OK, so Jake Berry MP, a recent butt of ours. Strangely, in the last couple of weeks, that post has drawn massive amounts of traffic, over a thousand unique readers in four days, none of them leaving referrer strings. Weird.
Anyway, I noticed this piece of his from just before he put down the shameless brown-nosing plant question that drew my attention. He’s proposing to give social housing tenants free broadband.
Now, with my telco hat on I’d point out that his plan is a bit of a disappointment in that it’s a nice little gimme to the Big Expensive Phone Company that doesn’t get any new infrastructure put in, although on the other hand it is similar to a couple of US federal programs that work reasonably well, but this is beside the point. This is the point.
So when I recently asked the work and pensions secretary to look at making broadband available to social housing tenants at low – or even no – cost, I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reception my suggestion received.
Yet when my local paper picked up on my comments, the response was markedly different. Sentiments such as “What is this guy on?” and “I go to work so they can play on the computer all day” flooded the paper’s online message board.
I actually think he might mean it. He even admits that most social tenants are in work. Presumably, what happened is that he had a fundamentally decent impulse and not a bad idea at all, and then ran into the emerging Osborne claimant-bashing strategy and was whipped into making a fool of himself on the floor of the Commons to demonstrate his loyalty. Put like that, I feel a hint of sympathy for him.
Here’s how Berry can recover some dignity. If he thinks social landlords bulk buying DSL lines is a good idea, because it will help their tenants get jobs, improve their kids’ GCSE grades, help move public service operations online, etc, I would argue that he should also support the Simple Plan. As you know, the Plan is a practical way to waste less money on housing benefit, while tackling the cost of housing, and avoiding the potentially disastrous consequences of mass evictions and buy-to-let bankruptcy.
Jake Berry, do you support the Simple Plan?