Current issues - Coventry

Oh no! When is that going to come into force? We used part of LPS last night to park in Salt Lane car park - how else are we meant to park there if they do that, I wonder? What a super council we have!

It sounds like you can get to the car park from the south end of LPS. After that the road becomes buses only. I drove very slowly at that point so that I didn't miss the turning for the car park.

I refuse to use that car park given what it's done to the view from Ford's.

Hi all, Everyone is the loser with these trap/gate restrictions. Don't be fooled. The bus routes fail to reach many of the locations, forcing folk with any mobility issue to simply give up. That is if they are running! There's a gap in joined up thinking.

Bus strike to resume on Monday. I'm saddened, as I'm not being hoodwinked, I can see some sloppy so called negotiations on both sides of this. Percentages being banded around might look impressive, but there are two factors to any percentage sum. Also, folk working irregular shift patterns can be messed around. Sixty years ago, there was a flexibility in who did what shifts, often according to crew preferences, but it's now more a sequence of turns. That makes other activities for crews very difficult to manage home & other affairs. I'm not taking sides on this as I simply don't know enough. It's twenty years or more since I knew crews that well or folk running the show. Please, if you do enter opinions or ideas, please keep them on a level playing field.

Hi all, Please be aware that the coronation weekend will see many commercial facilities, banks, building societies & so on, closed for extended periods.

Hi all, JUST CHAT An issue that is often in news or political discussions, is the need for better education, that better education will solve crime rates. Whilst violent crime, awful as it is predominates our news headlines, the biggest increase in UK crime over the last three years, is "White collar crime". Fraud & the like. Mostly executed by educated criminals. Up 53% in twelve months. Any polite thoughts?

Hi Philip Think you are spot on. The biggest crime in the UK at the minute is HS2

HS2 aside. Philip, the 'white collar crime' rise is not as a result of better education. You are assuming that the criminals are a) in this country and b) qualified c) are in a situation to gain well paid employment - see 1). The rise is almost entirely to do with the internet. It links people very far apart. It's easier to fool people because you never meet in person. The skills for crime aren't taught by legitimate schools, at least not here. I suspect that there is state sponsored crime in certain countries as a form of warfare but a lot of it is due to disinterested authorities who turn a blind eye to it. The 'crime' here is that people, the authorities and legitimate institutions are behind the curve when it comes to protecting ourselves. Software companies leave too many backdoors for criminals to exploit. Banks and other institutions that handle money are slow to implement protections. We are reluctant to use them because they're complicated. We are vulnerable to others because we inherently want to trust friendly people. The internet is a dangerous jungle full of predators and we casually wander in and wave our money about. Additional - Quite a bit of the locally based crime by genuine white collar, educated and employed people is due to them trying to pay gambling debts (also made worse by the internet).

Mick, you're forgetting all the money that was given to Tory donors and MPs' friends and relatives to source PPE during the pandemic, and which somehow vanished.

Hi Helen, Statistics, dam statistics & lies, but what helps with the credibility or not of statistics is whether there's a pattern of statistics. Just fraud. Total number of fraud crimes in March 2020 - 748,321 Total number of fraud crimes in March 2021 - 797,879 Total number of fraud crimes in March 2022 - 936,276 Recently, a prominent politician made the comment "Education will cure crime". I don't believe that there's the slightest foundation to that. The South East corner of the UK, per head of our population, has the highest education attainment of any other area, yet it has the highest level of classified white collar crime. More than the whole of Scotland. Those are published stats. The stats are so loaded, that but for three specific locations in the South East Corner, if they were excluded (I'm not going to mention them by name, please don't), less than 2% of youngsters at age 16, left school without significant attainment, even before going on to further education. Yet, the national average for poor attainment is nearly 18%. Last year 98,799 children in England left school without basic qualifications. I see very little evidence to change my mind. Anyway, it's lunch time. Slow roast chicken today.

Something happened in March 2020 - almost everything went online and cashless. London and the Southeast were the fastest to adapt and the slowest to return to doing things in the flesh. It's the area where the greatest percentage of people are still working from home Everything from dating to transferring money became word of text rather than face to face. For criminals it was an expanding opportunity and those criminals could be based anywhere in the World. It's an area with richer pickings than the rest of the country. The government schemes for funding businesses through the pandemic were grossly lax and even the basic rule that only businesses created before the pandemic should be entitled to claim wasn't enacted. It didn't take a rocket scientists to scam that system. Because it doesn't need to involve physical interaction between thief and victim, card cloning is a type of fraud - £25, £50 and now £100 easy money. That doesn't need the perpetrator to be more than basically educated. The south were far faster using contactless than anywhere else. Cloning number plates to avoid bridge and ULEZ zone charges doesn't need a genius to work out. What you're seeing as much as anything is a much bigger opportunity for white collar crime.

Speaking as both a former rocket scientist and criminologist, Helen, you're very much on the money there!

Britain's Wilko, a discount retail chain which sells homeware and household goods, is at risk of collapse after it filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators on Thursday, putting 12,000 jobs on the line if no buyer can be found.

It will be very sad if they go. Wilko is a favourite shop of mine. Very useful.