Just when we might reasonably assume our local authorities are starting to take a pragmatic look at recruitment in light of the financial woes that have led to redundancies up and down the country, we take a look at the Guardian jobs pages and realise that some are carrying on... Read more...
In a speech to the Bank for International Settlements by José Manuel González-Páramo, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank first discusses the economics of deficits. He sets out a number of conditions under which we should be relatively sceptical of the kind of argument the... Read more...
Sandwell Council bosses and the West Midlands’ most controversial art gallery are once again busy deflecting criticism as they find themselves at the centre of yet another row over public funds. Keen to stop the slugs moving in, Sandwell decided to stage an event within the vacant, cavernous The... Read more...
Writing in the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner really nails what is going wrong in the economy right now: "Together with Kraft's £12bn bid for Cadbury, Pru's assault on the Far East gives the impression of a renewed outbreak of merger mania. The reality is very different. These are exceptions, rather than... Read more...
Yesterday Government plans to tackle congestion were revealed and it didn’t include road pricing. Instead the plans aim to tackle the huge problem of road works overruns, proposing to increase fines on construction and utility companies that overrun to £25,000 a day. This is a tenfold increase from the current... Read more...
Here is a spreadsheet of the spending cuts for 2010/11 made by Windsor & Maidenhead council. Read more...
The Misery Index was quite a big deal in the 1970s. It's a pretty basic concept really, you just add the inflation rate to the unemployment rate. Barro produced a more complex version but the basic one produced by Arthur Okun will do for now. A high Misery Index score... Read more...
The National Audit Office (NAO) this week released a report on the BBC’s management of three estate projects. The redevelopment of Broadcasting House performed particularly badly and Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: “For future major projects, the BBC needs to make sure that: investment decisions are based on... Read more...
Earlier this week, the Local Government Association (LGA) released their annual survey of council tax forecasts. The report is based on just over 100 draft budgets, so it's not comprehensive, but it's normally a pretty reliable snapshot of the tax changes to come. The sad thing is, the LGA's reporting... Read more...
Earlier this week, I wrote about how the manufacturing order statistics fitted the pattern of Britain having a weak recovery compared to the rest of Europe. Even with the revision of the growth statistics announced this morning, the evidence still suggests we're not having a good time of it. New... Read more...
The Office for National Statistics have issued a new report on patterns in pay. There is a mistake on their graph of public and private sector pay - the label on the vertical axis should be £ per week not £ per hour - but it illustrates the growing divide... Read more...
Today British Gas has announced record profits. That will anger many ordinary taxpayers who are struggling with high energy prices, even after the recent cut. Energy companies do deserve the public's ire, but the story is a bit more complicated than it might appear. Taxpayer funded campaign group Consumer Focus... Read more...
The failings of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust are nothing short of a scandal. Poor care at Stafford Hospital has been linked to hundreds of deaths. Yesterday’s Telegraph reported that the management team in charge during the mess will not be disciplined; indeed some will receive handsome pay-offs. The former... Read more...
Yesterday George Osborne delivered the Mais Lecture at the Cass Business School, you can read the full speech here. He got many things right but there were some important flaws in his analysis and some areas where the Conservatives' plans clearly fall short at the moment. Read more...
A verdict by EU judges on Tuesday has potentially paved the way for people with no right to live in the UK being handed a free pass to access our welfare system.Nimco Hassan Ibrahim is now separated from her Danish husband and lives with their four children (of Dutch nationality)... Read more...
This morning Eurostat have put out a release on new manufacturing orders. In December, orders were up 0.8 per cent on November in the eurozone and 0.6 per cent across the wider EU27. By contrast, in Britain orders were down 0.8 per cent. New manufacturing orders are an important indicator... Read more...
As the Telegraph reports, the Treasury's attempt to reassure business that they are going to make Britain's tax code more competitive has failed to convince anyone. Their new tax framework promises "competitiveness, fairness, simplicity" and pledges a "commitment to lowering compliance costs". But there are no details of how that... Read more...
The consultants Brook Lyndhurst have responded to the Daily Mail story about our report on the Climate Challenge Fund. You can almost hear the panic as a report they hoped would only be read by starry-eyed civil servants gets picked up by a campaign group investigating wastes of government money... Read more...
With the public finances in such dire straits all political parties have acknowledged the need for cuts but no one quite knows where the knife will fall. Reports suggest that the Transport budget will face substantial cuts in the years to come; cuts totalling £29 billion over ten years have... Read more...
The Commons Business Committee has today criticised a planned tax on broadband, saying it would “place a disproportionate cost on a majority who will not, or are unable to, reap the benefits of that charge” (according to the FT). My colleague Mark Wallace first criticised the telephone tax in the... Read more...
1819 - what happens when government debt gets too high Are we too worried about the government's spiralling debts? According to some letter-writing economists the answer is yes. They reckon that gross debt of 83% of GDP, increasing at 11 percentage points pa (OECD projections), is perfectly sustainable into some unspecified "medium... Read more...
I wrote about the Tobin Tax for City AM back when Gordon Brown first brought it up in November. The scheme has been a favourite of anti-capitalist protesters and the radical Left for a long time, the Tobin Tax Initiative was set up in the United States in 1998. It... Read more...
Last month, TPA Chief Executive Matthew Elliott spoke at the Entrepreneur Country conference about the impact of taxation and other policies on entrepreneurs. As part of the event, he took part in a panel discussion with Derek Wyatt MP and Bernard Jenkin MP, following on from a speech by YouGov's Stephan... Read more...
The Sun’s recent discovery that Harriet Harman interfered in the Legg Inquiry comes as no real surprise- her initial attempt to prevent the disclosure of MPs’ expenses by making them exempt from the Freedom of Information Act in January last year showed her true opinion on the subject. However,... Read more...