I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that National Savings and Investments (NS&I) began life in 1861 as the Post Office Savings Bank and is still an offshoot of HM Treasury. It survives as a supposedly low-risk choice, in an increasingly hard-sell marketplace, for those who wish to put money aside for old age or their heirs. So it is peculiarly disappointing to learn that NS&I has been caught mishandling some £476 million of savings belonging to 37,500 deceased customers.
The story so far is of incompetence rather than malfeasance, compounded by cover-up and (with echoes of Fujitsu’s role in the Post Office scandal) overreliance on a longstanding IT contractor, the French firm Atos, whose modernisation of NS&I systems was condemned by parliament’s public accounts committee as a ‘full-spectrum disaster’. Two senior NS&I executives have already walked the plank, while opposition MPs try to spread the stain to the Chancellor and her pensions minister Torsten Bell.
But the real question must be why this enormous business is still under public-sector management at all. One answer is that it harvests low-cost funding for the Treasury itself, including a stock of £130 billion of Premium Bonds that are rewarded, in -‘prizes’, at 3.3 per cent per annum, far below current gilt yields.
Yet it could still perform that function from within an efficient retail financial services provider in the private sector, of which there would be a queue of contenders. They make cock-ups too – witness the recent data leak affecting almost half a million Lloyds account-holders – but unlike Whitehall, they recognise that the wellbeing of the citizen-customer must always be seen to come first.
Focus on gas
The North Sea debate is rapidly becoming rather arid. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ advocates argue that exploiting our remaining oil and gas reserves would generate tax revenue and jobs but accept it would make no difference to short-term UK fuel prices. Opponents refuse to budge from the view that it would harm the planet and deflect investment from the renewable projects they hail as the real route to UK energy security. I say they should all shut up about oil and focus on gas.
Why? We no longer have refining capacity to make use of more than a slim portion of our diminished North Sea oil output – so we sell it to global buyers, including China. But we still produce half of our gas needs, piping the rest from adjacent Norwegian fields or shipping it with a substantially higher carbon footprint from the US and the Gulf.
However fast Ed Miliband’s green transition advances, even he knows we need gas for electricity and domestic use for another generation. And we have ‘proven, contingent or prospective’ reserves in UK waters equivalent to well over a decade’s worth of total UK gas demand. In short, it would be madness not to extract every last cubic metre.
Sell the G-Plan?
‘Iran war shock hits investors’ portfolios hard’ was the Financial Times headline, while the Telegraph reported that, adjusted for inflation, London house prices had fallen by almost a fifth since the start of the decade. You probably already knew that buy-to-let flats have become all but unsaleable, and you sold your classic sports car for less than you paid after reading this column three weeks ago. So what’s left of solid or rising value in the middle-class asset portfolio? Is it time for a careful look at the contents of your house?
Gold jewellery and silver tableware are readily turned to cash and will sell much higher than a year ago if you’re unsentimental about Chinese buyers melting them for bullion. Many other ‘collectables’ go for next to nothing these days – so I learn from the East Yorkshire auctioneer and Bargain Hunt star Caroline Hawley – unless they happen to be this week’s Instagram sensation.
But Caroline’s top tip is once-scorned mid-20th-century furniture by makers such as Ercol and G-Plan, now back in vogue and an example of how everything in the saleroom world eventually comes round again. And though antique ‘brown’ furniture has long been in the wilderness, she’s seeing perkier prices there too – as buyers realise, for example, that a Georgian walnut bureau may not make a home computer desk but is fine for a laptop, built to last and brilliant for storage. If you have one, it may sell better than you think; if you bequeath it to a granddaughter, it could end up stripped and painted a fashionable shade of grey.
New horizons
Where next for British expats fleeing Dubai? Despite Beijing’s repressive grip, Hong Kong’s business scene is on the bounce – a recent visitor tells me – and always livelier than Singapore. And I’m pleased to see my Hong Kong club, the Foreign Correspondents’, still offering a full English breakfast for the equivalent of £7. Closer to home, a financier friend tells me he’s commuting monthly to safe, sunny, low-tax Malta, where his top restaurant tip is Michelin-starred Under Grain in Valletta.
Another veteran of overseas postings says airily: ‘I hear everyone’s heading for Kyiv: getting in early for the reconstruction, I expect.’ For eating out in the Ukrainian capital, I like the sound of Ostannya Barykada (‘The Last Barricade’), an ‘art and gastronomy space’ at Independence Square. And a recent graduate surprises me with ‘lots of my friends are moving to Riyadh’, apparently to work in software, finance or, despite spending cuts, eco projects in Mohammed bin Salman’s ‘green initiative’. Rumour says the favourite restaurant of de facto Saudi ruler MBS is Coya, which offers Peruvian flavours under the slogan ‘Find your inner Inca’ – though at prices that only look bearable when MBS is picking up the tab.
It’s a dangerous world wherever you look, but adventurous career and menu choices are rarely to be regretted. If I were younger, I’d stick a pin in a map, buy the local good food guide and get out of dismal Britain for the rest of the decade.
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