According to the Express & Star, Sandwell Council street wardens are certainly justifying their salaries having issued more than 6 times as many on-the-spot fines as their counterparts in the neighbouring borough of Dudley, making the council a tidy £165,000 if paid in full. Proactive council employees in West... Read more...
This Wednesday a debate will come before Parliament which affords an usual opportunity to further the cause of transparency in all public spending. If you can spare a couple of minutes, please follow these instructions on contacting your MP to urge them to support the motion. Essentially, back in... Read more...
The Administrative Burdens Reduction Programme was launched by the Government in 2005. Aiming to reduce the annual cost to business of complying with administrative regulations, the programme set the tough target of reducing the burden by 25 per cent by 2010. The NAO has kept a close eye on the... Read more...
This week we released a report on relative spending for road and rail, in which we said that road should be prioritised within a rapidly disappearing transport budget. Roads carry more passengers per pound than rail. Our research highlights that although spending on road and rail is roughly equal- £8.2... Read more...
Our local councils can be pretty incessant in their attempts to ‘wow’ us, but self-congratulatory newsletters and needless awards schemes for staff? Is this really what we pay our council tax for? A Worcestershire based supporter emailed the WMTPA to complain about the county council flooding out their bi-annual... Read more...
Tonight, the BNP will appear on BBC 2's Question Time for the first time. The row about whether Nick Griffin should be allowed to take part has been dragging on for weeks, and everyone has had their say: Unite Against Fascism, free speech campaigners, the BNP, Peter Hain, Jack Straw,... Read more...
The Royal Mail is facing increased competition and a long term decline in one of their core businesses, delivering letters, as people switch to e-mail. Big demand for parcel services from online stores was the silver lining to that cloud. But, the company is losing key contracts from firms like Amazon. ... Read more...
Birmingham City Council are certainly being hauled over the coals by the Birmingham Post this week. Yesterday, the paper revealed that BCC’s Business Transformation Project is looking at a £10m shortfall on its projected savings, and now in today’s edition we read that council chiefs have spent £1.4m of taxpayers’... Read more...
In the BBC report today on our new study on transport spending one of the more prominent groups opposing our views is "Greengauge21, which promotes the development of a high-speed rail network in the UK". That isn't a campaign we've come across before, so I took a look at their website... Read more...
New research produced jointly by the Drivers' Alliance and the TaxPayers' Alliance reveals that despite the huge amounts of tax paid by motorists, public spending on rail outnumbers spending on roads by a factor of ten to one when actual usage is taken into account. This demonstrates that whilst the... Read more...
And they thought things were bad then... The last time we calculated the real national debt - including all those off-balance sheet Enron items - we got to a figure of £1.8 trillion. But that was last year, and things have moved on since then.Now Brooks Newmark has updated the... Read more...
The Daily Mail yesterday reported the continuing defiance of Barnet councillor Christopher Harris who, despite spending the last three months on an extended holiday in Australia, continues to claim his monthly allowance. Cllr Harris’ behaviour has drawn criticism from colleagues and constituents alike, but he remains unrepentant and ludicrously insists... Read more...
This week has seen the MPs' expenses row rumble on, with Sir Thomas Legg, a civil servant charged with the unenviable task of reviewing invidividual MPs' expense claims, wrting letters to each MP with a brief assessment of their claims and in some cases asking for repayment. The interesting... Read more...
We’ve talked before about the difficulty in mapping the policy process in certain Government departments. The MOD is often seen as the hegemon of complexity but the sheer confusion at work in other departments makes British government a true multi-polar world. A world in which Defra must be considered a... Read more...
Pretty dismal news for the NHS in the West Midlands, as standards in local hospitals ‘deteriorate dramatically’ according to the front page of today’s Birmingham Post. The paper reveals that annual performance ratings by the national watchdog the Care Quality Commission appear to show that whilst financial management is... Read more...
The think tank Reform have unveiled the shortlist for this year's Reformer of the Year award. There are various worthies (and a couple of unworthies) on the list, but two in particular stand out: Heather Brooke and Douglas Carswell MP. In fact, they're both so good I'm simply going... Read more...
In October, after relentless pressure to toughen up Incapacity Benefit, the Government introduced a new ‘Employment and Support Allowance’. Over the last year applicants have been undergoing the new medical assessments, and the DWP yesterday released the results. Nearly two thirds of applicants have so far failed in their claim,... Read more...
On Monday the issue of road charging reared its head once again. But, no sooner had the story hit the front page of the Evening Standard, Boris Johnson issued a rebuttal: “There is absolutely no scheme in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to introduce road user charging in London.” London’s motorists,... Read more...
As the Express & Star reports the findings of KPMG auditors who urge Sandwell Council to consider mothballing, decommissioning or even demolishing the site if it gets too costly, we must ask the obvious question – is this the beginning of the end for The Public nightmare? (Oh, and... Read more...
Tesco's Chief Executive, Sir Terry Leahy, has attacked the "woefully low" standards in British state education. Despite all the money that has been spent, he said, employers were being left to "pick up the pieces". Fulfilling his role as one of Gordon Brown's 'Education Advisors', the Tesco boss gave his... Read more...
A woeful oversight and miscommunication between Wolverhampton City Council and the Health and Safety Executive is likely to see taxpayers picking up the tab for costly court proceedings. A WMTPA supporter spotted a story in the Express & Star that reveals how a £40million student village in the city... Read more...
The Spectator reports that the Conservatives are considering ambitious moves to cut corporate tax. James Forsyth, the magazine’s political editor, reports that: “The plan is a Laffer-style supply-side reform: by lowering tax rates, you increase the tax yield. There are even whispers that the aim is to reduce it to... Read more...
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... Read more...
Left Foot Forward continue to push forward irrelevant or misleading evidence in an attempt to pretend that cap and trade doesn't significantly increase energy prices and that such a policy won't kill jobs. They've misunderstood my point about the Climate Group survey. The point is simply that a survey... Read more...