Wednesday 18 July 2012

CALM - suicidal young men

As reported by the PA, and other media:

A quarter of adults in England and Wales have considered suicide, research suggests.
Suicidal thoughts are most common in those aged 45 to 54, with just over a third (31%) saying they had contemplated taking their own life, according to the research [...]

While men and women are both likely to feel suicidal, more men actually commit suicide, the campaign group said.
Calm chief executive Jane Powell said that 75.5% of the 4,517 people who committed suicide in 2010 were men.
She said that gender should be at the heart of Government's suicide-prevention policy.

Ah, so more taxpayers' money to be spent on... suicides. For men. (Or rather to reduce them.) Wonder where this money should be being spent?

And who conducted this research? From the PA article:

[...]according to the research conducted by the Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm).

Calm is a fake-charity in the UK, who out of their  £153k income for 2011, £152k (of which £98k was deferred to 2012) came from Primary Care Trusts. Which is the NHS. Which is taxpayers' money.

They describe themselves as:

The campaign against living miserably (CALM) was set up to reduce the high suicide rate amongst men under 35, currently the single biggest killer of young men in the UK

In other words: Charity that depends on taxpayers' money demands that more taxpayers' money be spent on primary reason for said charity to exist.


Tuesday 17 July 2012

Sun Life - funerals

From The Telegraph, carehome.co.uk, marketwatch, and other media outlets, we have some 'research' into funeral costs in the UK co-conducted by the University of Bath and another partner:

  • Almost half of 69,000 applications for a Funeral Payment (FP) rejected(2) 
  • So-called "pauper's funerals" (Public Health Funerals) expected to rise as it becomes "too expensive for poor people to die" 
  • Funeral Payment applicants forced into debt by committing to funeral cost of GBP 1,000s prior to finding out if they will receive state support
Gosh. What a sorry state of affairs. Who helped the University of Bath conduct their research? Another impartial group of people?

From MarketWatch:

A new Cost of Dying Special Report into Social Fund Funeral Payments from Sun Life Direct and the University of Bath reveals that the Funeral Payment scheme, intended to contribute to the cost of funerals for the most vulnerable in society, is failing to meet mounting demand.

[...]

Simon Cox, head of life planning at Sun Life Direct, says: "We have to ask ourselves whether the current infrastructure for end of life support is fit for purpose. Something must be done, and quickly.

Ah. Company that sells funeral plans seemingly encourages public, through scare tactics, to buy funeral plans. Or this is possibly a run-up to suggesting that the government use a private company (can you think of one?) to take over the Funeral Payments system in order to get their hands on tax-payers' money.

In no way is this an advertisement. Not at all.