The announcement today that RMT Union leader Bob Crow has pocketed a 12 per cent pay rise should be met with indignation. As millions of people in both the public and private sector are forced to accept painful pay cuts or pay freezes, fat cat union boss, Crow, has accepted... Read more...
Today the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) published their departmental spend with suppliers for the 2009-10 financial year. It contains every transaction over £500, and is a huge step forward for transparency. It's something that we hope to see every department do, as taxpayers now have the opportunity... Read more...
When the government announced the abolition of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) I was asked by a local journalist if I was already dancing on the bonfire. It was a little premature as, unfortunately, RDAs will still be with us until April 2012. I had hoped they were going to... Read more...
A lot of people are getting very excited about the idea that the coalition's announcements of cuts may be leading to a slowdown in economic growth, Left Foot Forward for example. It certainly does appear that the recovery is stalling a bit, but the front page of City AM offers... Read more...
Well there’s no doubt about it, there are definitely fewer public sector jobs going up on the Guardian jobsite. On the 11th November 2009 we reported that the number of jobs advertised had hit 556, and today there are just 188. Though there are still a number of PR and... Read more...
In our book How to cut public spending, we suggested scrapping Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAAs) for local government. They have been scrapped, which is good news. As part of our rationale, we suggested that the Audit Commission should audit accounts and detect fraud, and lose its compliance role entirely. Councils... Read more...
Breakdown Cover has read the TPA's report on speed cameras and liked it so much they have produced some very reader-friendly graphics to illustrate the report's statistical findings. Click on the image below to view the graphic in it's full grandeur! Read more...
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) certainly aren't hanging around. Tomorrow marks the three month birthday of the new government - less than one hundred days - and already the department have gone to work on stripping out layers of bureaucracy, abolishing costly schemes and scrapping cumbersome quangos.... Read more...
Tomorrow (Wednesday 11th August) it will be three months since the coalition Government was established and David Cameron became Prime Minister. During the election, the TaxPayers' Alliance published a manifesto which set out our objectives for this Parliament. We promised then that we would judge any new Government against that... Read more...
These days, we frequently come across the expression "public participation in local government". Most certainly, it chimes well with the Coalition Government’s published thoughts about localism. But what does it actually mean? You could say, for instance, that the residents of Norfolk are entitled to participate in local government once... Read more...
The debate over speed cameras keeps rolling on. Yesterday Mick Giannasi, Gwent's Chief Constable, predicted that the number of fatal crashes will increase if cameras are turned off. Giannasi and other supporters of the speed cameras say they have contributed significantly to a substantial fall in the number of deaths... Read more...
Is a private business mentality taking over at County Hall? Recent reports of increases in senior executive pay at East Riding of Yorkshire Council (ERYC) have predictably elicited a generally critical response from a bewildered and economically beleaguered local populace, whose exposure to the straitened economic climes is on a... Read more...
On Saturday 7 August, I had the following letter published inthe Hull Daily Mail: Dear Editor, The news that Hull City Council intends to go ahead andattempt to build a new school academy in WestHull, defies all logic. AlthoughEndeavour High School has been beset with problems almost from... Read more...
In an article about The Spirit Level for the Observer yesterday, Nick Cohen wrote that: "The Taxpayers' Alliance warns that it legitimises a fleecing of the middle class." Elsewhere in the same article, he describes the attacks on the book as "raging polemics". Poor readers of the Observer... Read more...
Great news today as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles has announced new restrictions on taxpayer funded lobbying at councils and quangos in his Department. Our report Taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning is cited a number of times in the DCLG release that has been... Read more...
I blogged this week about the looming autumn of discontent - the unions’ attempt to stop essential cuts to restore the public finances to health and condemn taxpayers to even more years of debt repayment.Of course the advice to the government was to be tough with unions and to make... Read more...
Some remarkable accusations have been levelled at Network Rail’s outgoing Chief Executive, Iain Coucher. Just two weeks ago, I blogged on the bonuses at the taxpayer funded firm, in which Coucher picked up £641,000 on top of his already huge salary. In fact, a monumental £2.35m of public money was... Read more...
After an animated debate at the Royal Society of Arts, The Spirit Level’s authors—Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett—have issued a written defence of their work via the website of their political campaign group The Equality Trust. The authors of the Taxpayers Alliance critique responded here last week and I have... Read more...
In September 2009 the TaxPayers’ Alliance revealed for the first time the type of groups and organisations to which local authority ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (PVE) grants were going. The Government has now decided to adopt our position and abolish these grants. However, Prevent – part of the broader Contest Strategy... Read more...
We recently released a report that studied speed cameras and their impact on casualty rates. It has done much to re-open and stimulate the debate on how Britain approaches road safety. The report presents analysis which shows that since the implementation of speed cameras in 1992 - coupled with a... Read more...
Yesterday, a government report leaked to the Health Service Journal revealed that the NHS spend £86 million per year on thousands of websites which are often poorly designed, difficult to locate and irrelevant to patient needs. Amidst a monumental budget deficit and spending cuts across Whitehall, the NHS budget will... Read more...
The letter in the Guardian today from Tony Benn - inventor of the seatcase - and seventy-three of his comrades is quite revealing. Most of the signatories are the usual suspects, washed up socialists with little relevance to the practical debate over how Britain deals with a serious fiscal crisis. ... Read more...
We might hearing about the strain on government budgets, but unfortunately public sector recruitment websites seem to be telling us a completely different story. Today both the Guardian jobsite and the very popular Jobsgopublic.com are jam-packed full of questionable roles – so much so that today’s non-job of the week... Read more...
It struck me the other day that, while we probably have little to thank the Blair administration for, we should all be grateful to it for giving us the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Where would we be without the Act when so many public authorities still seem to find... Read more...