Oct 2009 09

Busted! Part 210

Earlier in the week, we posted some photographs of public bodies spending taxpayers' money on exhibiting and lobbying at the Tory Conference in Manchester. This is utterly unjustified – even the Cabinet Secretary has expressly forbidden them from doing so.

We'll be reporting the bodies involved to the relevant authorities – to make sure we caught the full set I went on the hunt in Manchester yesterday morning to catch a few more:

Cheshire East Council  Cheshire East Council

This is a new local authority, set up in Hazel Blears' carve-up of Cheshire. When I asked them why they were exhibiting, their response was that being new they had a "responsibility" to tell national politicians about themselves. 

Shockingly, when I said it was a waste of taxpayers' funds, their justification was "of course, all the money we're paying goes to the Conservative Party". They had assumed I was a party delegate, and would therefore be happy that the Tories were hoovering up taxpayer funding through the back door.

Suffice to say, they looked a bit less comfortable when I introduced myself!

Standards Board for England

The Standards Board for England

This is a classic example of a quango trying to use taxpayer-funded PR to solve an image problem that is actually rooted in their own failings rather than any issue of perception.

You can't see in this picture the full blurb on the left hand side of their stand, but it was entirely focused on trying to rebut the popular view that the Standards Board has become a tool for disgruntled councillors (and increasingly council officers) to bind elected representatives and prevent them doing their jobs properly.

NHS Procurement NHS Procurement

Forgive me for being so naive, but I had assumed that the budget of NHS Procurement was for, ah, procuring things for the NHS. 

Why on earth is an organisation which is meant to be a behind the scenes, logistical aspect of a front line service, lobbying politicians at national party conferences?

The sheer irony is that their stand was themed around value for money - I'm sure patients, medical staff and taxpayers would rather they just got on with their job.

Network Rail Network Rail

Ah, Network Rail. Not content with repeated and overrunning disruption to people's travel, or with a funding structure that makes spaghetti junction look as simple as a one-way street, they had possibly the most grand stand at Manchester.

Network Rail have in the last few months moved to a much more outward-facing PR effort – including advertising on TV, despite them having no need to attract business from the public.

Leeds City Region Leeds City Region

Needless to say that all of the above bodies will be getting some interesting letters very shortly…
  

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  • J D

    None of the organisations you have listed come under the direct control of Central Government or therefore the Cabinet Secretary.

  • Steve Robson

    …apart from the fact that you say Tory things (public sector all bad, private sector all wonderful; paying people in the public sector a waste of money, paying bankers millions a good deal etc). You also look like a Tory; no smile, Tory hair and big Tory chip on the shoulder (I’m rich and can’t bear anyone to take a penny away from me to help people not lucky like me to be born wealthy).

  • Steve Robson

    My god, I’ve even made you sound like Gideon Osborne and Dave £30million Cameron. “i’m such a hero, I’m going to take a 5% pay cut when I’m PM, I’ll have to make do with the £30mill in the bank if it gets tight.

  • Steve Robson

    TPA and Tories – rich hypocrites all!

  • anthony Scholefield

    The whole conference as with the other parties is a Prince Potemkin affair as is now being discussed over at ConservativeHome.
    They estimate only 4500 of the 12000 passholders were Tory members. We are now trying to estimate how many of these 4500 were ineffect paid for or expected to be paid for by the taxpayer one way or another such as MPs,MPs staff,councillors,prospective MPs and Councillors,CCHO staff paid for out of public funds,MEPS an d their staff,Tory members of quangos. I doubt that there were 2000 ordinary mebers at the conference not paid for by the taxpayer.
    It is a closed loop.

  • 1

    Cheshire East is a Tory council. Can’t wait to see more of that when you elect them.

  • Phil Burrows

    How are politicians supposed to make decisions on organisations unless they know about them.
    This seems like a perfectly legitimate way of demonstrating the great things that public services do on our behalf.
    This way, politicians may think twice before swinging the axe through the organisations that keep this country going.

  • steve robson

    Nigel
    We know that loads of people in local government do lots of unpaid overtime, some working ridiculous hours. Many also spend lots of their own money because expenses are so difficult to claim. But you’ll never get an admission of that from people like the TPA; their agenda is to destroy the public sector for the benefit of their rich backers and their own political careers.
    Setting workers in the private sector and public sector against each other is key to the TPA strategy and unfortunately people like Daran and Julie get suckered into it. It diverts blame from the real culprits who are their friends amongst the super rich and the bankers. If they focus on the small number of high earners in the public sector and imply these are somehow a large group (while actually fifty times more people earn less than £20K than earn more than £50K, 0.2% of staff earn £100K compared to 2% in the private sector), we might not notice that their friends are worth £100 million and earning £15 million pa.
    They are very succesful at these tactics too as demonstrated by my anger at Daran for calling me an idiot yesterday which led me to a not very nice response. And I don’t even work in the public sector now.
    In the end we’ll all lose out, but at least their billionaire backers will have a few more million pounds in the bank. I was going to name a couple of these backers, but they are all faceless, fortunately all the details are in yesterday’s Guardian, though funnily enough, the Mail and the Sun didn’t run the story.

  • gigbod

    Tory party funder / owner Lord Ashcroft
    Tory party supporter Taxpayers Alliance
    Tory party free-publicity provider Rupert Murdoch
    What do they have in common?
    None of them pay UK Tax
    “Do as we say, not as we do”

  • Dave

    Steve wrote:
    “Nigel
    We know that loads of people in local government do lots of unpaid overtime, some working ridiculous hours”
    Do we? I worked in a County Council for 16 months and most of the people I worked alongside didn’t even manage the 7 hour day – and that’s not even including the flexidays (days off in addition to holiday for working an extra hour a day).