News broke last night that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority are looking to push through their plan to give MPs a 10 per cent pay rise before Parliament goes into recess last week. The TaxPayers' Alliance have long opposed any rise - why do IPSA think it's appropriate for MPs to get a pay rise when the rest of the public sector sees pay held at just a 1 per cent annual increase? Our comments were picked up by The Sun and the Daily Express.
Meanwhile, our Campaign Director Andy Silvester wrote a column for the Yorkshire Post on our research into the implications of Direct Recovery of Debt powers being given to HMRC, which you can read here.
But that is no reason to circumvent the principles of Magna Carta to do so. And that is without questioning whether HMRC – of all the government agencies – should be given such draconian powers. Last year, the organisation got 5.5 million tax bills wrong. Giving such an error-prone organisation the power to seize funds without legal recourse is a disaster in principle and in practice.