Today two polls from centre left organisations today suggest that the public are ready to back cuts in spending and will reject attempts by the unions to block them. The think tank Demos released the results of a massive YouGov poll of 45,000 people, this is from the press release:... Read more...
Today a three-year pay offer has been turned down by Scottish council workers – with possible industrial action to follow. Scottish branches of Unite, GMB and Unison have all rejected the deal which would have seen a 1.5 per cent rise over three years. Instead the unions have demanded a... Read more...
In recent weeks and months, we have seen a number of spending cuts and other policies initially recommended by the TPA adopted by the Government, ranging from the abolition of certain quangos such as the RDAs to the public sector pay freeze and scrapping preventing violent extremism grants from local... Read more...
On the same day that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have written a letter to the cabinet reminding them that deficit reduction remains the most urgent issue facing Britain, union bosses have unveiled their plans for an autumn of discontent.There will be a campaign for national strikes over cuts to... Read more...
The Telegraph report that a number of local authorities around Manchester are planning to establish a minimum price for alcohol of 50p a unit. I think that the problem with the proposal is that price is that price increases that could affect all drinkers are being used to try and... Read more...
It has been recently reported that the general secretary of the RMT transport Union, Bob Crow, has called for mass strikes to halt ‘savage’ job cuts. In a statement packed with rhetoric that reads like an A.J. Cook speech from the general strike of 1926, Crow calls for ‘general and... Read more...
In a release from the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude last week vowed to dispose of hundreds of needless and costly government websites. This is part of the government’s drive to cut £6.2 billion of wasteful spending and reduce the deficit. It is hoped that £95 million can be saved through... Read more...
High speed rail is hugely expensive and therefore needs to deliver significant benefits to justify investing taxpayers’ money. However those lobbying for high speed rail have never put forward robust statistics showing benefits that the new high speed rail line High Speed 2 will actually deliver. The HS2 Action Alliance... Read more...
A “radical extension of direct democracy” is upon us. An announcement today championing localism from Communities Secretary Eric Pickles MP is an important step towards greater fiscal decentralisation. Mr Pickles has proposed an innovative range of measures that will see English councils get the opportunity to attract businesses to their... Read more...
The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) today welcomed the 21st Century Welfare report released this morning by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) which cites TPA research and argues for a major simplification of the benefit system. The proposal in the recent major TPA report Welfare Reform in Tough Fiscal Times is cited as the... Read more...
Tameside MBC has been running a weekly news service on Youtube called 60 Second News; it's anything but as bulletins can often run to two or three minutes long. This gives you an idea of the time telling wizards we are employing here. The service was launched to much... Read more...
There was some welcome news from Eric Pickles this week. The Communities Secretary, addressing the Local Government Association (LGA), said that the trade association which represents local authorities should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act in the same way as councils and Whitehall departments. The FOI Act... Read more...
The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) new report 'The Measurement of Government Activity' shows that over a decade to 2008 productivity in the public services fell steadily, and in 2008 by an incredible 0.9 per cent alone. This shows how ill-judged the splurge in spending on unreformed public services in... Read more...
Today the Audit Commission released a report on the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS). They mention that there is a positive cashflow in the system - more money is going in than coming out. That sounds positive. But the liabilities in the scheme - the amount owed in the long... Read more...
Our Original Questions Q1. You claim to present an overview of the research on health and inequality, yet leave out the scientifically most heavyweight survey of the field, Princeton Professor Angus Deaton’s article in the prestigious Journal of Economic Literature. Is this simply because Deaton finds no robust relationship... Read more...
As the summer recess draws nearer, Government departments have been busy announcing quangos to be abolished. We've written extensively on quangos before, and have produced the most robust surveys of the semi-autonomous landscape, so the TPA's stance on the issue is pretty well known. There are too many bodies (1,148... Read more...
Something must be done, and it was... the trouble is it's since been overdone Once upon a time, long long ago, welfare was paid to the poor. And only to the poor. But these days, welfare is available to pretty well everybody. Even rich bankers on... Read more...
This week sees the start of a six-week summer holiday for the majority of state school children. It also marks the end of another £530 million annual Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) payout. Around now, those 16-19 year olds who have remained in education beyond GCSEs will receive their second £100... Read more...
TPA supporter John Martin blogs about Norfolk County Council... Norfolk is a fine county with a low crime rate, beautiful stretches of coastline, wonderful old churches and acres of open rolling countryside. There are few better places to live. But in the towering ugly building on the outskirts of... Read more...
We recently released some research about speed cameras. Since then, there has been a lot of discussion in the media of the cost and effectiveness of speed cameras. Oxfordshire County Council has chosen to cut funding to the Thames Valley safety camera partnership and there has been the one year... Read more...
The education system in Hull has taken more than its fair shareof knocks over the years. In all fairness to the teachers, Hull is a city whereeducation is regarded as unimportant. Until parents realise their children’sfuture lies with a good education, very little will change. Today though oneschool is celebrating.... Read more...
Labour blogger Hopi Sen has read our report on welfare reform and perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn't like what it says. But it's worth running through his objections because they highlight some key points about our argument. The most important issue is the definition of the poverty line. Sen writes: "If... Read more...
Yesterday, we learnt that Network Rail has gained approval for bonuses amounting to £2.4 million, one hundred per cent of which is being paid by you, the taxpayer. Amidst some very tough decisions across the public sector in recent weeks, it seems extraordinary that Iain Coucher, the company’s departing Chief... Read more...
There is no money for hanging baskets of flowers on the streets of Islington, but there is more than enough to pay the expenses of the local Great and the Good assembled for the borough’s first Fairness Commission held earlier this week, pet project of council leader Catherine West. She... Read more...