Sir Alan Sugar is in the papers this morning claiming he will step down as director of some of his companies to avoid the escalating brouhaha over his BBC job that has been gathering speed ever since Gordon Brown appointed him 'enterprise tsar' last week. It shows that Sir Alan knows there's a... Read more...
As Brown's new Cabinet settled down to their first meeting this morning, Liam Byrne may have joked that for a board of directors, few of them - himself included - really know much about their portfolios. Andy Burnham, who until recently was in charge of the rag tag department for... Read more...
It's rare to hear anything at all about Britain's Departmental Permanent Secretaries. Even scandal doesn't usually push their names into the headlines. So Sir David Normington's decision to speak to the BBC - for a programme about Sir Ian Blair's departure from the Met last year - is something of... Read more...
The Telegraph reports a truly ridiculous example of the police failing to do their job and enforce the law: "However, police and council workers have ruled out fixing the pothole-ridden road because they are worried about sparking a riot from travellers who could think they are about to be evicted... Read more...
Today, we submitted our evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life's investigation into MPs' expenses. The inquiry is pretty wide-ranging, with a number of questions to be answered on a wide variety of topics, so it's enabled us to set out a pretty comprehensive manifesto for how best... Read more...
It's difficult to recall now, but once upon a time, PFI was meant to save taxpayers money. Read more...
Sir Roy Anderson, Vice Chancellor of Imperial College, told the Guardian this week that Britain’s top universities should be privatised: "How important is higher education to UK plc? Staggeringly so. It is a multi-billion-pound industry. It is one of the few things we are world competitive in. If you take... Read more...
Over the past months we’ve been working with some grassroots campaigners in Swindon to save some libraries from closure. You would have thought it simple to keep a library open - the ideas are out there - and that if you appealed to the council, negotiated and found a settlement the libraries could... Read more...
As of writing the Guardian jobs website is advertising 527 jobs this week as you can see from the box on the right. The pick of the crop this week, and our non-job of the week, comes from Brent council: “Brent Tobacco Control Alliance Co-ordinator From £34,045 -... Read more...
A new report by the Taxpayers' Alliance reveals Britain's best and worst Members of the European Parliament, based on a detailed analysis of their performance. The assessment provides a key source of information on which MEPs are hard-working, and committed to transparency and accountability. The results reveal a wide gap... Read more...
Around this time last year the WMTPA wrote on the West Midlands Centre for Constructing Excellence (WMCCE), an off-the-radar quango with a snazzy website whose remit seemingly allowed them to give out a lot of advice and a lot of money. Oddly, at the time, the limited content on the... Read more...
The BBC has commissioned a poll which shows that voters no longer trust MPs to tell the truth, that they think MPs put their own self interest above public service motivation and that more than half of MPs are corrupt. None of this should come as a massive surprise,... Read more...
A new TPA/ComRes poll reveals the vast gulf in opinion between MEPs in Brussels and the British public on EU issues. By comparing the views of 1,020 British adults and 101 MEPs, weighted to be representative of wider society and the European Parliament respectively, the new research demonstrates that while... Read more...
Education is - by its very nature - social engineering. It provides people, young or old, with the tools with which to get on and move up. Education should be encouraged constantly, exactly because of its influence on wider society. Which makes recent news about the Department for Children, Schools... Read more...
One week on from the initial announcement that we have teamed up with the Daily Mail to bring a private prosecution against any MPs who may have broken the law in their expenses claims, I thought it was a good opportunity to give you an update on our progress. As... Read more...
So Sir Roy McNulty is to fill the £80,510 per year position of chairman at Advantage West Midlands, despite actually pulling out of the original race in April 2008, according to the Birmingham Post. Sir Roy’s withdrawal was apparently “amid speculation that he had been asked by the Government... Read more...
Last month the WMTPA blogged on how the West Midlands Fire Service is spending £23million kitting out a new base for call centre staff when the council-owned i54 project in Wolverhampton is across the road and still has tumbleweed blowing through it. Well, last Friday the Birmingham Post reported how... Read more...
Too often in the public sector, and in many private companies, bonuses are paid out year in, year out to executives presiding over failing organisations or according to targets that don't really reflect ambitious expectations of performance. Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco is not presiding over a... Read more...
At the TaxPayers' Alliance, we often have to criticise HMRC. Whether they're harassing law abiding taxpayers, pushing for new powers to take money straight out of people's bank accounts without approval from a court or losing people's personal data - they often need to be criticised. However, today they've really... Read more...
The Telegraph reports that the chairman of the Labour Party has written to their activists to invite submissions calling for MPs to be deselected. Unfortunately, all that does is move the Labour Party to a similar position to the Conservatives, where the small core of local activists can take... Read more...
The outrage over MPs’ expenses has been a catalyst for a wider debate on constitutional reform. The current political zeitgeist has fostered calls for significant change in how politics operates in the UK. Suggestions abound on how to achieve this, and one topic that has reared its head is that... Read more...
As the expenses scandal now turns towards a more constructive stage, potential reforms are thick on the ground. From wholesale electoral change (see here), to the beefing up the FoI Act (see here), interested parties on all sides are queuing up to offer their diagnosis and prescription. Gordon Brown concentrated... Read more...
This week's reports from the IMF and Standard and Poors (see this post) have piled the pressure on George Osborne.The IMF says he must be much tougher than Darling in tackling the build-up of public sector debt. And he must place the emphasis on cutting expenditure rather than raising taxes.S&P... Read more...
There is a debate going on at the moment, largely amongst educationalists, about whether to treat students as consumers or "partners in a learning community". It's a debate which appears to have no easy resolution, but on the ground - in campuses across the UK - it also appears to... Read more...