to exercise pay restraint when executive pay is spiralling upwards. So what’s the best way out? What should the unions be calling for?

Lower executive pay would get the unions the consistency between workers’ and executives’ pay deals that they’re after without destroying the economy. They shouldn’t be striking for higher pay for themselves, but perhaps they could strike for lower pay for their bosses instead.

Swindon Borough Council are considering getting rid of their speed cameras. Roderick Bluh, the Council Leader, offered a truly awful argument for doing so on today’s BBC lunchtime news:

When you fine a motorist for speeding, he’s already been speeding. Would it not be best to invest and make sure that speeding is prevented in the first place?

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that it’s better to prevent a crime than to punish one. If we can implement measures (e.g. advertising, improved signage, etc.) to encourage drivers to slow down, then that’s great. However, whatever measures we take to reduce speeding are only going to be partially successful; there will still be some people out there who break the speed limit. So what should we do about them?

There’s no reason why, having done all we can to prevent people from breaking the law, we can’t also try to catch and punish people who break the law. The first problem with Bluh’s argument is therefore that it restricts the options, trying to force us to choose between prevention and punishment when we can in fact have both.

The second problem is that it ignores the fact that speed cameras act as a deterrant. If you know that if you speed you’ll get caught and fined, then there’s a good chance that you’ll slow down. Bluh’s argument thus generalises from the fact that speed cameras don’t stop some crimes (those that they detect) to the idea that they don’t stop any crimes. Speed cameras may not stop people who are fined from speeding, but they do stop plenty of people who aren’t fined from speeding.

Even without those problems, however, there would still have been reason to worry about Bluh’s argument. If its logic worked, and we should get rid of speed cameras because by the time we catch and fine someone for speeding it’s too late to prevent them from speeding, then we should get rid of more than speed cameras. When the police catch and imprison a murderer, his victim is already dead; should we therefore forget about trying to catch and imprison murderers? Bluh’s argument isn’t just an attack on speed cameras, it’s an attack on crime detection and punishment in general, so goes far too far to be plausible.

Whatever decision the Council reaches, hopefully they won’t get rid of the cameras on the basis of the argument above.