27/03/2014 The Papers

McGealy subject to FA approval. Salford play seven leagues below

Manchester United. Welcome to our look ahead to what

the papers will be bringing us tomorrow. With us are Ciaran Stacey

and Susie Boniface, the Fleet Street box. Starting with the Independent.

Its story is a major study that shows that students from state

schools are more likely to achieve top grade degree passes than those

from the independent sector with the same A`level results. The Financial

Times has a joint article by the Chancellor and his German

counterpart, which says any EU treaty change must guarantee

fairness for EU countries staying outside the Eurozone. The Telegraph

reports that savers who are locked into pensions and investments could

be given a free exit. There's more on the probe into energy prices on

the front of the Daily Mirror. The Daily Express says that millions of

people will be better off after the Government has announced a cap on

pension charges. Ed Miliband's call for further curbs on energy bills

makes the lead in the Guardian. The Daily Mail has the news that cats

have passed TB to humans for the first time. Let's begin with the

energy story, this 18 month long investigation that is being

announced. This is the Daily Mirror's headline. The blackout

blackmailer. Yesterday, this ?2 million a year energy fat cat, this

is Centrica Cowes boss Sam Laidlaw, has the nerve, says the paper, to

claim a probe into fixing their high prices could lead to power cuts. How

dare they treat us with such contempt. No doubting whose side

they are on. Quite rightly. I think most newspapers and most people will

be on the side of the consumer and their readers, who are paying

increasing energy costs. This guy came out and said we got an 18 month

enquiry into our prices, this is outrageous, none of us want the

lights to go out. It is not so veiled threat that the lights could

go off at some point. The Big Six are the ones we rely on to produce

our supply. They build nuclear power stations and gas plants, as well as

selling us the fuel that comes out of them. There's a huge problem

there because they are providing the supply as well as delivering the

product. They can, if they want to, say, we are going to stop investing

in power plants, you can do what you like. A lot of these companies are

based abroad as well, their central offices are elsewhere. So they are

not necessarily under our control. I genuinely believe there should be

some way that supply of our fuel is a matter of national interest and

security to some extent. We should be able... It should the

Government's responsibility to provide our power plants. Have a

nationalised industry providing fuel. The private companies filter

and send out, so there's retail and so on. It's the fact the retail and

the wholesale arms are so close together that you have problems like

this. One man can turn around and go, that's it, lights off! How would

that work? Separating the wholesale and the retail arm. How would that

help us as consumers? What the energy companies say is they don't

make huge profits. The price we sell our energy after consumers is not

that much more than we pay for it. Look over here. The problem is the

people they are paying for that energy in the first place their

wholesale arms. What they are doing, this is the accusation and

privately, a lot of energy company bosses admit this is true, they are

overcharging their retail arm so the wholesale arm makes bumper profits.

The retail arm seems to be paying quite a lot for the energy but

nobody can quite figure out why. They then pass those costs on to the

consumer. Nobody can quite figure out why they are paying as much for

their energy as they are. They go, it's too sensitive, we can't

possibly tell you how much it cost in the first place. But if you let

the market drive this, as we've seen for many years since there was this

deregulation of power supply, aren't you inevitably going to have bigger

companies emerging? Even if you break them up, over time the

successful ones will grow and take over. You should in theory have some

competition between them, but the level of competition is so small

between the Big Six that if you try to switch between them you will not

save an awful lot of money. And they play follow my leader. If one puts

their prices up they all do. Yes. They call it pricing elasticity. You

put your prices up, everybody knows this from their own energy bills,

they put the prices up when their wholesale prices go up and when they

go down again they don't bring them back down. We don't expect the

prices to fall. But on your point about how big these energy companies

are, that isn't necessarily, although that can be a problem, it

isn't the main problem. The main problem is vertical integration. You

have the wholesale and retail arms in the same business. You can have

as big a retail arm as you like, the problems come when the hold ``

wholesale and retail arm are together, and they cannot tell us

how much they are paying. Greene it's them saying, we have a product

that is absolutely vital to all of you. It is something everybody needs

in one form or another, whether its gas or electricity, everybody in the

country needs it to live and to survive. We are going to start

charging you whatever the hell we like. This is not seen as a service,

it seen as a business. If there was one part of it which we retained on

a national base, this is the service, the provision of fuel is

the service, the provision of fuel as a service to our people that we

should be paying for ourselves, that might perhaps change... We did used

to do that, that's what happened in the 70s. You end up with the

stranglehold of the people who produce it in the first place.

Governments are notoriously bad for planning for infrastructure like

power plants. They don't respond well to consumer demand at all,

which is how you end up with one coal or steel board with huge

amounts of power. If the workers decided to walk out, for example,

you don't get any power. But this doesn't work either. Somebody on

Twitter mentioned there is a social enterprise that is set up to provide

power and energy. They buy it from SSE, one of the Big Six, but they

managed to pass it on at a more affordable price to their consumers.

But it's very difficult for new companies to get a foothold. Very

difficult. It's expensive to build a power plant. You have to have quite

a lot of money in the bank, or at least a bank who will lend you a lot

of money, to go and build it in the first place. As a small company, you

will not go out and build a gas power plant. Are the lights going to

go out? This is threatening. The Big Six are very worried, that's why

someone is talking about the lights going out. There are cheaper and

easier ways of producing energy than the way they do it, but we don't

invest in that. The Daily Express now. Bigger pension pay`outs on

their way. Millions will get an extra ?35,000 across the life of

their pension. How so? This policy has been in the pipeline for a long

time. What the pensions minister announced today is there's going to

be a cap on how much your pension provider can charge you for

investing your money on your behalf. So when we pay into a pension when

we are in work and saving for our retirement, a company is out there

in testing in the stock market or putting it in a bank account or

doing whatever it wants to do with it on our behalf, and for that it

charges a fee. The fees that these companies charge can be quite high.

The cat that these companies charge can be quite high. The cap the

Government has put on is year, which sounds really low. The that is a

huge amount of money. What the Government was trying to do is make

sure those companies can no longer charge astronomical amounts for

taking your money and investing for you. This cap only applies to those

people who are going to be automatically enrolled in a

workplace pension under the new Government scheme, auto enrolment,

which means if you enter the workplace now your company simply

says, here you go, here's your pension. The Government says if you

don't have a choice you should at least have your fees capped. When

people are trying to eke out a living on a pension, that will make

a big difference. It will, if any of us ever get to draw our pension, of

course! What is interesting, the same as the annuity announcement

last week, this is going to cost the pension industry about ?200 million

out of their profits, if this comes in. They are already saying that if

you take the fees off, that means the traders who are perhaps trading

too much and charging constant commissions on pensions to do so,

they are going to be trading less on the stock market. That might mean

your pension stays at the very flat rate rather than perhaps goes up

more over the course of its lifetime. If you are bringing in

caps, it's not in their interest to start investing it for you because

you could end up potentially also with less. If these big pension

companies are losing ?200 million a year, they will find a way to get

that out of us again. They are not going to be prepared to go, 200

million, fair enough, George Osborne, you can have the lot. They

will find a way to get that back doing something else. Trading and

other fees that will come in. She sounds like a city trader, telling

us we need to keep trading our stocks. If you stick your money in a

bank account or in a stock market tracker and leave it there, it's

often the best way to make money rather than keep changing what

stocks you hold. There you go, financial advice. I'm not a

qualified financial adviser. Ignore everything he says! Let's move onto

the Daily Telegraph. Hillsborough police questioned over deaths. Four

police officers have been interviewed under caution as

potential manslaughter suspects, following an investigation into the

Hillsborough disaster. This is the first time that police officers have

been questioned under criminal caution. Isn't that amazing? It was

25 years ago, 96 people, men, women and children, were crushed to

death. The police, we now know, were involved in some of the decisions

that led to those deaths, and possibly its those allegations about

covering up what those decisions were. It's taken 25 years for the

police to get around to arresting and questioning under caution their

own members. There are 13 police officers who have been questioned

under caution, for charges including manslaughter and also misconduct in

public office and perverting the course of justice. 12 of them have

long since retired, only one is still serving. They've obviously had

25 years to prepare for these possible interviews coming up as

well. This is 18 months, two years since the independent panel found

they had these questions to answer. It is gracefully slow. It often is

with the police. Funny that. There are no institutions better than

covering up their own mistakes and possibly, although we don't exactly

know here, criminality, than the police service. We've seen that time

and again. People around at the time, they certainly remember the

accusations flying around about what the supporters have been doing.

About how some supporters have been your knitting and other supporters,

they'd deliberately created this crush at the Hillsborough stadium,

which all turned out to be fabricated. They claimed even

children were drinking and had caused the crush themselves. Some of

the more outrageous claims people will be able to dispute, but so much

time has passed. Will memories be accurate?

Of course not. If you are trying to remember what happened 25 years ago,

But this is 25 years ago. It is just been so delayed.

Now the Independent. A major study showing that state school students

get better degrees than private school pupils with the same grades,

but they have to get into the university first, though? It is

interesting. It is a big study of people that went through university,

finding that undergraduates of state school tend to do better than

counterparts who have come from a private school. There will be lots

of explanations, one is that they have had to work harder to get in.

So they work harder at university. My explanation is how have they done

the study in the first place? They have probably taken people who

achieved the same grade, one at state and one at private. Let's say

you have two pupils with B at A level. Imagine that the pupil who

got the B at state school worked harder.

What happens after university, though, does it matter? Does it

matter if you have a good private school on your CV, will it matter

the grade you get at degree level? I don't know. No`one has asked for my

grades of any my exams. I think if you sent your children to Harrow or

Eton, they should get their money back, they are obviously not worth

the cash! Now the FT. A clash with Syria and Turkey and Twitter and

Facebook bans? Even the President has managed to get around the block.

They tried to ban Twitter, they could not. They have trying to ban

YouTube. They had banned it for three years. Perhaps that is easier,

but it is businessa. That as a country, it is not that far away

from Europe. That they can just ban something on the internet. If they

wanted to do something here, something that the Prime Minister

did not fancy, say banning grant shoppes, it would be interesting. I

don't know how it could work. You either have, it is a democracy, if

you are operating a democracy that is not as democratic as anywhere

else, you would tear it down. It does not work. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

feels under pressure. He has had protests on the streets. He has the

Arab Spring going on around him and Syria on the doorsteps, his actions

are becoming increasingly drabbing owna. That is it for the papers for

this hour. Fortunately, we are back at 11. 30pm for another stab at it.

Join us then. At 11.00pm, we speak about customers being given a poor

deal by the big six energy companies.

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