The excellent Jeff Randall is asking readers who run companies with fewer than 100 staff to write in for a new Telegraph series – Real Business in Brown’s Britain: “The aim is to cut through official hype and discover what it's like trying to make a living as an entrepreneur... Read more...
Open your wallet very wide please We've blogged the NHS dentist fiasco many times (eg here). And today we hear that the Department of Health's latest convoluted attempt to increase availability has flopped.Their new contract for NHS dentists was supposed to end the piecework "drill and fill" culture, yet at... Read more...
Lancashire county council has stunned its roadside workforce by insisting that all staff that climbs a 4-foot ladder to put up road signs must have ‘ladder training’. Added to this the council are inviting the fire and rescue services to take time off from their essential duties to instruct people... Read more...
Two things stand out in this week’s non-job. The first is the proliferation of ‘welfare rights’ advisors and other local government apparatchiks who are paid generous amounts to explain to people how to claim benefits. This raises the question of whether councils are actively pursuing take-up of benefits and that... Read more...
Qualification A- pass rate 96% Qualification B- pass rate 44% The charts above show the history of pass rates for two qualifications.One is a highly respected, highly prized qualification that opens career doors all over the world.The other isn't.Can you guess which is which?Here are some clues. Qualification B where... Read more...
Staffordshire County Council have once again outdone themselves in terms of profligate spending and managed to blow £230,000 on publishing their glossy magazine named Your Staffordshire (The Sentinel), a self-promoting brochure that includes interviews with Staffordshire celebrities such as Anthea Turner… A £50 million council funding shortfall makes this... Read more...
Explosive new figures have just been released by the Liberal Democrats. They show that for every £1 a private sector worker contributes to their pension they pay 91p in tax towards a public sector worker’s pension. The research shows that private sector workers paid about £12.8 billion a year... Read more...
Further Excellent News! Lord Adonis of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (National) has hailed the latest Key Stage 2 school test results: "Today's primary school children have achieved the best set of Key Stage 2 results we have ever seen, and I congratulate all pupils and teachers for... Read more...
Derrick Frost, a newly registered TaxPayers’ Alliance activist from West Sussex and member of USDAW (the Union of shop, distributive and allied workers), has told us how he recently won a crucial vote at the USDAW conference binding the Union to campaign against council tax. With a massive vote... Read more...
The Sun reports this morning that the cost of underwriting Teachers' pensions has risen by a quarter, from £143 to £181 billion. This is a truly astronomical rise. It can be added to the already massive liability that taxpayers face for public sector pensions in general, £1 trillion according to leading... Read more...
Trust in the BBC is non-existent. Its most popular programmes were recently rumbled, exposing a widespread phone-in scam that fleeced thousands of license-fee payers who thought they were taking part in legitimate competitions. They were even caught out in the Telegraph this morning by digitally generating parts of their ‘factual’... Read more...
League table of incompetence: scores out of ten The table above is taken from a shocking report just published by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee- Skills for Government (para 27). They say: "No department seems to be exactly “fit for purpose”, although the Home Office is unique... Read more...
"But critics say that there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that examinations are now easier than they were inthe 70s and 80s. It comes as the Government prepares to publish the results of tests taken by children aged 11 tomorrow. Dr Coe analysed the standards achieved by... Read more...
So we hear news about NHS budget deficits and hospitals not having enough money to clean wards properly. Apparently, however, there’s enough money to pay for treatment abroad rather than spending the money on the NHS at home. Taken from the public purse, 269 women took advantage of the... Read more...
That will be £12 grand In the even-sillier-than-usual season news this week-£12k on probing towels hazard- "HEALTH and safety bureaucrats wasted £12,000 — studying BATH TOWELS. Boffins wanted to know if laying them on the bathroom floor makes you more or less likely to slip. But the Government-funded project failed... Read more...
The £12-20bn NHS Supercomputer - the National Programme for IT - continues to lurch from crisis to crisis. In June the programme's head, Richard Granger, suddenly resigned. Now users are discovering the software is not fit for purpose, and is significantly inferior to their existing systems. A survey of Foundation... Read more...
The Bromsgrove Advertiser reported this week that Bromsgrove District Council have agreed in secret to spend £40,000 headhunting a new chief officer. The costly move was branded ‘obscene’ by Council opposition leader Peter McDonald, though the council clearly know this decision is an extravagant one, as is implicit in the... Read more...
Sure Start, a government program designed to give “children the best possible start in life", is a textbook case of a bureaucratic pet-project gone wrong. The scheme bears every hallmark of government failure: it is complex and expensive, has undergone mission creep and ultimately failed in its objectives. The... Read more...
West Midlands TPA Launch The West Midlands TaxPayers’ Alliance officially opened for business after a launch event outside the uncompleted 'The Public' art gallery in West Bromwich on Tuesday morning. The day went to plan, with our eye-catching 55ft poster truck stealing the show and providing a great backdrop... Read more...
The appointment of Sir Michael Lyons, author of the expensive and ineffective Lyons report into local government finance, to the Chairmanship of the BBC was seen as just another act of cronyism. The Daily Mail reports today (not online) that the House of Lords communications committee has criticised ministers’... Read more...
We have often wondered where all those Environmental Science graduates that new universities are so good at producing find employment on graduation. The answer, it seems, lies in the Guardian Society supplement, which, every week advertises pages of non-jobs in local councils that all seem to require environmental or earth... Read more...
Front row: Chris D. Kelly, Blair Gibbs, Tim Aker, Fiona McEvoyBack row: Matthew Elliott, Paul Biggs, TPA supporters, Peter Roberts, Nigel Hastilow, Cllr Ray Nock, Cllr Bill Archer Read more...
When terms like “fair trade” and “sustainability” so plague policy discussions over the environment and development, it really is quite an achievement to reach the status of most vacuous phrase. However, “food miles” really is so useless, so meaningless, so damaging a concept that, despite the fierce competition, it truly... Read more...
The magic beans were even more useless than we imagined Our very first blog about the Simple Shopper was on the new GPs contract (see here). We asked how the Department of Health could possibly have given away such a heavy milking cash cow in exchange for a few magic... Read more...