Council Tax has been a burden on thousands of families throughout Cardiff, with taxpayers from all walks of life seeing their bills increase annually with little to no improvement to the frontline services. This year the Local Authority have proposed a further increase of 3.7% on a typical band D... Read more...
Sky News have commissioned a poll that says 2/3 people would be willing to pay more income tax if the increase was guaranteed for the NHS. There is also a debate in the British Medical Journal about such a proposal. However, these proposals are seriously misguided and should be resisted... Read more...
Two days ago, I attended Surrey’s County Council’s debate on their proposed Council Tax referendum. According to Council Leader David Hodge before the meeting, they had no choice but to raise council tax by 15 per cent and trigger a referendum to approve that decision. We have written before about the failings... Read more...
This is a guest post written for the TaxPayers' Alliance by Dominic Raab MP. The UK tax code is too long and complex. That has facilitated tax avoidance, undermined UK competitiveness and led to the taxman (HMRC) acquiring arbitrary powers. This report sets out five proposals to simplify the tax... Read more...
Margaret Hodge MP, former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and vocal critic of government waste, has published a new book: ‘Called to Account’. We hosted Dame Margaret at a talk this week and had a wide-ranging conversation. Her book’s focus on government waste and poor accountability of those in... Read more...
Last night saw our first major event of the year, with Rt Hon Dame Margaret Hodge MP speaking to John O'Connell about her new book: Called to Account: How Corporate Bad Behaviour and Government Waste Combine to Cost us Millions. The evening started with a bang, as Margaret warned John that... Read more...
With the social care system struggling to meet demand, which is only increasing thanks to demographic pressures, a long term policy response is required. Greater incentives will be required to promote private financial products in a market with many significant demand and supply side barriers. The coalition government made some... Read more...
Rousseau’s Social Contract may have seen man as being everywhere in chains, but many of the state’s contracts with private companies leave taxpayers’ money chained into poor deals. In light of this, the NAO has today released their investigation into HMRC’s failed contract with Concentrix, a private company it hired... Read more...
In 15th December last year, the government announced that councils would be allowed to raise the social care precept by more than 2 percent, in response to claims of a crisis in social care funding. But the Times reported this week that the precept increase may bring in £500 million... Read more...
The public consultation on the introduction of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act closes on 10th January. Writers far greater than me have been putting the case forward for a truly free press and the dangers of fettering it in platforms as wide-ranging as the Mirror and the... Read more...
Rail fares increased this morning, prompting outrage from unions. The average fare will increase by 2.3 per cent with regulated fares, which include season tickets, increasing by 1.9 per cent. A report from “Action for Rail”, a union backed campaign, claims that UK commuters pay up to six times more... Read more...
From our Thunderer in The Times (Thursday 22 December) - our Chief Executive John O'Connell on the need for Whitehall to spend more wisely on consultants: A report this year from the National Audit Office said that government departments spent up to £1.3 billion of taxpayers’ money on consultants in... Read more...
The TPA has long criticised aspects of foreign aid spending and particularly the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI. However for the countless words that are written about this absurd policy nothing demonstrates its poor value for money like a few revealing statistics. Fortunately, that is what has... Read more...
Now that we have had some time to drill down into some of the finer points of Philip Hammond’s first public event as Chancellor, we have some thoughts on the more positive aspects of the last ever Autumn Statement: Our research director, Alex Wild, called for an end to the... Read more...
A Sky News poll has found that 43 per cent of Britons support “ending austerity and increasing spending” with 24 per cent opposed. After six years of relentless talk from the government about “tough choices”, some weariness is understandable. Unfortunately however, George Osborne’s words were far tougher than his actions.... Read more...
The Chancellor will deliver the Autumn Statement this week. Mr Hammond should use the opportunity to root out waste and introduce tax reform which the nation badly needs to put our public finances in order. He should also help secure the recovery by reducing Corporation Tax and restore honesty to... Read more...
In response to the news that the sovereign grant will temporarily increase: Harry Davis, Campaign Manager at the TaxPayers' Alliance: "These are clearly huge sums of money and the public are right to cast a sceptical eye when the public finances are still in such a dire state. Large renovation... Read more...
A copy of our letter to the Telegraph, published on 17 November 2016. Calls to slash stamp duty are welcome, but making sellers rather than buyers liable – as proposed by Pete Redfern, chief executive of the housebuilder Taylor Wimpey – would be nothing short of fiscal chicanery. The one... Read more...
If I were running a council which needed to get its finances in order, spending £350,000 on a referendum asking residents’ permission to take more of their money would not be top of my to-do list. Remarkably this is precisely what Liverpool Mayor, Joe Anderson, wants to do. He is proposing... Read more...
The treatment of pensioners’ income is often seen as one of the, if not the biggest headache in a merger of national insurance and income tax. As far as our proposals are concerned however, any problems are explanatory and could be politically painless with a comprehensive information campaign. Under the... Read more...
On Wednesday night (26 October) our local team in Hammersmith, which is being coordinated by local resident Mark, held their first get together to discuss campaigning in their area. These meetings are vitally important as we look to take our campaign across the country. The work we do from HQ... Read more...
The Taxpayers Protection Alliance in America released a damning report last week looking at the World Health Organization's (WHO) sub-agency that monitors tobacco policy. The report found that it is "failing taxpayers around the world and harming its own effort to reduce tobacco use". Naturally, they found wasteful spending aplenty too -... Read more...
This morning’s papers show what we have known for quite a long time: there are serious problems within the health service. The headlines alone make grim reading: Pointless treatments cost NHS £2bn a year – Times Ambulances wait nine hours outside A&E amid 'epidemic' of delays – Telegraph NHS trust... Read more...
On Wednesday Lord Ashton, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport told a Lords debate that BBC Studios would not have to carry out “full named disclosure”. This is unfortunately a step backwards for transparency, considering there are still uncertainties over the actual competitiveness of programme production... Read more...