Following his resignation from Cabinet last week, former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne is now entitled to a ministerial severance package worth £17,207, equivalent to 3 months of his taxpayer-funded £68,827 salary. Such entitlements are least deserved when criminal allegations are charged against Secretaries of State. A spokesmen for the party said Mr Huhne still had yet to decide whether to take the package. The TaxPayers’ Alliance is not the only voice urging him not to.

He now faces a cross-party and public consensus urging him to decline the generous package. In August 2010, he shared a platform with Conservative Party Co-Chairman Baroness Warsi who said (referring to Labour cabinet ministers who were entitled to payout having been voted out), “a time when people across the country are being asked to tighten their belts to deal with Labour’s economic mess, it is unacceptable that the very people responsible for the mess are eligible to walk away with up to £20,000 each. Forfeiting this pay would be the first step towards accepting their responsibility, and the first sign they had come to terms with the mistakes of the past.”

As Labour MP Chris Evans said: “If he didn’t agree with her, he should have said so – so he should now forfeit the £17,207 he is entitled to.”

Tim Farron, President of the Liberal Democrats said it would be right for him to “take a lead” in these tough times..

I agree that Mr Huhne should show he is sensitive to the economic climate and the circumstances surrounding his resignation by declining his severance package. Particularly at a time when taxpayers can ill afford it.

In the wake of the expenses scandal we revealed that many MPs who had fiddled their expenses were entitled to resettlement grants. These one-off payments are not the same as severance payments but are worth 50-100 per cent of an MP’s annual salary, dependent on their age and length of service. At the time we called for these grants to be abolished entirely as MPs are aware that they take their job on a five-year fixed contract, so there is no reason to hand them these payments. Similarly if an MP or minister, like nine-homes-Huhne leaves office under the cloud of such scandal as this, they should no longer be entitled to golden goodbyes like severance payments at taxpayers’ expense. Huhne should save himself any further embarrassment and forfeit his payoff, regardless of whether or not he is later cleared of these charges.

The Evening Standard’s Craig Woodhouse blogged last week that Early Day Motions are being threatened with abolition in the House of Commons, in advance of an adjournment debate tonight on the subject of “reforming EDMs”.

Early Day Motions are often referred to by their critics as “parliamentary graffiti”, since several thousand of these motions are tabled by MPs every year in Parliament but are never debated: they are merely printed alongside other Commons business papers the day after they are tabled, and reprinted on future days whenever they attract new signatories.

They can cover virtually any topic, and MPs often use them as a way of highlighting a local issue or cause, after which they can tell their local papers that they have “tabled a motion in Parliament” on the issue of the day in their constituency.  You can see that recent entries on the current list of EDMs includes one celebrating the Golden Anniversary of Livingston New Town and another wishing good luck to the Northern Ireland football team, for example.

Those examples are clearly quite parochial, but the motions can equally apply to national or international issues, and on a positive note, they offer MPs a way of setting out their stance on free vote issues or getting a head of steam behind a particular campaign. No one could doubt that getting a couple of hundred MPs’ signatures in support of an EDM is a good way of demonstrating strength of feeling on an issue. However, if truth be told,  very few of the EDMs ever reach that level of support. Instead, most languish with a couple of dozen signatures and are forgotten very quickly.

The big problem with EDMs is their cost, as cited in Craig Woodhouse’s blog. He wrote that they end up costing £290 each – equivalent to £1 million a year – which is quite clearly an exorbitant amount.

But I would not want to see EDMs abolished altogether: as I said above, occasionally they can be a useful tool for demonstrating strength of feeling on an issue and one such example was the Save General Election Night campaign I ran in a previous life. The EDM on that issue in 2009 attracted 220 signatures from across the political spectrum – the 20^th-most signed of the 2,424 EDMs in 2008-09 – and helped build support for a change in the law.

I’m pretty sure that the lion’s share of the cost of EDMs must go in the paper, ink and administration of the daily printing of the EDMs, so I suggest that in order to save money they should not be printed as a matter of course. Instead, EDMs should become an MPs-only version of the Government e-petitions site: it would surely cost a fraction of the current system to administer, but would not remove that potentially powerful mechanism from an MP’s armoury.

What’s more, if you want to make EDMs more meaningful, topical and relevant, the BackBench Business Committee should be encouraged to take note of the most popular EDMs when deciding which issues it wants brought to the floor of the House in backbench time.

Simon Heffer is into shooting. Last year, his shooting club noticed that its members were booking fewer shooting days, thereby reducing the club’s income. When asked why this was, the members replied that they now had 50p income tax to pay. One gamekeeper lost his job.

My neighbour in Kent has a ramshackle garden and wood of about 12 acres. He can’t maintain it himself, as he works on average 60 hours a week. When he bought the property, he had planned to employ a part-time gardener to maintain it. As a result of the 50p he is holding back. His house could also do with a cleaner – who is also not employed for the same reason.

I have heard similar stories about window cleaners, house cleaners, chauffeurs, gardeners, housekeepers, child minders and painters-decorators. In other words: punishing ‘the rich’ has meant that people who do not earn a lot have lost their jobs.

A person with an income of £500,000 now pays £50,000 extra in tax since the 50p rate was introduced. A full time live out nanny-housekeeper in London earns, on average, £20,000 a year. Guess which savings are made first?

Sometimes the full-time position is tuned down to part-time day work, often cash-in-hand instead of fully legal. A number of the freshly fired may end up on welfare, paid for by the same state which is so eagerly hoping for extra cash from the 50p.

As a story, these job losses remain largely under the radar. They are held by people who have no loud public voice, and who are usually not unionised. The right hold back from pointing it out, as they fear the left’s accusation that they only care for the rich. Observe that it is not the ‘rich’ person who loses his job in the process.

The jobs lost because of the 50p rate are often held by people who have no other employment options. They are pushed off the lowest rung of the job ladder by greedy government. Often they are women; sometimes the sole breadwinners or single mothers.

Many on the centre right have claimed that the 50p would bring in less money, rather than more, as those targeted by it would move money abroad, move abroad themselves, or pay extra for good tax advice to avoid it. Back in November Chief Secretary to the Treasure Danny Alexander poured cold water on the clamour to scrap the 50p, claiming it raised “hundreds of millions of pounds” for the Treasury. John Redwood MP pointed out that the Treasury’s own figures show that income tax fell by 8% in the year to September 2011, and that most of the reduction came from the top income scale. I doubt whether the report will also report on the extra welfare paid as a result of the 50p.

Last year TaxPayers’ Alliance research revealed that 2,840 full time equivalent public sector staff were working for the unions, instead of front line services.

Today the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has released a new study looking at facility time, arguing that it provides benefits in excess of the costs to taxpayers.  There is no genuinely new research, an old estimate of the benefits is simply adjusted for inflation, but more than that the study is misleading in a number of ways.

Misrepresenting the source

Within the study, it is described as a “short report, commissioned by the TUC from the Work & Employment Research Unit at the University of Hertfordshire”.  This suggests that the source is, while commissioned by the TUC, not ideologically motivated.  Though the author is not identified in the report itself, their website identifies him as Gregor Gall, Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire.  At his page on the university’s website he makes clear his close and longstanding relationship with the unions, saying that: “In this I have work [sic] with the Institute of Employment Rights, established a research service for trade unions, write [sic] regularly for the Morning Star and conducted research for unions like the FBU, PCS and RMT.”

The Wikipedia page about him records his history in far left politics:

Originally a member of Labour Students and the Labour Party, he ended his membership of these over the issue of the poll tax, then joining the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in 1990. He joined the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in advance of the SWP joining on mass, leaving the SWP in 2004 after many years of growing disagreements. He remains a member of the SSP and is a member of the editorial board of the Scottish Left Review,[2] editor of its book arm, the Scottish Left Review Press, and the chair of the editorial committee of the journal of the Scottish Labour History Society, called Scottish Labour History. He is a member of the board of management of the Jimmy Reid Foundation. He is working on a biography of Tommy Sheridan (due out late 2011), and a history of the SSP (due out late 2012).

While the author’s political history does not mean we should discount this study, the TUC clearly give the impression of a far more disinterested relationship between the researcher and their movement than actually exists.

The cost of facility time

The study compares estimates of the benefits of facility time across the public sector with the cost of union subsidies that we identified in our study.  However, as we made clear in our report, that estimate is a conservative one for a number of reasons:

• “Some authorities did provide an actual remuneration or cost for facility time taken, and in nearly every case it was higher than our figure of £28,192.36. For example, our total for Barking and Dagenham council was £183,250 in remuneration; the local authority disclosed remuneration of £235,008. For methodological clarity, we used our – generally lower – estimate in all cases.”
• Not all public bodies responded to our Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.  In part because some union staff urged the staff responsible for answering freedom of information requests to say that they could not provide an estimate of facility time taken.  That problem is discussed in the 2010 edition of our research.
• There will be other costs to hosting those staff, such as office space and other facilities, that were not included in our estimate.
• Not every public body was included in our FOI request.  Small quangos for example were often left out in order to minimise the cost of administering and complying with the requests needed to produce the research.

That is all the result of the fact our report was an attempt to discover how facility time affected different public bodies, not to maximise the estimate of the total subsidy to the unions.

There are official estimates of the total amount of facility time taken, which are, to quote the Channel 4 Fact Check blog, “far higher” than the figure in our report “at £230m to £243m”.

Comparing the total found in our survey with an estimate of the value of facility time across the entire public sector will obviously bias the results in favour of the benefits of facility time.  It is hard to believe that the author of the TUC report was not aware of the higher official figure, which suggests that this was an intentional attempt to mislead the reader.

Lower dismissal rates

A major element in the purported benefits of facility time is that dismissal “rates were lower in unionised workplaces with union reps – this resulted in savings related to recruitment costs of £107m-£213m pa”.  But that is clearly only part of the picture when it comes to dismissal rates.  Dismissals can be a bad thing to the extent they represent the loss of workers who could otherwise have represented good value for the taxpayer in their roles.  Or they can be a good thing to the extent they get rid of workers who have behaved improperly or are not well suited to their roles.  In some cases, such as teaching, there are longstanding concerns that it may be too difficult to dismiss bad employees.

In some cases, it may be the case that union reps have helped to turn around situations where workers were not productive, or prevent someone being dismissed inappropriately.  In others they may have worked to frustrate a dismissal that should have taken place to improve services.  The RMT union once urged members to strike after “a union activist was sacked for playing squash while off on sick leave with an ankle injury”, for example.

Lower voluntary exit rates

Another large element is that voluntary “exit rates were lower in unionised workplaces with union reps, which again resulted in savings related to recruitment costs of £72m-143m pa”.

Again this could be a good thing or a bad thing.  It could be that the workforce is better motivated as a result of the union reps work, or it could be that having full-time activists working for a union secures more generous pay for their members, and means that they are more likely to stay.  To the extent it is the latter, taxpayers will more than pay, in the bill for higher salaries and benefits, for any improvement in exit rates.

Lower numbers of employment tribunal cases

This is a relatively small component in the overall calculation.  It is likely to be a corollary of the lower rate of dismissals, which as noted above could be for good or bad reasons.  And it could also be driven by the types of industry that are unionised or not unionised.

Lower rate of workplace-related injuries

Without a more detailed investigation of the underlying data it is difficult to fully assess the validity of this finding.  But there will be a number of differences between unionised and non-unionised workplaces in both the private sector and the public sector that are not the result of the work of union reps, as entire industries tend to be unionised or non-unionised rather than individual organisations.  That could be particularly important in this case.  It could be as stark as the difference between police officers and soldiers on the one hand, and officials working in a Government Department on the other.  Or fishermen on the one hand, and others working in an office.

Lower rates of workplace-related illness

This is subject to some of the reservations noted above.  It may reflect other qualities of unionised and non-unionised workplaces and union reps extracting more favourable terms of employment, which are paid for by the taxpayer in other ways.  At the same time, this is hard to reconcile with the fact that public sector staff take far more time in sick leave than those in the private sector, but public sector workers get far more facility time.  Productivity growth in the private sector is also higher and there are fewer strikes, as I discussed in an earlier article.

Conclusions

Our study was not a comprehensive attempt to study the costs and benefits of facility time.  An honest attempt to do so would be a welcome contribution to the debate.  However this study is both extremely simplistic in its analysis of the benefits and misleading in its presentation of the cost.

It is utterly inadequate as a justification for the counter-intuitive claim that higher quality public services can be delivered when public sector staff work for their union, rather doing the jobs they are supposed to be paid for on the front line.  There are case studies of union reps doing valuable work included in the TUC study.  But those case studies ignore the opportunity cost of those staff being unavailable to work on the front line, and have to be balanced against the cases exposed by MPs, the media and the Order-Order.com blog that show union reps engaging in work that is not in the interests of taxpayers.

And, on top of the direct cost of funding well over two thousand union activists, subsidies to the unions distort the democratic process.  They allow the unions to spend money they raise from their members on building their institutional weight and political power, instead of their immediate work representing those members.

The Government should act to end taxpayer subsidies for the unions, and reject this misleading analysis.

Last week the BBC Daily Politics ran an interesting discussion of crony capitalism between presenter Giles Dilnot and Jesse Norman MP, who has written a concise paper about the subject for the Free Enterprise Group in the Conservative Party.  Unfortunately the discussion is much too narrowly focused on the extent of regulation, whereas the more important issue is its capture.

I think the starting point for any discussion of crony capitalism has to be William Baumol’s work on entrepreneurship.  Here is the abstract to his classic paper Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive and Destructive:

The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society’s entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime.  This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities.  This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply.  Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.

The reason why calls to abandon capitalism are getting such short shrift is that it has proved unbelievably productive.  Jesse Norman explains how it is both productive and moral, and Baumol’s hypothesis explains why.

Smart and ambitious people will always come up with inventive ways of gaining greater wealth and status.  Greed isn’t new and also isn’t good or bad.  The question is how they do that.  In feudal societies they would physically fight over land, people and property.  Under Communism they would desperately fight for political power, often with extremely high stakes.  By contrast, when capitalism is working well entrepreneurs succeed by innovating and addressing some need that had previously gone unmet.  That drives economic growth.

What we call crony capitalism is when that process breaks down.  When the best way to do well is to play a zero sum game beggaring your neighbour instead of engaging in more productive activities.  That can happen because of failures of corporate governance: smart people get rich by lobbying for unjust rewards at the expense of shareholders.  Or failures of politics: they get rich by lobbying for subsidies or protection against the consequences of risks they have taken, and been rewarded for taking.

There are a number of recent examples in which interference has promoted crony capitalism rather than free markets: extravagant solar subsidies; procyclical banking regulations; and quangos that take money raised in taxes from all businesses and spend it supporting a favoured few.  All of those are instances in which regulatory or fiscal interventions have created an economy in which profits depend more on using politics and the law to seek rents instead of innovating.

Laws that politicians promise will fix the situation are likely to end up being captured in just the same way as existing rules have.  On balance, crony capitalism seems most likely when politics is big and remote from the people who pay the bill.  That might be why decentralised public finances are associated with greater restraint in public spending and greater economic growth.

It isn’t more or less capitalism, or more or less regulation, that will determine how cronyish our economy is, but clear and simple rules built on healthy democratic accountability.

The Economist writes about a long term challenge for the Chancellor of the Exchequer as people drink less and smoke less, reducing the revenue from duties on cigarettes and booze.  More efficient cars could have the same effect.  A Citigroup study has pointed out that the lower fueling costs of electric cars, which partly make up for the currently high initial costs, are the result of taxation on electricity being lower than taxes on petrol or diesel.  So if we all start driving them what will politicians do with a Fuel Duty shaped hole in their budgets?

This gets at the problem with attempts by advocates of sin taxes to have it both ways when they argue for those taxes.  On the one hand they’re all trying to save us from some vice, like driving to work or enjoying a drink.  On the other they promise a new, friendly way of financing public spending. To the extent that you succeed in changing behaviour that revenue will evaporate.  The fact that some of these taxes raise so much money shows that they are mostly about politicians’ just taking the cash to prop up wasteful spending – often particularly from people on low and middle incomes – rather than improving the nation’s health or helping the environment.

The best argument for these taxes is that they are needed to control externalities, costs our actions impose on others that we don’t pay for without the taxes.  That logic doesn’t necessarily work out either in theory or in practice.  Politics rarely produces the neutral, efficient interventions that the theory requires.

And that argument can’t justify our existing sin taxes.  I’ve looked at the problems with green taxes in research for the TPA and in detail for the book Let them eat carbon.  But tobacco duties are another example where the evidence to justify high taxes on smokers who will bear most of the costs of their addiction themselves is very weak.  I wrote for ConservativeHome about the weaknesses in a Policy Exchange report that was a good example of the problems with that evidence.

If these are just taxes to raise revenue then they start to look very unfair, and a very bad idea.  Taking money from people on low and middle incomes means leaving them either more dependent on benefits, reducing their ability to stand on their own two feet, or impoverished.  Not very virtuous at all.

A new dossier of evidence demonstrating how trade unions are abusing the subsidies they get from the taxpayer has today been published by Witham MP, Priti Patel.

Citing our recent research note, Taxpayer funding of trade unions 2011,  Ms Patel’s dossier – as previewed over the weekend in the Sunday Express  – makes the case for urgent reforms.

Ms Patel has uncovered:

• Examples of how unions encourage their members to abuse taxpayer-funded facility time by stretching the definition of what counts as legitimate union activity. She cites a Unison guide to facility time which instructs its members: “…Although you’re entitled to unpaid time off to attend conference, branch meetings, etc., why not try to get those activities covered by your paid time off?”;
• Examples of trade unionists with public sector jobs using taxpayer-funded time for political campaigns against the cuts being implemented by the Government. Cases highlighted in the dossier include a PCS union official abusing taxpayer-funded resources to promote the “Blackpool Against the Cuts” campaign (alongside evidence that the PCS trade union has formally advised its reps to abuse facility time);
• How the taxpayer subsidy to the unions is increased further when councils or other public sector organisations provide them with free office space. Camden Council has been providing free of charge a disused council building for nine taxpayer-funded union officials organising anti-cuts campaigns – resources worth hundreds of thousands of pounds;
• Abuse of the money given to unions by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills via the Union Learning Fund – with over £20,000 now being repaid by the TUC, by order of the Skills Minister, after the cash was found to have been used to publish politically inappropriate material;
• Details of the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money channelled to unions through European Union funds, some of which is merely paying to train trade unionists in organising and activism, and for which they are then awarded Diplomas and Certificates.

Ms Patel’s dossier – which you can download here – has been passed to David Cameron and Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, for further consideration and is an extremely valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about taxpayer funding of trade unions.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance will continue to make the point that while it is perfectly legitimate for trade unions to represent their members’ interests, it is simply unfair and wrong that taxpayers’ money should be subsidising them: all union activities should be funded by their members’ subscriptions.

Today I attended the Government’s meeting on their open data plan. The measures were announced in the Autumn Statement and include opening up more data, allowing for the releasing of transport and health data as a priority, and the creation of the Open Data Institute. The Government made even more of a commitment to open already created data that it holds in various forms. This is good news for many reasons, including public service efficiency and the growth of the innovation economy.

The most important aspect of the Autumn Statement was the omission of the Public Data Corporation. A consultation was launched late in the summer to discuss the proposal to set up a fee charging organisation which would aggregate government data and charge for open data which we the taxpayers have already paid for. The Public Data Corporation proposal would also seek out private sector investment to eventually privatise a public body with open data. There were many other details discussed in this consultation, but the bottom line was that the government sought a way to seek direct revenue from open data instead of indirect revenue through innovation of free and freely available open data.

In our consultation response we made the argument for the free release of open data and discussed the fact that the Public Data Corporation did not need to be created. We cited a number of compelling case studies in our argument – further details can be found in our report here.

So today at the Government meeting Francis Maude said that the government itself is moving away from the charging model proposed in the Public Data Corporation consultation. Instead, the Open Data Institute has been created to bring together academia, public sector, and private enterprises so that new ways of opening up data can be discussed and implemented. We will need to keep close watch and make sure that any vestiges of the Public Data Corporation don’t creep into the Open Data Institute or the newly announced Open Data Group. But for now the Public Data Corporation will not be created.

There has already been much publicity in the media for our report last week into Taxpayer funding of trade unions. We found that at least £113 million of taxpayers’ money was last year given to trade unions either in direct grants or through taxpayer-subsidised “facility time” – and we believe that it should be stopped.

At yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions – coinciding with the strike by many of the unions which are benefiting from that taxpayer funding – Tewkesbury MP Laurence Robertson cited our research as he raised the issue with David Cameron.
The Prime Minster agreed in his answer that it was indeed time to review the situation and said that he would end the practice of “full-time trade unionists working in the public sector on trade union business”. The exchange is the subject of a report in this morning’s Guardian and you can watch if for yourself above.

This is the second week running that TPA research has been discussed at Prime Minister’s Questions. Last week our report into excessive motoring taxes was raised with David Cameron.

Following up on our release yesterday confronting union myths, and TPA Research Director John O’Connell’s blog for this site, I wrote for the Spectator Coffee House about the TUC using a poll which showed the public had a good idea of the value of normal public sector pensions to try and sell their misleading average pension statistic.

Since then the Institute of Fiscal Studies have estimated that public sector workers are 7.5 per cent better paid, even after “allowing for the higher age and qualifications of public sector workers”.  Their work confirms the figure from the Office for National Statistics which we have been quoting.  The unions just can’t defend the strike except with misleading claims that fall apart when challenged, like they did when I debated the issue with the ATL President on Sky News:

In case you missed it, our recent report into the excessive motoring taxes paid by British drivers took centre stage in Parliament on Wednesday. We found that the residents of Maldon in Essex are clobbered by higher motoring taxes than anyone else in the country, so their local MP, John Whittingdale, asked David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions what he was going to do about this “intolerable burden”.

The Prime Minister replied by saying that he is “absolutely committed” to helping people with their motoring expenses at this time of economic difficulty – and you can be sure that we at the TPA will hold him to that. The Prime Minister added that the TaxPayers’ Alliance was doing “a good job” of highlighting the issue. Here’s the full exchange:

A BBC Politics Show South East report last weekend explained how Brighton & Hove City Council plan to increase council tax by 3.5 per cent. They are one of the only councils to publicly admit to rejecting money from the Government to freeze tax instead.

As Helen Drew explains, the council could have accepted £3 million from central government. However, this was turned down in favour of raising council tax to gain £4 million.  The council said that the extra £1 million was necessary in order to maintain local services. This misses the point somewhat. As many innovative councils have shown, it is possible to make savings which don’t affect local services – take Newham for example.

Admittedly it is a little disappointing that councils need an incentive to freeze council tax in the first place, but the measure is a welcome one for struggling families. However, Cllr Jason Kitcat, Cabinet Member for Finance and Central Services at Brighton & Hove City Council, wrote:

“Brighton & Hove is not the kind of place where we want to give up on the elderly, marginalised or vulnerable – those most in need of help. We believe in civilisation, in public service and the greater good.”

This rhetoric does not address how the council can make savings in other areas while prioritising key local services. They could, for example, look at cutting executive pay and leading from the top. Our Town Hall Rich List, released earlier this year, revealed that five council officers, including the Chief Executive, received total remuneration in excess of £100,000 in 2009-10. In addition, the council employs three political advisers and three European Officers. Removing unnecessary jobs like this could save the council around £225,000 per year. They could even shift mileage rate claims down to HMRC recommended levels from the 65p a mile they are at now. These bills currently cost the council over £800,000.

In addition to hitting local taxpayers with a 3.5 per cent rise in council tax, another proposed measure is to increase parking charges. Leaked papers seen by the Brighton Argus disclosed the council’s revised tariff, which will see increases of more than 100 per cent. It could cost £15 at weekends for four hours at one city centre car park – a huge increase on the current £9.50. The measures have united the local Conservative and Labour groups, both describing the idea as an unwelcome blow to business at a time when they are already struggling. As Cllr Kitcat notes, inflation is running at 5.2 per cent, so yes, times are tough, but they are also incredibly tough for taxpayers. With VAT at 20 per cent, as well as staggering fuel and energy costs, the last thing they need is an increase in council tax, and more parking charges on top.

In the BBC piece, Tony Travers of the London School of Economics suggests that the country’s first Green controlled council wants to “stand out from the crowd to show they are different”. Whether this is the case or not, they have the same responsibility as other local authorities across the country. Councils need to be making savings while at the same time giving taxpayers a break. It is safe to say this deal is anything but a good deal for taxpayers.

Click here to watch the piece on the BBC Politics Show South East (from 38m 30s, available until Sunday 13th November). On this Sunday’s programme, there will be a feature on plans to change the amount councils get from business rates.

** UPDATE** Councillor Jason Kitcat has been named the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s Pinhead of the Month for boasting this month about his administration’s decision to refuse the Government funding which would allow for a freeze in council tax next year and to instead impose a 3.5% increase in council tax for Brighton and Hove residents. **