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Cameron unveils plans for first time buyers
 David
Cameron will head towards his first Conservative Party conference
as leader armed with a raft of ‘new’ policy announcements
made during the summer recess. At a recent Cicero Consulting
summit on expert housing policy in Westminster, Cameron, joined
by his rising star Shadow Housing Minister Michael Gove MP,
delivered a keynote address which echoed Thatcher’s ‘Right
to Buy’ speech, calling on the Conservative Party Public
Services Policy Group to look at proposals where rent payments
can be converted into mortgage payments for council tenants...
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Everything you ever wanted to know about MiFID
 There
are certain EU initiatives, especially in the area of financial
services, which the people and institutions most affected do
not fully understand until late in the day. MiFID, the Markets
in Financial Instruments Directive, is potentially an example
of this; yet it is of profound importance for the whole European
financial services industry, and it is essential for stakeholders
to realise its implications...
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Pensions and the longevity bind
 Last
year, just short of 570,000 people in the UK died. 66 per cent
of these deaths were at age 75 or greater, compared with just
12 per cent at the beginning of the 20th century. This rather
morbid statistic encapsulates the nub of a rather serious problem:
that we are all living longer...
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SMEs and the increasing regulatory burden
 “If
only I were paid for being a government tax collector”. In
my role as an accountant who provides services to the small
and medium sized enterprise (SME) sector I hear this plea with
increasing regularity these days...
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Europe needs to get up earlier
 Drawing
on its own steeped national tradition of research and development,
the Finnish Government has put innovation at the centre of
its Presidency of the European Union. The rather stark lack
of progress on the Lisbon agenda to date has given many across
the EU a wake-up call that much more needs to be done to fulfil
the untapped potential of the single European economy...
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ASPs: a snake in the grass?
 Not
for the first time the Government finds itself caught in a
bind in its attempts to make sense of A-Day, its pensions simplification
reforms introduced in April this year. After a long, high-profile
wrangle with industry over what level to set the new annual
and lifetime contributions limit at, followed by the Treasury's
eleventh hour decision to scrap plans to allow residential
properties to be invested in SIPPs without much in the way
of consultation, the reforms have not gone as smoothly as the
Government had hoped...
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How global warming became a hot topic
 George
W Bush’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 2001
was, in hindsight, one of the most significant acts in the
history of the climate change movement. Since then, coverage
of the issues at stake has been steadily increasing—and
in 2006, it has reached a crescendo which not even the most
ardent cynic can ignore...
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