One of the last politicians to be investigated in the expenses scandal, Margaret Moran, will be charged with fiddling her expenses by more than £60,000.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has announced that the former MP for Luton South will appear before Westminster Magistrates’ Court on the 19thSeptember 2011.

Charges relate to 15 charges of false accounting, contrary to the Theft Act 1968.

Moran claimed for dry rot treatment on a home more than 100 miles from her constituency.

Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, said:

“Ms Moran also faces six charges of forgery, contrary to the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, where it is alleged that she submitted forged invoices in support of some of her claims.”

The Metropolitan police originally passed ten files of evidence to the CPS, relating to ten individuals. Seven cases have resulted in charges: David Chaytor, Eric Illsley, Elliot Morley, Jim Devine, Lord Taylor of Warwick and Lord Hanningfield have already been jailed over the scandal.

Margaret Moran is suspended from membership of the Labour Party and is no longer an MP.

Further information and our reaction to the trial and sentence will be posted on this blog once proceedings are complete.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the Government must scrap its ludicrous and expensive High Speed Rail project. But it’s not just us: a broad spectrum of others have joined our call, from the Green Party to the RAC Foundation. And this morning, The Economist newspaper joined the ranks. They have a special editorial and feature this week outlining why they believe the project is horribly flawed.

More of a problem for everyday commuters?

Their main feature focuses on the supposed regional regeneration that HS2 will bring. The Government argue that it will close the North-South divide, but The Economist is less sure; in fact they argue that it could exacerbate regional disparities. They cite evidence from France where more businesses have relocated to Paris after the high speed line to Lyon was built. Similarly in Spain, Madrid has benefited at the expense of Seville, while in Japan, Tokyo still grows faster than Osaka.

So The Economist and others think that a big Government-led scheme to close regional disparities won’t work – who’d've thunk it? Regional Development Agencies helped exacerbate regional disparities and this big shiny Government project runs a real risk of doing the same.

So let’s see what’s been destroyed so far: the business case; the job-creation case; and capacity claims. Now the regional regeneration claims have come under serious fire. The Government is fast running out of credibility on this issue. HS2 is not a good project at the wrong time, it’s just a bad project. Scrap it.

The Sun has revealed that former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith used the services of two day release prisoners – detained at our expense – to decorate her £450,000 home in Redditch when they were supposed to be working to benefit the local community.

You may recall that the former Labour minister has a record of abusing taxpayers’ money when it comes to expenses. The former MP for Redditch, who was removed by the electorate at the general election last year, seemed reluctant to pay for anything herself on her £450,000 family home in Redditch.  While claiming on her website she lived in Redditch, she registered a bedroom in her sister’s London house as her main residence, so the Redditch house could be a second home and she could claim £116,000 in various expenses for it over six years.  Taxpayers were even billed for X-rated films enjoyed by her husband.

The prisoners were taking part in a charity scheme, intended to reintroduce them to work and to give something back to the local community. She appears to have become an expert on personal gain at the expense of others, whether it is ripping off hard pressed taxpayers with dodgy expenses claims, or in this case, using a contact to gain the decorating services of convicts.

In her defence, the former Home Secretary claimed “they didn’t have anything else on”. This seems astonishing if you take a look around her former constituency where local community centres are in desperate need of repair and derelict buildings are becoming eyesores.

Also Jacqui Smith and her husband did make an undisclosed donation to the charity for which the prisoners were working. But that is beside the point.

The authorities have made it clear to the Sun that even if there wasn’t work for them, they were supposed to be returned to prison and not used as cheap labour to do up a private home, let alone one that had been the subject of dodgy claims by a now disgraced former MP.

Daniel Jennings is interning at the TPA

The Department for Transport (DfT) has published online data for accidents, casualties and speeding at fixed camera sites. Statistics for the 75 local authorities who have so far provided their information shows that speed cameras have done very little, if anything, to improve safety for motorists and other road users.

In fact, the figures suggest the exact opposite. In some cases, speed cameras have not cut accident rates, but increased them. Research we did last year found the rate of decline in road accidents slowed when speed cameras were introduced, and today’s figures build on that. We also saw that when Swindon turned off their cameras, there was no increase in accident rates, debunking the claim that without these cameras, motorists become dangerous behind the wheel.

Many of us may be guilty of ‘panic braking’ when we see a speed camera and slam on the brakes to avoid detection, others may tactically brake because they already know where the cameras are. But even the most consistently speed conscious motorists among us will have seen this behaviour from other drivers. This camera-induced erratic driving doesn’t make for safe roads. As Claire Armstrong, co-founder of Safe Speed notes, “road safety is not measured in miles an hour”. People should be encouraged to drive safely, rather than just slowly. Yet there have been numerous cases of cameras being installed with no real road safety benefit at all. For example, a speed camera was erected on the A329 in Little Milton, Oxfordshire, in 1997 despite no previous collisions or casualties for five years.

This data further supports the suspicion that many of us have held for a long time: that speed cameras are little more than money-making machines, topping up the government’s revenue through speeding fines, rather than genuine safety devices. Motorists are already very heavily over-taxed and they don’t want to see more of their hard-earned cash pay for the maintenance and installation of fixed cameras which penalise them further. If speed cameras are not doing their road safety job effectively, they should be scrapped, something we called for in our manifesto pledge last year.

The DfT should be praised for its transparency in publishing this data but they shouldn’t stop there. All councils should be held to account and publish their data, so we know if our money is being used on ‘safety efficient’ rather than money-spinner cameras. Road Safety Minister Mike Penning sums it up:

“Local residents have a right to expect that when their council spends money on speed cameras, they publish information to show whether those cameras are helping to reduce accidents or not.”

Another shocking story of public sector staff working for unions at the taxpayers’ expense has emerged today. Dominic Raab MP has found out that £7 million of our cash has been wasted on 1,200 Home Office employees, police officers and border guards to work for trade unions and Police Federations.

This is a disgraceful misuse of public money, not least because £7 million is a huge sum. Mr Raab goes on to calculate that an extra 300 officers could be paid for with the money going to trade unions. With necessary spending reductions being made, the policing budget savings are among the most controversial. But there’s money being wasted on funding union work. This shows that there are easy savings to make that won’t damage frontline policing.

Many UK Border Agency staff are represented by the Public and Commercial Services Union, who recently assisted in organising a national 24-hour strike against the cuts. Taxpayers should not be paying for staff to do union work, particularly when unions play such a blatant political role.

This is just another in a string of recent stories on this topic – last week it was revealed that almost half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money is given to trade union officials representing Edinburgh City Council staff. A member of that council has called for an investigation by the council’s leader following the release of figures detailing the £473,965 cost. It is an especially alarming figure seeing as it is more than double the amount spent on union work by Glasgow City Council, even though it is a smaller city.

Previous work from the TaxPayers’ Alliance has shown that during the 2009-10 financial year, almost 2,500 full time equivalent public sector employees undertook trade union duties while being paid with our cash. If union officials who work for public bodies wish to undertake their union responsibilities, it must be in their own time, and should not be at taxpayers’ expense.

There is much talk of PFI in this morning’s news; the Treasury Select Committee has warned that many Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals are poor value for taxpayers and the cost of those that have been badly negotiated has shot up.

A huge amount of taxpayers’ money is spent via controversial PFI schemes and Andrew Tyrie, of the Treasury Select Committee, said on Today that whilst taxpayers are “getting ripped off” by PFI schemes they are often not aware how bad the situation is because PFI is not counted as part of our official national debt. The insidious characteristic of PFI deals is that they allow the Government to spend taxpayers’ money without really fully admitting that it’s spending it, or promising to spend it in the future.

We highlighted the importance of counting PFI as part of the national debt in our research paper, The Real National Debt, written in 2010 and using figures for the financial year 2009-10. For the first time we laid bare the startling growth of the real national debt over the last decade. At the time of that paper it stood at £300,000 for every single household in Britain; for most ordinary families it would represent the whopping second mortgage you never knew you had.

$1,000,000,000

Bringing PFI fully onto the balance sheet and including it in the headline figure of national debt would, at a stroke, add a good few billion to the amount we admit we owe. It sounds terrifying but it’s hugely important that the liabilities for PFI are more transparent; at the moment the true scale of what taxpayers are on the hook for is disguised. Once we’ve faced up to the PFI problem why stop there? Shouldn’t we also look at the huge liabilities we have thanks to unfunded public sector pensions and unfunded state pensions? The debt from bailing out the banks is still very much sitting on our books, add that too and we’re nudging £8 trillion.

Once you get above a few million I think it gets all too easy to throw around billions and trillions discussing these matters. We created this video to try and illustrate the scale of the numbers we were talking about in our report. This useful graphic relates to US dollars but also gives you some serious perspective on what a few trillion looks like.

The Government should be responsible not just for the money that it spends but for the PFI deals that it signs taxpayers up to, because that represents our money or our children’s money.

The Government’s recently launched e-petition website is a small but welcome step towards giving people more say over the country’s affairs: the TPA believes that an online petition gaining sufficient support should be able to trigger a referendum, although for the time being we have to be content with it being eligible for a debate in Parliament.

And the second most popular e-petition right now is one to which I hope TPA supporters will lend their backing.

Organised by Harlow MP Robert Halfon and backed by FairFuel UK, it highlights the fact that many motorists are now having to spend 10% of their income on petrol and calls on the Government to scrap increases in fuel duty planned for next year and the rest of this Parliament.

The TPA has previously demonstrated how motorists are taxed excessively and in his new book out this week, Let them eat carbon, Matthew Sinclair has exposed how green taxes such as fuel duty are excessive compared to the harms they are meant to address.

100,000 signatures would make the petition eligible for a debate in Parliament, and it has just passed the halfway mark – 51,849 people have backed it as of this morning.

Click here to add your support.

John Swinney, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth in the Scottish Government, has made a large profit on his taxpayer-funded apartment. The two-storey terraced property was recently sold for £430,000, after being bought for £355,000 in December 2003, while he was Leader of the Scottish National Party. After capital gains tax, his total profit was around £57,000.

But between the purchase and the sale, Swinney claimed more than £60,000 of taxpayers’ money to pay for the interest on his RBS mortgage. Right now, Mr Swinney is overseeing the implication of necessary spending cuts and a public sector pay freeze, but saw no problem in claiming this huge sum of money from taxpayers.

Let us not forget that Mr Swinney already earns a six-figure taxpayer-funded salary, which only serves as another kick in the teeth for hard-working families. The TaxPayers’ Alliance has previously condemned the way politicians are able to make a profit from taxpayer-funded homes; it is a scandal how they can enjoy personal gain from property paid for by ordinary families. If one of Mr Swinney’s constituents was to try something in their place of work with their employer’s money, does anyone really think they’d be able to get away with it?

Last month, I wrote about how some MPs in Westminster were opposed to having to explain their expense claims. Now it appears that in Holyrood, John Swinney may have some explaining to do himself, not least because of the irony of his position as Finance Secretary. He’s made a handsome profit from the taxpayers who are finding it hard enough as it is.

Councillors in Cornwall haven’t been paying their council tax. Let me say that again: the people who set the rates of council taxation, who stand on a manifesto of delivering services for residents and who are paid generous allowances from taxpayers’ money, have been failing to pay their council tax.

A Freedom of Information request has revealed that 17 councillors in Cornwall – that’s one in seven of the men and women charged with setting council tax rates – had to be sent payment reminders. It appears only 3 took heed of this, as 14 required a second reminder letter. Councils frequently encourage residents to set up direct debits to avoid this kind of problem, maybe the councillors in questions should practice a bit of what they preach?

Worst of all, one case led to court action, resulting in a farcical situation where Cornwall council instigated court proceedings against its own councillor while they continued to collect their allowances and perks. Maybe they should have used those allowances to pay up?

At first, the identity of the worst offenders was unknown, but two have now been exposed. Councillor Andrew Wallis, representing Porthleven and Helston South, had a court action taken against him for getting into arrears.

On his website, Cllr Wallis explained what happened. “Two years ago I failed to pay my council tax on time which led to court action,” he confessed. “Like many people in Cornwall I was faced with the problem of juggling mounting bills with a limited income and at that time I chose to pay for essentials such as rent, electricity and food rather than pay my council tax bill.” Wouldn’t we all rather do that! “Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” he continued, “but I made that choice of not paying and I will have to live with it.”

Cornwall Council has refused to name any further councillors and the details of their arrears on the grounds that it would breach data privacy laws. This is wrong; standing in a democratic election means a commitment to being held to account for your actions while in public office. Failure to pay your council tax in a timely fashion costs the council money in administration, and ending up in court means further expense. The councillors’ negligence in paying their bills on time will almost certainly have cost local taxpayers money.

Councillors are responsible for spending local taxpayers’ cash, setting the rate of council tax and even deciding policy over tax write-offs. A councillor not paying their council tax is surely compromised when discussing these issues. A councillor taken to court by their own council cannot be a credible representative of the community they wish to represent.

There was further embarrassment for the taxman this weekend after the Commons Treasury Committee criticised HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) for poor performance and ‘endemic delays’.

HMRC was formed in 2005 when Inland Revenue and Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise were merged. Like the two organisations that were combined to form it, HMRC hasn’t always gotten things right and caused problems for millions of taxpayers in the process. This latest report by MPs was ordered after last year’s PAYE debacle when HMRC had to admit that 6 million people had been paying the wrong income tax in previous years.

Almost 1.5 million people had to pay back an average of £1,500 each, after being told they had been underpaying because of faulty calculations. At the time we were very critical of the tax office, and said that things had to improve. This newest report reveals that the department is in crisis and confirms they still aren’t getting it right – and taxpayers are the ones left to pick up the pieces.

Let’s not forget that isn’t even their biggest mistake, as John O’Connell blogged in February this year when the Public Accounts Committee criticised HMRC for their mismanagement of the tax system and a few years before that the tax office lost 25 million taxpayers’ details that had been copied onto a disc – whoops!

Key complaints raised in this latest report were:

• The continuing legacy of unresolved tax discrepancies from past years still affecting millions of tax payers
• Taxpayers had to wait as long as three months just to receive a reply to a letter
• Excessive reliance on the internet for filing tax returns, or giving information, to the disadvantage of those without good internet connections, such as the elderly
• “Overly ambitious” IT projects such as plans to make employers submit “real-time” data for the PAYE system
• Increasingly complex tax laws.
• Just 48 per cent of telephone calls made to HMRC offices are answered
• The use of 0845 phone numbers by HMRC for customer queries. The committee suggested that cheaper 0345 numbers are used.

We cannot go on with the system in total disarray like this, it’s failing millions of taxpayers and we’ve put up with too many mistakes and excuses for too long. Last time it was a new IT system that was blamed, now it is staff shortages. Enough is enough.

At least after this most recent debacle Mike Clasper, chairman of HM Revenue & Customs, came out and apologised. Last year it took Dave Hartnett a full day to put his hands up and say sorry, after initially telling the BBC that he “had nothing to apologise for”. The attitude may have changed, but the problems still remain. It is too hard to make contact with HMRC, and it is often too difficult to understand the information and guidance.

The problem of increasingly complex tax laws, highlighted by the committee, is one that we have been shouting about since our inception. The 2020 Tax Commission (a joint project with the Institute of Directors) will release a report early next year that will look at ways to address this and other problems with our tax system. We released a video featuring the world’s fastest speaker to underline how long the UK tax code now is.

The taxman must get his house in order, taxpayers should not have to tolerate another fiasco.

Today we had another sign of how desperate the campaign for the new high speed rail line, HS2 have become.  While the Government are sticking to their guns and backing the scheme for now, the public are clearly opposed to this white elephant.  A YouGov/TPA poll found that 48% would support cancelling funding for it against 34% who would oppose doing so.

Instead of trying to build a more credible case for the new line, or set out more realistic and affordable plans, proponents of HS2 are just upping the ante with ever more ludicrous claims about its potential effects.  We will be keeping up the pressure and you can help by replying to the Government’s consultation on the scheme this week, it closes at the end of Friday.

Arup/Volterra have written a report that is available on the Campaign for HSR website and being parroted by a number of politicians today.  It is utter nonsense.  There is a lot in there, so here are just three examples:

• On the basis of a few weak, largely unquantified and unsystematic examples they have cherry picked, they claim that high speed rail typically exceeds demand forecasts.  If you instead look at proper systematic research by Danish academics they found that passenger forecasts are overestimated in 9 out of 10 rail projects, with an average overestimation of 106 per cent.  High speed rail is no great exception to that pattern.  The Spanish had to close a service at the end of last month, the Dutch high speed network has recently been facing bankruptcy.
• Their analysis on jobs seems to consist of an estimate of how many jobs the “Core Cities” connected by the line are likely to generate, and then just arguing that creating those jobs will be harder if they don’t have enough rail capacity.  HS2 isn’t creating those jobs, the cities are!  Given that Chris Stokes has set out a far more affordable plan that could deliver the rail capacity needed this is simply nonsense.
• They uncritically repeat the Greengauge 21 claim that all sorts of services not on the route will benefit from the capacity released by HS2.  But the Government’s current plan includes billions of pounds of cuts in existing services, not expensive new subsidies to expand them.

The Government’s consultation will be finishing at the end of this week.  The questions are ridiculously misleading and clearly designed to get the ‘right’ answer so a proper, independent inquiry would be a lot more valuable.  That’s why we focused on our response to the Transport Select Committee who we hope will show the independence to call out the weaknesses in these proposals.

But as we’ve always said we can’t ignore the opportunities politicians do give us to have our say.  It is important that we show we are willing to engage.  You can submit to the consultation here, and you don’t need to provide a substantive answer to all the questions.  The critical question is number two, about whether or not HS2 is the right project.  Please submit to the consultation and let the Government know they should cancel HS2.

Yesterday, the Sunday Express reported on our Freedom of Information request about Departmental internet usage. We asked each Government Department to send us a list of websites their staff had visited, in order of frequency, and the amount of time spent on these sites. We also asked for details of disciplinary procedures linked to internet usage. The only Department that provided the information was the Department for Work and Pensions. They provided a Monthly list of the top 100 websites visited, in order of frequency. It didn’t quite fulfil our response, but they at least were able to easily obtain this information from their internet provider.

No other department could answer the main part of this request – what websites, in order of frequency visited, have staff been logging on to. That’s pretty damning. It should be relatively straightforward to hold this information centrally, or do as DWP did and ask their internet provider for a list.

As outlined in the Sunday Express report, DWP staff spent a lot of time on shopping websites. There were also lots of visits to nationalrail.co.uk and numerous holiday websites. Perhaps the civil servants were more keen on getting away then getting on with work.

Staff time is the biggest item of expenditure for most public sector organisations, so it’s crucial that time at work is spent productively to give taxpayers value for money.

We feel that each Department – and eventually all public sector bodies – should publish this kind of information as a matter of course. It’s simply not good enough that no other Department aside from DWP could get this information. How do they know whether their staff are focussed on the job?

Have a look through DWP’s response below and see what websites staff are visiting on taxpayers’ time.

Click here to download