Some well informed MPs
>many remain ignorant of what the thing does or is supposed to do;
> another four per cent claimed Tech City has had no impact
So the few who HAD heard of it correctly identified that it would have no impact
Shitty what? Almost half of MPs have never heard of Tech City
If Tech City UK is the beating heart of the local tech digital industry, someone forgot to tell almost half of MPs about the taxpayer-funded initiative. In a Parliamentary Snapshot Survey paid for by think-tank The Entrepreneur Network, 48 per cent of 105 MPs polled had not even heard of the venture, launched by David Cameron …
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Friday 5th September 2014 15:43 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
48% of 105 MPs, does not compute.
48% is 50.4 MPs, so unless they've cut on in half... I'm assuming that they mean either 50 or 51 MPs (Using either number would have been easier, shorter and clearer, but whatever). So they must be rounding like idiots.
Or maybe they are counting one as the half-wit that they are...
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Friday 5th September 2014 16:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Change policy for what?
"As things stand, MPs don’t appear adequately informed to vote on future policy changes impacting entrepreneurs"
Never really understood this approach... if a policy is bad and needs changing to help business in general it probably makes sense (why can't a business drive sheep over London Bridge if it helps the economy as a whole). If a policy is good but has an impact on business (e.g. say paying taxes creating an overhead) why should it be changed in such a way to help just one or two business (or individuals really in this case) but not others?
We get a lot of that on the other side of the pond.... policy changes to help "disruptive" companies challenge the market place or vice versa. Smh.
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Friday 5th September 2014 16:12 GMT dotdavid
"Blighty’s Silicon Roundabout will rival America’s Silicon Valley for job creation and maybe it will… in the next thousand or so years"
Silicon Valley has rather more space I'm guessing which will always give it a numbers advantage IMHO. Can't imagine Apple getting planning permission to build a shiny new GCHQ-style doughnut HQ in the middle of Hoxton...
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Friday 5th September 2014 17:07 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Silicon valley started because there was masses of land in California's orange groves almost for free.
Then WWII lead to a huge demand for electronics and components for the local aerospace industry. This attracted lots of engineers, as did the local world class tech universities.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard went there to get jobs and started HP in their garage which grew into a $Bn company which later employed Steve Wozniak who started his own company in his garage which grew into a $Bn company ....
While we have some overpriced office space in a couple of warehouses in a fashionable bit of Central London where a few media types sell imagineering services to each other.
It would make you laugh if you weren't crying.
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Friday 5th September 2014 20:44 GMT ecofeco
"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard went there to get jobs and started HP "
Just to clarify, HP was founded in 1939, before WWII and was making what were then, the best audio oscillators.
Click for history.
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Friday 5th September 2014 17:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Can't imagine Apple getting planning permission to build a shiny new GCHQ-style doughnut HQ in the middle of Hoxton.."
Well the tax dodgers at Google got the nod for a £650m HQ just up the road in Kings Cross. Sounds like they've since cooled on the idea, perhaps because they've now visited the area, but if you've got the money then London welcomes you.
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Saturday 6th September 2014 19:36 GMT Will Godfrey
Re: I thought I'd seen silicon roundabout once.
Indeed they do. Most of the CMOS range is still in production, and cheap as, err, chips. Also some TTL is, although that has largely been replaced with CMOS duplicates of the older 74 series.
In fact, only last week I got a bunch of 4040s from Farnell to quickly knock up pre-scalers for pulse counter/comparator thingy-whatsits.
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Friday 5th September 2014 19:05 GMT All names Taken
That's the trouble u c?
Here it is again, command & control of market strategies courtesy of UK (anti)civil serventia.
What the market wants, needs, will evolve and respond to is nothing compared to the dream inside some mandarin's head?
Add the traditional UK class struggles and it makes for another recipe of squandered public dosh by those collecting that dosh and ultimately for the betterment of those directly involved dullwitted politicians permitting?
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Saturday 6th September 2014 09:22 GMT Frankee Llonnygog
Re: That's the trouble u c?
Also naff all to do with Civil Service. It's political marketing from ministers. If I were a civil servant wanting to do central planning, I'd be rolling out a national grid of fat comms pipes - but that fails as political marketing in 2 ways: it would cost real money; it would be useful beyond the current party's time in office
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Sunday 7th September 2014 06:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's the trouble u c?
"If I were a civil servant wanting to do central planning, I'd be rolling out a national grid of fat comms pipes "
You mean spending tax payers money on things they aren't prepared to pay for themselves, on the basis that you know better than they do what is good for them? You should apply now, you'd make an excellent civil servant.
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Friday 5th September 2014 19:41 GMT Hargrove
Re: what is a MP
Mais oui, mon ami, Nate. Vraiment different.
Ils sont des Ministres de Parliamente (MP).
They are no so well armed but is much more, how is it you say, more dangereux que les Policiers Militaires simple. No needs for you thanksing me, . . Il n'y a pas de quoi.
Les Anglais, they no longer know these things, yes? No?
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Friday 5th September 2014 19:34 GMT Hargrove
As the kiddies say . . .
Let's do the math shall we. . .
The provisional salary figures from the Office of National Statistics for 2013 show that the average professional salary is shade over £700/week, or (bless the kiddies) around £36,400/annum.
Dividing that smartly in to the £2.3M/annual contribution of the gov we find that it provides base salary for 63 and a fraction persons. By the time one takes into account overhead (offices, desks, phones, computers (presumably digital) and other amenities like soap, water, soft tissue for the bum, etc. and even the most efficient operation is going to be down to a few actual worker bees.
This makes the MP's ignorance all the more appalling. At that level they should be able to keep track of what each soul is doing individually.
We in the US have extensive experience in this kind of thing, under the general headings of nepotism and pork. The model is simple. The money is funneled into a select group in insufficient quantity to do anything but create the illusion of doing something. They and the politicians benefit. In terms of benefit to the Commonweal, the money is simply being pissed away in such quantities that in the US no longer even bother to try to count it up.
The amount quoted @ ledslinger for Google's investment in a new facility is roughly 240 times the £2.3M annual investment in Tech City, provides an interesting and useful reality check.
This is not to say that a small team of dedicated scientists cannot accomplish miracles. . . But the odds of anyone's doing it with "help from the government" are between slim and none.
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Saturday 6th September 2014 09:01 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Re: Almost half
But they all know howto fill out expenses forms for swapping homes at the taxpayers expense without help....
All MPs really need to know is which way their paymasters/party bosses want them to vote on a subject and then go do it.
Which always begs the question.. why do we need so many of them?
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Saturday 6th September 2014 08:43 GMT BongoJoe
To be fair I have only heard a few things about it. I haven't got a clue as to what it is, where it is and what it's supposed to do for us.
I am not rubbishing what may be, for all I know, a perfectly good working establishment but it does have a rather trite name.
I have left IT in the City a decade ago and, really, I have no idea what this is all about. So if I haven't a clue then I wouldn't expect many MPs to have a clue neither.
I know that the government is wanting everyone to get into coding because of something on the BBC (again only heresay as I don't have a telly) and if this is some sort of Blue Sky project to get IT moving and people into software development then I think that this is the wrong way to go about it.
If we're having establishments built up on a roundabout or around a roundabout (yes, I must look this up as I have a vision in my head that won't go away of Royston Vasey zoo) then we're going to get a hive of middle managers and HR droids sucking the life out of everything and making everything, as usual, London and Boris-centric.
I would be better if the government arranged with every multinational to ship out to every UK resident who requests it a free full development package from all the major corporations so that we can have a country full of developers living and working all over the country.
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Saturday 6th September 2014 11:19 GMT Green Nigel 42
Why the big suprise?
Quick reference to the professional break down of our MP's reveal very little, if any practical business experience, 24% are professional politicians with PR, marketing, law, finaciers, media & business consultants making up most of the rest.
http://www.smith-institute.org.uk/file/Who-Governs-Britain.pdf
Is it any wonder Government continually write poor contracts based upon a cronic lack of understanding of technical matters & a real appreciation of what we actually need, then demonstrate this by abysmal (if any at all) project management.
Numerous IT & engineering projects they have commisioned have failed after falling behind & grossly over budget as a result in both civil & military fields. My favourite at the moment is the unholy alliance between Lockheed Martin & BAE that our Government (Labour & Alliance) has through compiling, not checking, released such badly written contracts, it has hobbled our new aircraft carriers (no cat & trap), & made sure we can only take the troubled, increasingly expensive to buy & run F35C Fighter. Not to mention the recent Border control fiasco, NHS records & Police data base.
A Silicon roundabout is appropriate, not as a node to communicate or go some where, but just to go around & around!
Who do they blame, industry.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
