Average local authority employs nine times as many people on £50,000-plus packages as ten years ago, an increase three times larger than growth in the wider economy. Average local authority spends £4 million on employing people earning over £50,000. The total bill is almost £2 billion - almost £1 in... Read more...
Wolverhampton City Council are allowing themselves to be dragged into the realms of expensive lunacy as they continue to seek the prosecution of a woman who they claim threw an apple core out of a car window. The 26 year-old mother-of-three, Kate Badger, who works as a promotions girl... Read more...
We've taken a closer look at the Office for National Statistics' new analysis of NHS productivity (first blogged here yesterday by Matt Sinclair). The Big Picture is that since Labour turned on the spending taps, value for money has collapsed. In the most recent five years studied (2001-2006), spending... Read more...
Fears are growing amongst the West Midlands business community as their East Midlands counterparts are facing a Workplace Parking Levy (WPL) on their private staff car parks in Nottingham. The tax, being introduced by Nottingham City Council on business car parks with 11 spaces or more, amounts to a... Read more...
From the Financial Times: “This is the fifth minister in this role in less than three years. The constant changing of faces and portfolios has been unhelpful to building a long-term dialogue, so it is important that we now see a period of stability,” said Lucy Findlay, head of enterprise... Read more...
The picture emerging from today's report (PDF) on health service productivity, by the Office for National Statistics, is stark: "From 2001 to 2005, productivity fell, as high growth in health care was lower than even higher growth in inputs. Even with the available adjustments for quality change in output, productivity... Read more...
Why can't politicians be trusted... Because they don’t trust you! Such is the image Simon Milton, head of the Local Government Association, gives off today. He’s paraphrased in Peter Riddell’s article in the Times this morning arguing against direct democracy and localised public services because voters could get... Read more...
This is a really tragic case. Colette Mills has not lost her case in the legal fight to be able to buy the drug Avastin - that could have doubled the chance of her breast cancer not spreading - without the NHS cutting off support for the rest of her... Read more...
The European Central Bank has, today, released a new study "Government size, composition, volatility and economic growth" (PDF) which examines the effect of big government on the rate of economic growth. It finds a substantial effect: "In particular, a percentage point increase in the share of total revenue (total expenditure)... Read more...
South West Surrey TPA Organiser and STAG Chairman Peter Webb led a delegation of taxpayers to Surrey County Hall last week to call for a freeze in Council Tax. This had been the first consultation a TaxPayers’ Alliance Branch has been invited to, however it had been the 4th for... Read more...
Over the last year the poor quality of housing provided for those in the forces, and the snails pace of improvements, has been an ongoing scandal. There are persistent worries about equipment shortages - over the weekend we heard that only one third of the helicopters vital to operations in... Read more...
No good comes of too much suckling “The kind of open-ended breastfeeding of a private institution that goes on at the moment is the worst of all possible worlds.” (para 198) Thus Professor Willem Buiter explained to the Treasury Select Committee how the hopeless... Read more...
Here in the UK we are all familiar with the way that Government departments, quangos, health trusts, Health and Safety bureaucrats and numerous others spend large amounts of money propagandising and heckling the public about various kinds of behaviour. From anti-smoking ads and the new campaigns... Read more...
Ministers have challenged Birmingham City Council, claiming that they could significantly cut council tax by making further efficiency savings. Today’s Birmingham Post reports that Local Government Minister John Healey has claimed that the authority could save as much as £26.7million a year, chopping the Band D bill by £92... Read more...
Answering our questions this time is Ruth Lea. Ruth is the Director of Global Vision, the campaign for an outward-looking UK in an outward-looking Europe, working for a fundamentally renegotiated relationship with the EU. She is also a Governor of the London School of Economics, and formerly Director of the... Read more...
2008 has already been an eventful year for our activists, and we’re only 3 weeks in! We’ve had our Norfolk campaigners highlight the disgraceful behaviour of North Norfolk District Council sending armies of bailiffs to claim the property from those taxpayers who can’t pay their council tax. In fact we’ve... Read more...
Economist Alex Tabarrok writes, for the Marginal Revolution blog, to describe just what the law of unintended consequences entails: "The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short... Read more...
The Government has released new plans to pay people to lose weight. This risks creating an incentive for people to lose control of their weight in the first place and is a bit of a gimmick. As has been pointed out before this kind of problem can be avoided in... Read more...
According to the French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, the French government is planning to freeze public spending for the next five years to eliminate the country's high budget deficit and bring down spending as a share of GDP. It is not yet clear whether the spending freeze would be... Read more...
Sometimes I wonder if we should not strengthen the rule of "unintended consquences" into "opposite consequences". Recent news that "it's the rich wot is doin' the boozin' " brings to mind a conversation with a local publican trying to ameliorate the consequences of the smoke-free legislation. General early consensus... Read more...
In response to Bromsgrove District Council announcing a whopping 4.45% increase in council tax, Labour opposition leader Coun Peter McDonald has struck back by claiming his party’s alternative budget would make £625,000 of savings without costing the local taxpayer anything. McDonald said he wanted to ‘give services back to... Read more...
It was a busy day for the TPA in Norfolk yesterday. Events started as early as 7am when senior TPA activist Tony Callaghan was interviewed on BBC Radio Norfolk about the story we highlighted last. Tony went to say how unfair it was that North Norfolk District Council sent out... Read more...
Today there is a withering attack on the Government's management of the crisis at Northern Rock in the Times, by Anatole Kaletsky: "The Northern Rock bailout will demolish or, at best, discredit the entire economic policy framework created in 1997. Since the creation of this framework was his one unquestionable... Read more...
The Audit Commission's new 'Positively Charged' report raises some interesting issues today. For the first time it puts a figure on the massive amounts raised by councils through extra charges - on car parking, waste disposal and numerous other services - as a whopping £10.8 billion. To put that in... Read more...