A car-free life

MY inner miser grudges handing money over to oil companies, multi nationals and governments and, having been brought up in the village where the high-priest of self sufficiency, John Seymour, learned many of his country skills I have always liked the concept of not being dependent on the system. That’s why a car-free life has real appeal.

On the other hand, since my first Morris 8 Series E rattled around the Suffolk Lanes 40 years ago I have also been in love with the ideal of freedom that you always hope driving a car will bring you, that ability to go wherever you want at the drop of a clutch – and that means I have been a petrol addict most of my life.

Miracles do happen - and for the past five months I have been virtually car free – and now I don’t want to go back to my addiction.

Over the years that myth of freedom on the road – when experience says the reality is delay, frustration and expense - has resulted in a wide variety of vehicles passing through my hands, among them a glorious Humber Hawk, a rusting Fiat 127, a new Land Rover Discovery V8 and an almost new Jaguar Sovereign and several less memorable ones in between.

Sometimes life smacks you in the face and insists you re-assess things and for me it was a heart attack at 50, followed by a by-pass operation. Millions go through it, but it brought me up short and we moved out of running a pressurised business, downsized our lives and decided to turn our narrow-boating hobby into a lifestyle.

For the past five years we have enjoyed the freedom of living on our narrowboat on the English canals, able to slip the mooring and head off at a steady three or four miles an hour whenever my journalistic work allows. It has been the beginning of a withdrawal from the addictions of modern life such as TV.

But we had still not shrugged off the tyranny of the car. Having realised (belatedly for me) that it isn’t what you earn but what you spend that decides the quality of your life, I was willing to accept that older, smaller and cheaper cars were necessary to help achieve that financial balance. For some time I ran an ageing Citroen Xantia and my wife an even older Fiesta.

One of the children needed a car and we realised that we could – probably – cope with just the one, especially as I was writing more and more from the boat . We became a one-car couple.

That wasn’t too difficult but, even at the bottom end of the car market you can indulge yourself and I persuaded myself that as I was not longer driving 30-40,000 miles a year I could buy an old, N-reg, Volvo 850 estate – ideal for shifting bags of coal and wood for the boat’s stove and for grandchildren – as well as being big and a bit luxurious in an old fashioned way.

If virtue has its own reward so does economy and I was really pleased to have spent just £1,000 on the Volvo and proud of selling the old Citroen Xantia for £400 – giving me a £600 car – in fact, I boasted about it. But it did mean we were moving further and further away from that obsession with personal motor transport, almost without noticing.

Then the opportunity presented itself to spend several months out on the canal system in our boat, as all my work could be done with the aid of a mobile broadband modem attached to the laptop.

We travelled up to Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales for several weeks, leaving the Volvo at the marina and, on our return, moved our home moorings to Derbyshire, taking the car an hour or so by road before spending over a week doing the same journey by canal.

Within another week or two the car was again abandoned, at its new home, and we headed off again, finally remembering to declare it off-road with the DVLA a month or so later.

Our journey meant we would have to shop on foot and travel by public transport from wherever we moored for the night and over the weeks we travelled around the Midlands, Birmingham, Shropshire and the borders Wales.

After 40 years as a driver, never without a vehicle for more than a few days, could we cope? I even bought a folding bike on e-Bay, in brilliant yellow, from an IKEA employee who had been given it by the company as a way of establishing green credentials.

The bike hasn’t been used much, one trip down the towpath ending in a puncture as my substantial weight on top and a large rock with a sharp edge beneath proved too much for the tyre.

Instead we have covered more ground on foot than at any previous period of our lives and walking shoes and rucksacks have become the necessary accessories of our lives.

Mostly we have shopped in small stores in the villages and towns through which the canal took us and it has been a delight. We shop more often; there is a limit to what you can carry in a rucksack, even if you fill the two foldaway bags that are always stored within it.

Not all small shops are delightful and not every local butcher has a supply of wonderful meat – but enough of them are and do to make it worth finding out. Of course, it costs more to shop like that and we didn’t abandon the supermarkets completely.

When we arrived near a small town, like Market Drayton on the delightful Shropshire Union canal, we might well gather all our shopping bags – about half a dozen – trudge the mile and a half into town and raid the local Morrison’s before getting a taxi back to the boat.

And public transport is not wonderful in rural areas, although it was fairly cheap and simple to get a train from Staffordshire into Manchester when I needed to visit an office on business.

Five months later we are back at our Derbyshire marina and rather pleased with ourselves as we have walked further than ever before and enjoyed not having the car.

The freedom means you can stop at a pub for a drink and not worry about the breathalyser, you can see so much more as you walk, as well as hear and smell the world around you, and you are not handing large lumps of money to government and those big businesses on a regular basis.

We have complained at times about the cost of taxis, buses and trains but the biggest shock came when we looked after our daughter’s house for a week, borrowed her fuel efficient modern car - and spent £65 for three-quarters of a tank of diesel.

And now we are back, are we going to stay car-free?

We have thought about it, and we would really like to, but the reality is that our children are between an hour and two hours away in three different directions, to say nothing of grandchildren, and making those journeys on public transport would be expensive and time consuming.

Those may just be excuses, but our cowardice means that we have put the Volvo back on the road. It was an exercise that cost well over £500 without any fuel, as it needed work done to pass an MOT.

The irony is that, after complaining about train and bus fares, we did it without thinking twice about the costs of car ownership. On top of that £500 there is another £400 for insurance, a further £100 for the second six months of tax and probably £600 at the least for petrol in coming months.

That is £1,600 – cheap motoring by many people’s standards - but it would buy a lot of train fares, to say nothing of new walking shoes.

Perhaps we will be a bit braver in a couple of years’ time when I hit 60 and the free bus pass makes the economics even more compelling. I know we could do another car-free six months next year – and maybe we can manage longer as our new base marina is in a small town with two rail stations, regular bus services and even reasonably-priced taxis.

At present we still walk when once we would have driven and we still like to get trains. One on our doorstep takes us into delightful Buxton in the Peak District in less than half an hour and Manchester city centre is the same journey time the other way.

We constantly measure the fares against the cost of taking the car. Most of the time it is more expensive for two to take the train than for two to use the petrol – but we don’t allow for the fixed costs of the car.

Longer journeys can be either dramatically cheaper or more expensive, depending on the whims of the ludicrous train pricing system that day, but they almost always take considerably more time – seven hours to wonderful Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast, rather than three in the car.

Once the car has gone, of course, we can measure our total spend on public transport against what the car would have cost us over a year and the sums may make more sense, they certainly will once we both have our freedom passes and senior rail cards.

Copyright: News Services Ltd 2008

Ask your granny

PEOPLE are queuing up to take money from us in order to tell us how to run our homes in hard times – and it’s understandable when you consider what a throwaway society we’ve become - the average household throws away between £15,000 and £24,000 worth of food in a lifetime.

Although it’s almost certainly very annoying, the truth is that anyone over a certain age has a great advantage in dealing with even a short and minor recession.

If you were brought up in the decade after World War 2 you will have had drummed into you that nothing must be wasted, from patching clothes to making bubble and squeak.

My late mother would have been horrified at the idea that food is just thrown away because we can’t be bothered to do something with it before the sell-by date (not that they had any such thing in those days).

Most of the baby-boomer generation – at least those with parents on a working man’s wage - were brought up to enjoy slow-cooked cheap cuts of meat, eat offal and not turn their noses up at a suet pudding.

It is ironic that the combination of the threat of a recession with a new consciousness of our ever-increasing impact on the climate and resources of the world has brought back to our homes a sense of frugality.

Today’s generation of parents have not been informed by a decade of rationing and war and have been trained to get their information from the web or some sort of expert.

This brings us back to people selling economy and frugality. Just on the market is a £12.95 tome called The Use-It-All Cookbook, in which Bish Muir offers over 100 recipes and ideas for using your leftovers, and using up that sad-looking carrot or half tub of yoghurt at the back of the fridge.

Soups, stews, pies, and risottos sit alongside the information to transform leftover bread into bread and butter pudding, treacle tart, and make a chicken go from roast dinner into stock, soup, risotto and a sandwich
There is also advice on planning your shopping, storing your food, basic tools for the kitchen, and essential ingredients for the store cupboard; and each recipe features the comparative average cost if bought in the supermarket.
The book’s publicity clams that changes in people’s shopping habits and fears over food hygiene, means food wastage is increasing at a rate of 15 per cent every decade – so take that to its logical conclusion and we will soon be throwing away more than we buy.

I can make one money-saving suggestion of my own – you could save £12.95 by going and talking to your granny or anybody old enough to remember what true poverty and food shortage was really all about.

Collect a few of their recipes and tips and you may well make some real savings.

Money lenders still money-grabbing

MORTGAGE lenders – having promised government to return to 2007 levels of business – are still lending substantially less than last year and charging substantially more than necessary.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) reports gross lending totalled £17.7 billion in September, 10 per cent lower than in August and down 42 per cent from September last year.

The bankers and building society bosses insist the mortgage market remains open for business, but claim weaker consumer demand and ‘continuing funding constraints’ will dampen monthly lending figures for rest of this year and the first quarter of 2009.

In fact, gross lending will be substantially lower than the 2007 total of £363 billion, and is expected to reach around £255 billion in 2008.

The lenders are also failing to respond to the dramatic Bank of England interest rate cuts. Darren Cook, mortgage expert at Moneyfacts.co.uk, said: “Two weeks after the Monetary Policy Committee announced a shock 0.5 per cent cut to the base rate in unison with key central banks around the globe, more than three quarters of all UK lenders have yet to pass on this reduction to their ever growing number of standard variable rate mortgage customers.

“With mortgage approvals falling to rock bottom levels and house values continuing to fall to unseen troughs, it is unlikely that mortgage lenders will soon regain their appetite to lend at reasonable levels in the short term.

“Unfortunately, within this increasing turmoil, the majority of customers currently have no alternative but to switch to their lender’s standard variable rate (SVR)

“Some lenders have announced a reduction in their SVR and have reduced their rate by the full amount. However, a growing number have chosen not to do this and only passed on a proportion of the cut or none at all.

“A mortgage that was previously known as only a revert rate, due to circumstances, has become a prime product that could be adversely priced at will.

“With more base rate cuts on the horizon, which in part are intended to reduce the burden of household finances, we could find ourselves in situation where future MPC decisions on a rate cut will have little or no bearing on the majority of current household’s mortgage outgoings and could ultimately result in an increase in repossessions.”

The CML acknowledges more borrowers are facing long-term unemployment and other financial difficulties are at risk of losing their homes.

The lenders fight shy of taking any responsibility for dealing with the situation and want government action to ‘build a more comprehensive safety net of support for home-owners in difficulty’.

Instead the CML is attempting to set the tone for the post-crunch debate when it predicts policy and regulatory initiatives will have an impact on the number and types of households that are able to enter – and sustain – home-ownership.

In a ‘think-piece’ on its website it says: “While we recognise the strength of aspirations to home-ownership and the many benefits it delivers, we also acknowledge that it is not the tenure for everyone all of the time. The real challenge is deliver a healthy balance of tenures, providing a choice of affordable housing options.

“One response to balancing aspirations to home-ownership with risks for more marginal borrowers may be more widespread availability of an intermediate tenure. In the longer term, we see a potential for expanding low-cost home-ownership and for households to be able to lower or raise their level of home-ownership according to their changing personal circumstances.

“That would be one way of managing the higher risk profile of mortgage lending as a result of extending home-ownership lower down the socio-economic spectrum.”

Bankers refuse responsibility

BATTERED bankers are getting defensive about suggestions that – despite the billions of taxpayers’ cash being poured into their coffers – they are behaving as badly as ever and penalising members of the public caught by their policies of lending too much to people the lenders should have known would be at risk in anything other than a booming economy.

After suggesting the Chancellor wasn’t really serious when he spoke of the banks committing to a return to the 2007 levels of borrowing as part of the bail-out package, the mortgage lenders now appear to be retreating from the pledge to do everything possible to help borrowers with problems stay in their homes.

Following figures showing very clearly that the nationalised Northern Rock was leading the charge to repossess more and more homes, but still failing to sell them on, the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has issued what it describes as a background briefing, which claims ‘media coverage of repossessions in general, and at Northern Rock in particular, could have the effect of creating a misleading impression’.
It seemed to think that journalists couldn’t tell the difference between figures showing the flow of properties being taken into possession, and the stock of properties in possession, when comparing Northern Rock’s figures with the wider market.

The CML publishes a figure showing the number of properties repossessed during a period and a stock figure which is a snapshot of the number of unsold repossessed properties held by lenders at the end of the same period. Those figures for the first half of this year showed clearly that the number of homes taken from their owners and the number unsold were identical.
In effect this means that the bankers are simply taking away people’s homes and keeping them empty when the government, local authorities and the public are saying very clearly that it makes sense to keep people in their homes; rather than create more homelessness and over-burden a social housing system which simply cannot cope with demand.

Observers find it particularly worrying that Northern Rock, a bank owned by the taxpayers, is repossessing homes at three times the rate of other lenders , with a repossession rate of around one per cent rather than the 0.38 per cent the CML insists is the national average.
If the government cannot even bring a bank in which it has a controlling interest to pay more attention to the needs of customers and the country as a whole, what hope is there that other bankers, who have already proven themselves to be greedy and irresponsible, will be any better, despite the cash handouts they are being given?
Overall, the CML claims it still expects a total of around 45,000 families and individuals to be thrown out of their homes this year as the banks take possession.

It claims this is a ‘ very modest’ repossession rate out of 11.7 million mortgages, and that 98 per cent of borrowers continue to pay their mortgages in full and on time, and where arrears occur these are usually because of changes in the household’s circumstances such as unemployment or other loss of income.
It is difficult to see how these figures can continue to be anywhere near accurate as unemployment rises towards two million and some predict it could hit three million before the current problems are over.
The bankers are anxious to point out that all lenders are bound by the Financial Services Authority rules on arrears management and repossessions and the CML says there is no logical rationale for a difference in approach for different lenders based purely on their ownership structure. It also admits, however, that all lenders should be making best efforts to avoid repossession except as a last resort, as required by those rules.
The bankers also say they support the mortgage rescue scheme currently being developed through local authorities and housing associations to help some households to stay in their homes on a shared equity or rental basis, but there has, so far, been no sign of that having an impact on the number of repossessions.

In the final analysis, as this briefing note shows, the lenders seem to regard those who have got into difficulties as feckless individuals who have over-stretched themselves – nowhere is there an acknowledgement that the banks’ and building societies’ policies of lending too much money to people they knew couldn’t afford it has any role to play.

Instead the CML simply notes that ‘borrowers gain significant protection too from the court process, as well as from the Financial Ombudsman Service,’ as they wash their hands of any responsibility.