The SATs exam shambles, which has left huge numbers of children either without results or with results that are clearly inaccurate, has laid bare a failing that pervades the public sector far beyond just education and schools.

The first issue it raises is that of effective and professional contract negotiation. The Government has disgracefully hung back even from criticising ETS, the company which has made such a hash of things, despite failures so great that in any other sector they would have had their contract terminated before you could say "turn over your papers and begin". There have been worrying suggestions that the reason for this could be that their contract is so incompetently drafted that ETS haven’t fully breached it or, just as bad, that ETS might be in a position to sue for compensation from the taxpayer.

If that is the case it is truly extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine how much worse ETS could have got things, with Barry Sheerman MP providing anecdotal evidence of teenagers being desperately drafted in to mark papers. The contract should have made perfectly clear that if they fail then the taxpayer has no responsibility to pay them another penny – anything else is a betrayal of taxpayers’ interests and the children relying on the system.

The second problem is one of accountability – who was responsible for getting this wrong, who must be responsible for solving it and how can we go about bring people to book for the whole shameful show. Ed Balls, as Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has responsibility for deciding educational policies, exam systems, study aims, financial provisions and a host of other things. Ken Boston, head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, was in charge of supervising the contract and delivery of the SATs. Both are presumably hoping the other will take the blame, whilst there is a very real danger that each will take a sufficiently small share of the blame that they both survive this farce without any real comeback at all. As we have so recently learned with the case of HMRC’s former boss, even if Mr Boston was to resign over the affair, there’s a good chance he would end up handsomely paid for doing so.

Underneath all this, past the flurry of abbreviations, quangos and contractors, is a harsh reality. This might be a question of dodging the blame or passing the buck in Whitehall but for the children involved it is a nightmare. They have worked hard for these exams, and have been left in limbo. Worse, their results are often used to decide their sets next year, on which their future education and GCSE choices are based. Furthermore, SATs are used to assess school performance, so without any reliable results parents, teachers, ministers and taxpayers are on shaky ground in making any judgements about who is doing well and who isn’t.

The really worrying thing is this: even if we punish those responsible for this case, the underlying conditions that produced this failure will persist across the public sector. Too many bad contracts are signed on our behalf by people who lack the experiece to negotiate them properly, who are relatively safe in the knowledge that they are near-impossible to hold to account if it does go wrong, and if they do lose their jobs then they will get a great big golden parachute, funded by the taxpayer. Unless we make fundamental changes, this will happen again – maybe not in schools, perhaps in the army or in hospitals – but it will happen again.

The excellent WhatDoTheyKnow online tool, developed by the MySociety group, makes it easy for members of the public to submit Freedom of Information requests and find out what public sector organisations are doing with their money.  It then makes the responses public so that we’re all a little better informed and can try and hold organisations to account democratically.

Unfortunately, Rother council are resisting this British glasnost.  They are complaining that the electronic submissions don’t give enough detail as they don’t tell them where the person sending the Freedom of Information Request lives.  Apparently inquiries from people outside Rother can’t have "serious purpose or value" unless they are from "a professional journalist or researcher".  This is incredibly dismissive of hard-working amateurs trying to do their bit for the community by scrutinising local government.  Julian Todd, who submitted the original FOI, sets out in detail why Rother are wrong to refuse to answer here.

Don’t let council officials get away with refusing to respect your right to know.  Get in touch with the leader of Rother council and let him know what they’ve been up to, and that you aren’t impressed!  Here are his contact details:

Cllr Carl Maynard (Leader of the Council) – [email protected] / 01424 756586

What price would you pay for your local councillors elected to your local district, borough, metropolitan or county councils?  A few points that we’ve noticed here bring us to ask this question.

The first issue must be the shocking increases in councillors’ pay.  Windsor and Maidenhead Council this year increased their pay by 91%.  We fought a long running battle with Bournemouth Council against their plans to increase Cabinet pay by 32% as well as offering a sweetener of a 17% pay increase for backbench councillors.  Other councils have voted themselves shocking increases the rest of us just don’t see. 

Second, the debacle over MPs expenses has brought mass public disdain over ‘snouts in the trough’ behaviour from elected politicians.  As public servants, employed by British taxpayers, do they get the right to line their pockets with our money?  It’s a far step removed from the ideas of voluntary, public service.  Councillors used to be paid an attendance allowance granted when they turned up for meetings.  Investigations into MEPs expenses, however, has shown that routinely politicians check in and check out, having declared their attendance and qualified for their attendance allowance – a shocking technicality robbing the taxpayer through abuse of the system.  Already councillors can claim breakfast, lunch and dinner allowances.  They get free blackberry’s, laptops and other luxuries on the taxpayer’s dime.  Yet with this subsidised communications equipment, when was the last time you heard from your councillor?

Finally, as I noted last week, councillors have very little power to overturn or even check decisions made by officers.  That officers at Thurrock Council could arbitrarily employ more staff for the public payroll, despite the objections of the elected councillors, shows that the current diffusion of authority in Town Halls leaves councillors with little power to shape their boroughs.

Obviously there are problems, the results of which cost the taxpayer dear.  Councillors have little power to stand up against Development Corporations, QUANGOs, Regional Assemblies and even central Government despite being the locally elected voice.  Unable to block unpopular decisions and powerless against central Government, are we just paying a high price – thousands of pounds per councillor – for an expensive caseworker, who usually can’t do much about real matters that affect taxpayers?

A democratic deficit is oft mentioned when discussing the value we get from MEPs and MPs.  It’s time we started looking at the scandal going on right under our noses: an elected position, powerless, yet continuously voting for higher and higher salaries costing the council tax payers hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. 

There’s nothing like a bit of political campaigning from someone who’s meant to be impartial and restricted to their given task. Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is charged with ensuring that laws on race, gender, age, religion, sexuality and disability are enforced and obeyed, has openly started lobbying to vastly extend the powers of the EHRC in a terrifying way.

Not content with his new super-quango, or even with Harriet Harman’s new "equality" law that makes it legal for you to refused a job on the grounds of being white or male, Mr Phillips has decided that he should have the power to fight financial inequality.

Can you imagine what such powers would entail? We’ve had societies where the State has appointed unelected and unaccountable officials to forcibly bring about some kind of artificial abolition of class divides before, and none of them turned out very well for anyone, including the poor.

A remit like that would be a universal excuse for a myriad of policies that would be barking mad at best (see the Fabian Society’s "Ban the word Chav" contribution to get an idea of this category), economically hugely damaging at medium and sinister at worst (consider that the Government’s recent race and gender "equality" laws have founded equality on the principle of actively discriminating against others).

Trevor Phillips has come out with some moderately sensible things on occasion. This is not one of those occasions.

Like manna from heaven for the campaign, but a pain in the neck for Thurrock’s taxpayers, Thurrock Council have decided to turn one job – costing taxpayers £30,000 a year – into 4.  No, it doesn’t mean 4 bureaucrats earning £30,000 between them, it means a whopping £130,000 bill for the Council to employ 3 more health and safety officers at Thurrock Council.

Usually it’s time to turn the fire on councillors, but not in this instance.  It appears this new recruitment of non-jobbers was entirely devised by the Town Hall officer corps.  From the article in the Thurrock Gazette, you’ll see that it was unelected, completely unaccountable apparatchiks who have put together plans to fatten the Town Hall pen-pushing class.

First the ‘head of public protection’ presented a report by the ‘acting team leader for safety, nuisance and licensing’ requesting the need for these new health and safety officers.  Then the Chief Executive Angie Ridgewell – earning a sig figure salary herself – defended the new taxpayer-funded employees, saying “my corporate management team feel that we really need this to meet the Council’s responsibility. We want to make sure the health and safety of our own employees is maximised at all times.”  Look Angie – put signs up saying ‘no running in the halls’, don’t use taxpayer money to top up the public payroll.

The chilling thing is these bureaucrats can get things done even when the elected councillors oppose the plans.  Not one councillor is mentioned in the article calling for or even supporting these new bureaucrats.  Yet, they’re the ones elected to make these decisions…or so we’re led to believe.

Do feel free to send a letter to the Thurrock Gazette expressing your outrage at this waste of taxpayer’s money.  Email one over to them by emailing the editor at [email protected].

A very recent TPA report explains how our current crop (using the polite term) of ministers are unfit to run large organisations.  Asking top CEO’s their opinions, it shows how they rate business and management experience as a key factor in being able to run a government service.  In layman’s terms, here are two examples that prove the rule:

Take a fictional service, employing millions of people with a budget into the billions.  Who do you get to run it – a small businessman, running a small company for 20 years but has reached its potential and is unlikely to grow any larger; a top CEO of a FTSE 100 company, or a postman?  Now, bring that scenario into reality.  The large organisation is the NHS.  The government chose a former postman and trade union apparatchik, Alan Johnson, to run it.  And you wonder why there are problems in the NHS?

Here’s another one.  A security company, again with a large organisation, budgets running into the billions and currently operating at maximum capability.  Who do you get to run it?  The choices are a former general, a TA man who works in industry when not in duty, or an academic whose doctorate was in African politics?  Anyone with half a brain would choose either of the options with any military experience.  The government chose Dr John Reid to head up the defence department.

In either scenario, the first two options would have been reasonable.  The report doesn’t demand that doctors be placed in total command of the NHS or that the military take responsibility for political decisions sending our boys to the front line – that is, after all, what politicians are there for.  Yet the minsiters responsible should have some experience in their areas of responsibility.

The problem of service delivery, however, wouldn’t arise if we had successful reform of our services.  If there was no department for education and we decentralised education, allowing education vouchers to permit funding to follow the pupil, schools would be their own policy makers, competing for custom by providing the best education.  In Health, similarly, there would be choice if reform was implemented.  Given the opposition to the government’s proposed super-surgeries, there are clearly differing healthcare models that merit competition.  Would you like a small, family surgery close to you or a super-surgery miles away?  An even more radical idea could stretch to policing.  Which police service would get your custom, one putting police behind desks to fill out paperwork and bureaucracy or one that put police on the beat?  In all of the mentioned areas, there is the model proposed by big government and the one, I believe, that would be proposed by service personnel with frontline experience. 

The structural problems in our current government prevent the taxpayer-focused delivery we are campaigning for.  With a centralised pot of money, government thinks – wrongly on both counts – that it’s the government’s money and that it knows best how to deliver it. 

By reforming, decentralising and allowing taxpayers’ money to follow the taxpayer into competitive services, we would see taxpayers’ making the choices about where their money goes so they have the responsibility of finding – and receiving – the best service.  Undoubtedly taxpayers would opt for the service professionally run and delivered.  If the service fails, they have the option to remove their custom.  With government education, health and – dare I even say it – policing, there is no alternative, the politicians rule and make your decisions.  It’s like Henry Ford’s analogy: “you can have whatever colour car you like, as long as it’s black”.

After the disgraceful vote in the Commons a couple of weeks ago to keep the John Lewis list and reject external auditing of MPs’ expenses, parliamentarians have today voted through a pretty half-hearted substitute for the accountability and transparency that is so urgently needed to restore faith in Parliament.

First, the John Lewis list is now officially dead. MPs will still, however, be allowed to claim furniture, TVs and so on for their second homes, just up to a limit of £2,400 a year. That’s an improvement on the £24,000 they could previously claim, but it’s still £2,400 too much in our view. People fundamentally disagree with the idea that you can buy and keep furnishings, hi-fi’s, fish tanks and god knows what else at the taxpayers’ expense. Restraint is welcome, but it won’t dispel people’s discomfort with the practice.

Second, there will be what the Government are quite deceitfully calling "an external audit". Instead of the previous proposed audit, though, in which actual external, non-governmental auditors would go through each MPs’ accounts at least once in the course of a Parliament, this will in fact be a one-off report by the National Audit Office on what MPs should and shouldn’t be allowed to claim. In fact, it’s not really an audit in the proper sense of the word, but is more like an official inquiry. Yes, like the numerous inquiries we’ve already had…

Unfortunately, these changes are a messy compromise. MPs can still furnish their homes at our expense. They still won’t be audited independently. Crucially, those receipts still won’t be published for us all to scrutinise. In trying to save face by bending to the demands of their intransigent backbenchers, the Government have simply fudged the issue. It’s a slight improvement, but we’re still not there yet.

In other news, it’s encouraging to note that there has been at least one step towards transparency by the Tories today, who have published the categorised expenses claims of their frontbenchers and many of their backbenchers for the last three months. We’ve had a look through, and will of course be scrutinising them even more closely in coming days, but do have a look yourself – they can be found here.

Madness is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  The government, I can therefore announce, is bonkers.  It’s the one who flew over the cuckoo’s nest, one it built with taxpayer’s money.

So that poses the question – how long is this country going to allow it to be mugged by a government throwing money at problems that a bit of reform and common-sense thinking could easily solve?  And don’t sit there fuming, they’ve won three elections and each time your money has gone up in flames as a result.  They’ve been using your money for 11 years to throw at problems that still persist.  Quite literally, it is madness.

That isn’t to say, however, that the alternatives have been much better, either.  The debacle over MPs expenses demonstrates how the rot stretches across parliament and parties.  But this nation, sooner or later, must stand up and say that their money can’t be thrown at problems expecting it to be some sort of panacea.

Take the story on immigration in the Express today.  A cross-party parliamentary panel found that the government’s immigration policy has produced troubling community tensions.  And the government’s response?  You got it; they simply stated there was a £50 million ‘cohesion fund’ to ‘tackle’ the problem.  So what?  What does that even mean apart from the fact the government is taking more of your money to throw at a problem you and I know money simply can’t solve. 

The same goes for education, crime, health and every other policy area that has seen 11 years of soaring spending.  Are there still problems in all of these areas – you bet.  But where reform could have been brought in, for instance allowing patients to top up healthcare and permitting education funding to follow pupils instead of NUT instructions, the political establishment has flinched.  Refreshingly, the Conservatives have proposed policies to allow funding to follow pupils into independent schools parents and community groups can set up – but sadly Cameron won’t allow these schools to make a profit, thus denying these schools any greater private investment they could potentially achieve. 

As Nigel Holder has written and proven today on our site, the ideas for reform are out there but the principle for any future government must be for the government to take less from the taxpayer and return power – even wealth – back to those who create it for the government.  If the driving principle for a government is to end the year having taken less from the people, then it will be a taxpayer’s government because reform will trump any government’s blind faith in the miracle of ever-increasing spending.  As our long-standing activist Tony Flynn states to me time and time again: “it’s the people’s money” and the government should start treating it as our money that we earn, we want to use more of and know how to spend better than any bureaucrat ever could.

Nigel Holder, ex-RAF fighter pilot, election candidate, management consultant and TPA Supporter gives his views here as to how government can return power and wealth to the British taxpayer.

Taxation is a necessary evil – but it should be minimised at all costs.  Why? – because taxation involves the sequestration of wealth from the citizen by the politician so that the bureaucrat may then exercise choices, notionally on behalf of the citizenry, in how that wealth is to be disbursed.  In practice, the public sector is parasitic on the public purse, as it will always feed itself before it feeds the citizen.  Furthermore, in taking choice away from the citizen and exercising it by proxy, the public sector regularly commits monopsony – the denial of free and fair competition through the exercise of monopoly purchasing power within a rigged marketplace.  And this amounts to an assault on the most fundamental conservative value – freedom of the individual.

Freedom is only evidenced when the individual can exercise choices in what they do and how they do it.  It is true that we have much freedom in many aspects of our lives – travel, speech, diet and association to name but a few areas.  But, even in those areas where the State exercises fairly loose constraints – through sensible regulation – true choices are only available to those who possess what economists call effective demand or discretionary spending power.  When the State sequestrates wealth through excessive taxation it shrinks the discretionary spending power of the citizen to such an extent that the taxation itself amounts to an assault on basic freedoms.  Further, when the state arrogates unto itself the right to administer the delivery of essential services, then the assault on freedom of choice is even clearer.

The has been much talk of late about the role of the State a commissioner of services, with competition being provided through a multiplicity of providers, some of whom may be in the private sector.  It is important to recognise that true competition only exists when an individual citizen freely can make a value for money distinction between providers that are vying for trade in a free market place.  As anyone who has seen the public sector tendering process at work will attest, bureaucrat choice is a very poor substitute for the judgement of individual citizens about those choices which are in their own parochial and immediate best interests.

Socialism has always sought to transfer wealth from rich to poor.  The principle mechanism devised to achieve this has been to tax the rich and to give benefits to the poor.  However, an additional mechanism, the arrogation by the State of power over the delivery of essential services, has somehow become enshrined as an essential component of wealth redistribution policies.  Both of these socialist nostrums should be challenged.

First, taxing the rich and giving benefits to the poor is a “Revenue” rather than a “Capital” solution.  State benefits will never enrich the poor; they just institutionalise the poverty trap. The sale of council houses to their tenants was a classical example of compassionate capitalism and we should urgently search for new ways of wealth creation for the poorest in society.

Second, if we believe that true freedom is only achieved when individuals have the wealth to exercise free choices about all the goods and services that they might wish to purchase, then the purchasing decision must be transferred from the bureaucrat to the citizen in every feasible circumstance.

Third, if we believe that capitalism is the preferred method for the delivery of goods and services – because the profit motive moderated by competition is the best mechanism for delivering quality at the lowest cost – then taxpayers have an obligation to ensure that, in every practical circumstance, public services should be delivered by profit seeking private enterprises operating freely within a competitive marketplace.

These ideas can be unified under a single policy strap-line – “Transferring Wealth from the State to the Citizen”.  We should set out a programme to transfer ownership to our citizenry, of the all those state enterprises which cannot be defended as “Natural Monopolies”.  Every hospital and every school should be incorporated as a limited company with share capital distributed to all in the relevant catchment area.  It would be important to transfer the shares to citizens rather than sell them – millions of citizens would become capitalists at a stroke, able to trade their shares or to retain them as profitable investments.

Equitable education funding would be achieved by distributing vouchers to parents each year for the purchase of the national curriculum from any school of their choosing. By moving every school to the private sector, the damaging class-divide between the state sector and the independent sector would be removed – all schools including those in what is now called the independent sector would take these vouchers. A continuum of provision from independent schools would emerge, with some charging nothing, some charging for extra curricular activities and some charging significant top-up fees.

Healthcare, free at the point of need, would be preserved for all emergency and acute conditions, and in a highly subsidised form for all treatment of chronic conditions, by the introduction of a hypothecated tax that funded insurance payments to all patients.  Citizens could choose their insurer from within a competitive marketplace.   Emergency and acute care would be paid for directly by the insurer according to locally agreed schedules of rates for specified healthcare interventions. These rates would be negotiated between insurers and hospital companies within a free market.  Chronic care would be subject to citizen choice of provider and basic care would be reimbursed by their insurer with “Optional Extras” paid for out of advance voluntary contributions or ad-hoc top-up fees.  Thus the principle of free healthcare at the point of need would be retained for all accident and acute care, whilst a regime of differential insurance premiums would disincentivise the adverse lifestyle choices that require greater reliance on the healthcare system.

In summary, we privatise all healthcare and education, eliminate the sclerosis of state control, introduce competition into those marketplaces and thereby significantly reduce the costs of service delivery and simultaneously increase the quality of the services provided; empower the citizen with real choice rather than bureaucrat mediated choice, and give every citizen – even the very poorest in society – a first step on the capitalism ladder.  Together, these policies would reduce the tax burden and more fairly distribute the benefits of taxation throughout society.  Who would dare to oppose such policies?  Or should I ask –who would dare to advocate them?

If you would like to discuss Nigel’s thoughts, please leave a comment.  Similarly if you would like to write a piece for the website on tax and government related issues, please email them to me at [email protected]. 

Last year we commented on news that Devon and Cornwall police were handing out stickers featuring themselves in the style of those early 90s football sticker albums as a promotional gimmick to try to improve the respect young people had for them. Today, it emerges that Hampshire Police have gone one step further – and a few years more old school – and produced their very own set of top trumps.

It’s safe to say the response has been…mixed. According to a police spokesman a few officers had understandable reservations:

There were a couple of officers who had reservations about the whole thing. They thought "I’m a police officer, I’m here to solve crime, why am I handing out game cards?".

A good point – in an age where many young people lack any respect for the police, does this really give them the necessary boost to their gravitas? Never fear, argues the spokesman:

We had to convince them that we weren’t messing about and told them that the children will love the cards and more people will talk to you as a result.

PCSO Phil Farrell either has a very optimistic character, a genius for spinning bad things into good or generous tendency to think the best of people:

I’m now a hero so that’s good. I now get recognised all the time by kids on the street…

So far so good…

…they all call me Fatboy Farrell.

Ah. Was that exactly what they meant when they said "build bridges with young people"?

Last year we commented on news that Devon and Cornwall police were handing out stickers featuring themselves in the style of those early 90s football sticker albums as a promotional gimmick to try to improve the respect young people had for them. Today, it emerges that Hampshire Police have gone one step further – and a few years more old school – and produced their very own set of top trumps.

It’s safe to say the response has been…mixed. According to a police spokesman a few officers had understandable reservations:

There were a couple of officers who had reservations about the whole thing. They thought "I’m a police officer, I’m here to solve crime, why am I handing out game cards?".

A good point – in an age where many young people lack any respect for the police, does this really give them the necessary boost to their gravitas? Never fear, argues the spokesman:

We had to convince them that we weren’t messing about and told them that the children will love the cards and more people will talk to you as a result.

PCSO Phil Farrell either has a very optimistic character, a genius for spinning bad things into good or generous tendency to think the best of people:

I’m now a hero so that’s good. I now get recognised all the time by kids on the street…

So far so good…

…they all call me Fatboy Farrell.

Ah. Was that exactly what they meant when they said "build bridges with young people"?

Good on Swindon council for finally saying what the rest of us have known for quite some time – speed cameras have become a money-raising scam rather than a road safety measure.

The Borough Council have today announced that they are considering stopping their annual £400,000 payment for speed cameras in the town – as they are concerned that the scheme is more about bringing in fines for the Treasury than saving lives.

Councillor Peter Greenhalgh, head of transport in Swindon, said they:

"are a blatant tax on the motorist. They are being used as a cash cow. I do take exception to the positioning of some mobile speed cameras. They are designed to raise revenue. I think enough is enough. There are much more important things we as a council should do instead of acting as a law enforcement arm of this government."

Here, here, Cllr Greenhalgh.

How refreshing it is to hear a council smash apart one of the biggest taboos in Government. The speed camera has been used far beyond its practical applications for cynical reasons, and as a result it has become increasingly discredited as a piece of road safety equipment.

Predictably, Anne Snelgrove MP (right, with her beloved speed camera) has blown her top – especially as she’s PPS to the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly. Her charge that the council are somehow "playing politics with lives" sounds a bit cheap when you consider that the Government have transparently been using the road safety argument to squeeze money out of motorists. In a dizzying feat of illogic she also suggests that the council are trying to pursue a "speed camera stealth tax", saying "Policy on speed cameras should be about saving lives not making a profit". Yeeees – will you be giving back the money raised from cameras tot he taxpaying public then, Anne?

Swindon are absolutely right to say that things like car-activated signs that flash up your speed when you are going over the limit are apparently more effective, as well as being less exploitative. Hopefully some of the money saved will end up back in taxpayers’ pockets, too.

I’d love to find out how much support Anne Snelgrove gets for her "Hands off our speed cameras" campaign. I suspect people aren’t flocking to her banner…