Ed Vaizey

So I trotted down to the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority in Holborn last week.  To refresh your memory, PADA is the body charged with setting up Personal Accounts - essentially, occupational pensions for 5.5 million people and a million employers who do not normally take out or supply pensions.  People will be automatically enrolled, and you have to actively choose not to have one.

One of the reasons PAs got through was because the set up cost was promised to be £500 million.  This meant that you could argue that it was cheaper to do it this way than use private providers (as the Government has done with the Child Trust Fund for example).

I think the cost will be £2 billion, which is why the affable CEO of PADA, Tim Jones, summoned me to a meeting.  He told me that I was completely wrong, but refused to reveal his own estimate of the set up costs, because he does not want to weaken his negotiating position with contractors.  On running costs, he said they had spent about £14 million since August, but he won’t pblish full accounts until the summer of 2009.  They are still consulting on the charging structure for PAs, so no way of knowing if they will meet the 0.3 per cent the Government promised.  And finally, as I predicted in my last post, he refused to reveal the costs of consultants on the grounds of commercial confidentiality,

I find it amusing to look at the contrast between the press getting worked up into a lather about the cost of MPs expenses, around £10 million a year, yet no one seems to care that an organisation that could cost the taxpayer billions is able to keep its financial arrangements completely confidential.  Mark my words, PADA will cost you more than the Government told you.  Guaranteed. 

I went to Geneva for the day today.  Sadly, it was not to check out my Swiss bank account.  It was actually more exciting than that.  I was visiting the Large Hadron Collidor, or LHC, which, despite being an almost incomprehensible and mind-boggling physics experiment, has actually got quite a lot of press coverage as it nears its opening.  It is based at CERN, the European centre for nuclear research. CERN is where the world wide web was invented, and interestingly there is speculation taht one of the side-effects of the LHC will be to make the current web obsolete - see HERE.

My host for the day was Dr Brian Cox, a name which immediately conjures an image of beards and sandals.  So you can imagine my surprise when he turned out to be the spitting image of Liam Gallagher, if Liam had decided to pursue a career in particle physics rather than rock’n'roll.  It turned out that there was a reason for this.  Dr Cox had indeed been a rock star, playing keyboards for D:ream, of “Things can only get better” fame.  I was delighted to learn that he is now planning to vote Conservative.

Brian and his wife were producing a podcast in the lead up to the opening of LHC.  They have already interviewed John Barrowman and a Dean of the Church of England.  A lot of comedians seem interested in the project as well.  We pondered why this should be.  Is there a tendency in both physicists and comedians towards introspection? Or have both physicists and comedians worked out that we are merely insignificant specks in the universe, so the only way to get through is to have a good laugh?

Anyway, on to the collider, the purpose of the visit and the star of the show.  Yes, this is science fiction stuff.  It is a 27km circle 100 metres underground.  It has four detectors, which is a modest word for hundreds of tons and millions of pounds of sophisticated engineering that looks like a spaceship.  All this to detect the smallest particles in the universe.  The collider will sling particles around the circle at just under the speed of light, and collide them into each other.  The resulting smash up will replicate Big Bang about one billionth of a second after it happened i.e pretty much the very beginning of the universe, hence travelling back in time.  The furthest we have got so far is about 300,000 years after Big Bang.

They hope to find the Higgs Bosun.  This is a particle first identified (at least, the maths was) by Professor Higgs (who is alive and well in Edinburgh) in 1963, and it is the particle that gives matter mass (with me so far?).  The analogy used is that the Higgs bosun is a “sycophant” - it attaches itself to particles in the way sycophants attach themselves to famous people when they walk in the room, slowing them down and giving them mass.  Not all elements interact with the Higgs bosun - light, for example, which therefore has no mass and goes straight through the room, friendless.

Brian describes what is happening at CERN as the biggest step change in physics for a generation.  It is like opening the door to a room that has so far been completely sealed.  The Higgs bosun is the key but no one is sure what is inside.  Someone in Hawaii has even launched a lawsuit to prevent the LHC opening, as they think it will cause the end of the world.

All this excitement comes when science cuts are clouding the particle physics world.  Newsnight had a good report which you can read/see here including a starring role for the leyboard player from D;Ream.

Following the NUT’s vote to ban troops from schools, I wrote to all my secondary schools.  I am delighted to report that all of them said they welcome visits from the armed services (one was just about to welcome the Marines) and would continue to do so.  Quentin Davies - the Tory MP who defected to Labour - has just prepared a report for Brown which has been given as an exclusive to The Observer.  It claims that there should be cadets in every school, and all secondary school children should be taught how to handle firearms.  This is not as barmy as it sounds - teaching children to handle guns properly is far more likely to teach them to respect the deadly nature of the weapon and could (I know it sounds counter-intuitive) reduce the use of guns.  However, the report is presumably uncosted, and apart from a quick headline and a re-announcment in six months’ time, nothing will actually happen.