While Cristiano Ronaldo's motivations for going to Real Madrid are easy to understand, Real's willingness to commit £187 million to a single player (the total value of his transfer fee and contractual wage bill) is perhaps less easy to explain. Brilliant he may be, and no doubt a commercial asset,... Read more...
Working as we do to highlight the massive cost of the Government's tax policies, we often get asked how people and businesses can spread the word. One great way to do so is for businesses to adopt a policy of producing full tax receipts, so that their customers find out... Read more...
In response to my earlier blog on the LGA survey of allowances, a supporter has sent information about Newham council’s shocking state of council allowances. In perusing the documents, I thought I’d report the scandal going on in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country. Look at... Read more...
Among the parlour games played at Downing Street last week (musical chairs, pin the blame on the donkey, smash the Brown pinata, etc), pass the parcel was the one most emphatically won by Peter Mandelson. Every time the music stopped, the good Baron was holding the parcel, a wry smile... Read more...
I am intrigued to see Richard Kemp's reaction to a report, out today, from the Commons Communities and Local Government Committee that accused councils of taking their eye off the ball and being negligent when it came to their investments in Icelandic banks. We have been accusing them of this... Read more...
An ONS report published on Tuesday revealed that productivity in the public sector has declined by 3.2% since 1997. This is the first such report carried out using the recommendations of the 2005 Atkinson Review, which rightly highlighted the need to change the way productivity in the public sector was... Read more...
The LGA has today released its survey of councillor allowances from over 300 English councils. From their summary you can see average councillor allowances rising above inflation to an average of £6,099 per. Astonishingly, the London average councillor salary equates to almost £10,000 – not a bad income supplement for... Read more...
As you can see on the right there are almost 600 jobs on offer in the government sector this week. Our non-job of the week comes from Hackney council: “"Cultural Officer £34,707 - £37,476 p.a. inc. The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games has led to the... Read more...
If you had a drug problem and wanted to tackle it, where would you fancy going to admit it and seek help? Perhaps you’d go to your family at home? Or maybe visit a doctor’s surgery? Or – if you’re rather an exhibitionist – you can now go along to... Read more...
It's definitely heavier Regular readers may recall an extraordinary exchange at a Public Accounts meeting in November 2007. The PAC were grilling Treasury mandarins on the PFI millstone, and they wanted to know how big the debt had become.Now, you might have thought that would be simple to answer. After... Read more...
Sir Alan Sugar is in the papers this morning claiming he will step down as director of some of his companies to avoid the escalating brouhaha over his BBC job that has been gathering speed ever since Gordon Brown appointed him 'enterprise tsar' last week. It shows that Sir Alan knows there's a... Read more...
As Brown's new Cabinet settled down to their first meeting this morning, Liam Byrne may have joked that for a board of directors, few of them - himself included - really know much about their portfolios. Andy Burnham, who until recently was in charge of the rag tag department for... Read more...
It's rare to hear anything at all about Britain's Departmental Permanent Secretaries. Even scandal doesn't usually push their names into the headlines. So Sir David Normington's decision to speak to the BBC - for a programme about Sir Ian Blair's departure from the Met last year - is something of... Read more...
The Telegraph reports a truly ridiculous example of the police failing to do their job and enforce the law: "However, police and council workers have ruled out fixing the pothole-ridden road because they are worried about sparking a riot from travellers who could think they are about to be evicted... Read more...
Today, we submitted our evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life's investigation into MPs' expenses. The inquiry is pretty wide-ranging, with a number of questions to be answered on a wide variety of topics, so it's enabled us to set out a pretty comprehensive manifesto for how best... Read more...
It's difficult to recall now, but once upon a time, PFI was meant to save taxpayers money. Read more...
Sir Roy Anderson, Vice Chancellor of Imperial College, told the Guardian this week that Britain’s top universities should be privatised: "How important is higher education to UK plc? Staggeringly so. It is a multi-billion-pound industry. It is one of the few things we are world competitive in. If you take... Read more...
Over the past months we’ve been working with some grassroots campaigners in Swindon to save some libraries from closure. You would have thought it simple to keep a library open - the ideas are out there - and that if you appealed to the council, negotiated and found a settlement the libraries could... Read more...
As of writing the Guardian jobs website is advertising 527 jobs this week as you can see from the box on the right. The pick of the crop this week, and our non-job of the week, comes from Brent council: “Brent Tobacco Control Alliance Co-ordinator From £34,045 -... Read more...
A new report by the Taxpayers' Alliance reveals Britain's best and worst Members of the European Parliament, based on a detailed analysis of their performance. The assessment provides a key source of information on which MEPs are hard-working, and committed to transparency and accountability. The results reveal a wide gap... Read more...
Around this time last year the WMTPA wrote on the West Midlands Centre for Constructing Excellence (WMCCE), an off-the-radar quango with a snazzy website whose remit seemingly allowed them to give out a lot of advice and a lot of money. Oddly, at the time, the limited content on the... Read more...
The BBC has commissioned a poll which shows that voters no longer trust MPs to tell the truth, that they think MPs put their own self interest above public service motivation and that more than half of MPs are corrupt. None of this should come as a massive surprise,... Read more...
A new TPA/ComRes poll reveals the vast gulf in opinion between MEPs in Brussels and the British public on EU issues. By comparing the views of 1,020 British adults and 101 MEPs, weighted to be representative of wider society and the European Parliament respectively, the new research demonstrates that while... Read more...
Education is - by its very nature - social engineering. It provides people, young or old, with the tools with which to get on and move up. Education should be encouraged constantly, exactly because of its influence on wider society. Which makes recent news about the Department for Children, Schools... Read more...