An Investigation by the BBC has revealed that a charity receiving taxpayers’ money has links to a strange group which has been likened to a cult. Development Aid from People to People (DAPP) runs charity projects in Africa with programmes ranging from farming to health to education. However, the investigation... Read more...
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) had previously decided that only BBC staff earning over £450,000 should have their salaries published, a decision that we at the TaxPayers' Alliance were quick to condemn as not going far enough. However yesterday a report by the DCMS Committee suggested that... Read more...
The “triple lock” promise – that pensions will always rise by whichever is higher out of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent – made by the Conservatives before the 2010 election was irresponsibly profligate. In 2015 a report published by the Government Actuary Department estimated that the pension triple lock would... Read more...
Today the government was widely expected to sign contracts with French utility giant EDF to build two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point. The board of EDF had (reportedly narrowly) voted to approve the project but Greg Clark, the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced a... Read more...
A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report released yesterday has highlighted how the incompetence of HMRC has harmed taxpayers. According to the report, the tax-collecting organisation released 5,600 staff from its personal tax division in 2014-15 in order to ‘live within its budget’. Though a reasonable aim, this led to a... Read more...
Earlier today, an article published in the Telegraph highlighted a number of new controversies surrounding the topic UK’s inheritance tax. The article reported that campaigners are calling for a compensation for nearly 30,000 families paying inheritance tax in the two years from April 2015 because the Government “has taken too... Read more...
The NHS faces a compensation time bomb as provisions for hospital clinical negligence claims have almost doubled since last year to £56 billion - almost half of the NHS’s annual budget. The provisions, a pot of money set aside for paying compensation claims for medical blunders, has increased by an... Read more...
On the 4th July, Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council introduced a new £2.4 million recycling service. The vehicles bought would have enabled weekly collections to take place where there were once fortnightly ones. However, there was one major problem with this plan: the vehicles which the council purchased were too wide for... Read more...
In response to a written question from Valerie Vaz MP in 2013, health minister Norman Lamb revealed that in 2012 there were more than 55.7 million general practitioner registered patients in England, 104.2 per cent of the population. These 'ghost patients' are individuals who are registered at their local surgery but... Read more...
With a vote on the principle of renewal of Trident set to take place in Parliament today, it is essential that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) learns the lessons of past failures in defence procurement to ensure the costs of the Successor Programme (which will replace the 4 Vanguard submarines) does not... Read more...
Prime Minister Theresa May set out her stall yesterday by merging two Whitehall departments into a giant new office that promises to deliver an “industrial strategy” for Britain – City AM reported this morning. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will replace the departments of Business, Innovation and... Read more...
In 2014/15, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) placed new contracts worth £11.5 billion. Of these, £5.4 billion were “single source” or non-competitive contracts for military goods works and services. There are some contracts that can only realistically be given to one company (eg the Successor Programme) so in the absence of competition to... Read more...
Yesterday’s release of the ‘Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s (IPA) annual report on major projects 2015 to 2016’ provided a startling insight into the inefficiency of government spending on infrastructure projects. The report, which shows how government-funded infrastructure projects are progressing, revealed that for only 7% of infrastructure projects ‘successful delivery appears highly... Read more...
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) have this week given a nod, if a cautious one; to plans to begin fracking for shale gas in the UK. While they stress the need for emissions to be strictly monitored and limited during development, production and even decommission, they have put forth... Read more...
The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) has today published a damning report on the changes to the process of making public appointments. In 2015, the Grimstone review suggested several changes to the process including the watering down of the Commissioner for Public Appointment’s powers. These were subsequently accepted... Read more...
Responding to George Osborne’s plans to cut corporation tax to less than 15 per cent, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor has warned against turning the UK into a “tax haven”. While there is no universally accepted definition of a what a “tax haven” is, a number of jurisdictions are invariably... Read more...
Many doubts have been raised over High-Speed 2 but it may even need to be renamed Medium-Fast 1. The Times reports advice that the trains should be slowed by 65 mph in order to save money on this “crazy” project. The former Chief Scientific adviser to the Department for Transport,... Read more...
Oldham will be the latest Manchester council to change black bin collections to every 3 weeks, instead of every fortnight, in a bid to save £1.5 million a year. In other parts of Manchester the increase in fly-tipping and complaints of vermin and flies have already become apparent as consequences of... Read more...
The The TaxPayers' Alliance will be bringing their campaign to Woking on Thursday 21st July. At 13:00 we'll be leafleting in Jubilee Square in the centre of Woking so if you're around please come and grab some leaflets or come to say hello and find out what we've been up... Read more...
Everyone has been shocked by the horrific killing yesterday of Jo Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire. I offer my deepest condolences to her family. She was a wife and a mother to two young children, and few of us can begin to imagine the pain... Read more...
Our Chief Executive Jonathan Isaby has a piece in The Times today, not on the BHS pension scheme, but on public sector pensions - specifically within the NHS. As Jonathan points out, public sector pensions are broadly worth five times as much as their private counterparts. Considering how good a... Read more...
“Callers to a [HMRC’s] tax helpline were kept on hold so long, [hold music] became the UK’s second most streamed piece of music in 2015-16”, the Sun’s headline reported this morning. It emerged yesterday that UK taxpayers spent over 4 million hours on the phone waiting for an answer. The... Read more...
On the same day as the Westminster Hall debate on the 0.7% Foreign Aid target The Telegraph reports that a £156.4 million grant by the Department For International Development (DFID) has led to acts of terrorism by Palestinian civil servants becoming 'more likely'. The Overseas Development Institute have released a... Read more...
The government usually acts or passes a new law because it has a certain outcome in mind. It might be ensuring that our roads are maintained or that our children get a good education. However, when it comes to our foreign aid programme, it seems to be all about the... Read more...