10 facts about UK offshore wind

Here’s a nifty collection of facts about offshore wind in the UK from Renewable UK.  Number 3 is particularly striking, I think:

The UK is the world leader in offshore wind with as much capacity already installed as the rest of the world put together. Given the current construction and development pipeline, the UK’s sector lead is likely to continue until 2020. The nation with the most offshore wind farms after the UK is Denmark.

Read more here: 10 Facts About Offshore Wind

Council House Sales by Local Authority from 1979

This page from the DCLG website has some useful stats on Council house sales since 1979, broken down by local authority and by region.

Table 648: Social housing sales: Local authority stock sold through right-to-buy and other council house sales by district and region has what I think are the best local authority figures.  This shows, for example, that there were 6886 council homes in Southampton sold off between 1979 and 1998; and that there were around 200 Council homes in Southampton being sold off per annum in the early years of the Labour government; and that this figure dropped to just 29 homes being sold off in 2009-10.

Labour Achievements 1997-2010

There are lots of good individual sites out there that list Labour achievements from 1997-2010, so I thought I’d try and collate some of them for easy reference.  Some of these are slightly out of date, but still I think useful as a prompt for the kinds of things we should be monitoring now.  I’ll add more to the list if people point them out.

50 Labour Party achievements since 1997 (originally from the old Labour website, reproduced by UK Local & General Election Debate)

50 Labour Achievements – a list compiled by the Trades Unions UNISON and GMB

Top 50 Labour achievements (different list but still good, from South Thanet CLP)

Labour Achievements in International Development

Labour Achievements in Europe (alternative pdf version here)

UPDATE: Wells Labour Party has got a great section showing Labour lines and achievements, broken down by policy area, up to 2010

Local Recycling Rates

The DEFRA website has some useful stats about the recycling rates of local authorities going back to 2005.

Table 3 of the local authority data 05-06 spreadsheet has the earliest LA data.

Table 3 of the LA-201011-v2 spreadsheet has the latest data.

Here’s the fun bit though.

The local authority data 07-08 has some additional key performance indicators about the cost of waste collection that don’t appear to have been continued in later datasets.

Column O shows the cost of waste collection per head for every local authority in England.  Costs of waste collection and disposal are generally higher if recycling rates are lower, because more waste has to be sent to expensive landfill sites.  But this is the first time I’ve seen local stats you can interrogate to bear this kind of thing out.

The stats show an average waste collection cost per head amongst all local authorities who returned such data as being £53.60.  My home of Southampton comes in at above average, at a cost per head of £58.07.

Just in case DEFRA ever gets rid of this awesome spreadsheet, I’ve saved a copy of it here.

Local Authority Municipal Waste Statistics 2007-8- cost of waste collection per head