Richard North over at EU Referendum has been discussing the importance of the EU in the tax debate - the "elephant in the room", as he puts it. It's definitely a problem, not only tax but in all areas, that the EU is often quietly left to one side by... Read more...
A harmless, yet wasteful, job this week from Luton Council courtesy, as always, from the Guardian (though afterwards you’ll see one we were sent from – gasp – The Times): “Community Development Service Manager £44,610 - £47,168 + £3,203 car benefit (pay award pending) Over 140 nationalities... Read more...
Last night's Newsnight debate in Crewe ahead of the by-election produced a wonderful image that embodied the gulf between politicians and the public on motoring taxes. After a heated debate on fuel duty in which all of the main parties steered clear of promising a cut in the taxes on... Read more...
Yesterday’s The Sentinel reported that Arts Council West Midlands and Stoke-on-Trent City Council will be pumping £35,000 of taxpayers’ money into a summer dance event named “A Game of 2 Arfs” in a familiar effort to “make dance a bit more accessible to those who wouldn’t normally go to see... Read more...
The Audit Commission's biennial National Fraud Initiative has made headlines today after uncovering £140m of fraud across England. Cross-referencing records from councils, public sector payrolls, GPs' surgeries and other bodies allows them to uncover fraud that had so far gone unnoticed, which is of course a welcome programme. Time... Read more...
Are you sure you can ride that thing? Hurrah! For the first time since 1472 the political cycle has turned. Tax and spend is out, and tax cuts are back on the centrist agenda. Yesterday, David Cameron finally summoned up the nerve to say taxpayers "can't take... Read more...
Michael Martin has, apparently, finally given up the futile courtroom battle to keep MPs' expenses secret - a battle that has so far run up a huge legal bill that we as taxpayers will be forced to pay. Good. Fighting the Freedom of Information requests regarding expenses was the wrong... Read more...
Even though Michael Martin – the Speaker of the House of Commons – has given up the fight to keep MPs expenses secret, he’s found another avenue with which he can waste your money to keep you less involved in the political system. According to this morning’s Today programme, Martin... Read more...
Government plans for a single, massive database containing records of all public internet activity, e-mails and phone calls, reported in the Times, are alarming. This system will be massively vulnerable to abuse and would allow Government officials to snoop, far too easily, on ordinary people. It is also likely to... Read more...
The Telegraph reports some harsh words from Ofsted today about standards in British schools: "In a consultation document published yesterday, Ofsted said: "If education in England is going to compare favourably with the best in the world, standards need to improve. In fact they have stalled." In our report (PDF,... Read more...
The Government have failed to improve the education system via the unimaginative means of large dollops of taxpayer cash. We documented the extent of their failure in the report (PDF, Chapter 1) we launched before this year's budget. That is bad news for taxpayers, whose money has been wasted, and... Read more...
David Cameron's pledge that the Conservatives will prioritise cutting the tax burden, in a speech this morning, is great news. It suggests that the Conservatives are taking seriously the need to the end the Great British Taxpayer Rip-off we identified in a report (PDF) last weekend: "With the rising cost... Read more...
The Victorians used to fill them with water Our recent Taxpayer Rip-off report tried to pull together some stats on public service cuts. It proved to be quite tricky because for obvious reasons, the government doesn't tend to publish them. But from schools, to healthcare, to policing, to... Read more...
The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) presents the full list of the UK’s vast quango industry, a detailed run-down of the staff and cost of the 1,162 bodies, boards and agencies that make up Britain’s Unseen Government. Read more...
Chris Dillow, at his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, sets out why a left-winger such as himself should like the education provided by private schools: "It's education in the sense of "educere" - drawing out whatever latent talents a student has. If someone doesn't have the aptitude for academe, they are... Read more...
Today’s Express and Star reports that residents of a Staffordshire residential home deemed ‘not fit for purpose’ have been moved out to a luxury care home at a cost of £1,000-per-person-per-week. Staffordshire County Council shied away from revealing just how many former residents of Billbrook House are now... Read more...
It's great news that the High Court have thrown out the case brought at the taxpayers' expense by the House of Commons authorities to try to keep details of MPs' expenses secret. Having fought the case for years, the Commons authorities decided to try to overturn a ruling of the... Read more...
West Midlands Police are set to cost taxpayers £100,000 in a payout to Channel 4 after accusing them of misleading the public and ‘heavily editing’ their documentary, Dispatches: Undercover Mosque. The story is reported in various national newspapers as well as on the front page of Today’s Birmingham Post.... Read more...
The headlines in the paper should read: ‘Multimillionaire claims taxpayer money for house renovation’. It was revealed yesterday that the multimillionare leader of the Liberal Democrats – Nick Clegg, the MP for Sheffield Hallam – claimed just over £7,000 of parliamentary expenses to renovate his Sheffield home, installing new... Read more...
One of the measures announced in the draft Queens Speech by the Prime Minister yesterday should leave taxpayers seething with rage. The announcement of a ‘Sentencing Commission’ to set “prison sentences…depending on the amount of space in jails” shows the government have lost the plot on crime and cynically move... Read more...
The BBC reports that one of the Government's proposals, in their pre-Queens Speech, is to add a measure of patient satisfaction and healthcare outcomes to the funding formula for hospitals. The details are being kept from the great unwashed at the moment but, suffice it to say, this is a... Read more...
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. It sounded good at the time, no? Read our non-job of the week at Southwark Council and see if the sentiment exists in local government: “Family Intervention Project Keyworker £22,638- £27,723 Fixed term contract until March 2011 ... Read more...
Last month the French finance minister Christine Lagarde cheerfully announced France’s intention to push for corporate tax harmonisation when it chairs the EU for six months from July. Since then the EU Commission and pro European politicians have toned it down to make sure businessmen don’t urge for a “no”... Read more...
Tramps, hoodlums and the various other categories of loiterer who clutter both Chamberlain and Victoria Square in central Birmingham must be bracing themselves for the return of their BBC Big Screen television that was removed from Chamberlain Square eight months ago. Read more...