Category Archives: Government

Good luck Ollie, you’ll need it!

Posted on by • Posted in Government, public sector • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

I see Oliver Letwin is calling for the cold wind of commercial reality to blow through the world of public service. Apparently, his radical suggestion is that, just like happens in the private sector, if somebody doesn’t do their job properly, they sholud be sacked and not just shuffled around the department until it’s time for them to retire.

Looked at from the outside, this doesn’t seem a particularly radical idea, until you look at the way the public sector, through it’s unions, has tied success governments and therefore the taxpayers in knots over the years. Public sector terms and conditions are based on the age old tradition of, work for peanuts, but get rewarded by a shorter working life and a better pension.

However, the confidence trick that has been played on the taxpayer over the past 20+ years, is that of ever increasing salaries, but without this being balanced by a reduction in their much criticised gold plated terms and conditions. Until that key point is addressed, the whole issue of dragging the public sector in to line with the private sector is going to remain a pipe dream.

By coincidence, I asked a very similar question when the district council was looking at how to reorganisation itself – how do we bring ourselves in the real world, by making our terms and conditions parallel the private sector? Like Oliver Letwin is no doubt already hearing, I was told that it wasn’t that easy. Apparently, the way public sector employment is structured in law, the council could not employ two people doing the same job, on different terms and conditions. If that is the case, then I can see little future for the public sector, as it seems the only way to level this particular playing field would be to scrap the public service sector completely and start again. Ultimately, is that what the Big Society is all about?

Ed Miliband – one trick pony?

Posted on by • Posted in Everyday life, Government • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

Apparently Ed Miliband is being given plaudits for kicking the open goal that is the phone hacking scandal. Surely, unless he actually came out in support of Murdoch, it would be difficult for him not to be heard saying the right things wouldn’t it? Heaven help us if picking easy targets is all it takes to become a political leader.

A credit card non-story and easy street for MPs

Posted on by • Posted in Government • Tagged , , , , , • Leave a comment

Two stories have caught my attention this week. The first one strikes me as something of a non-story once you scratch the surface and is about the amount government depts spend on credit cards. The very terms credit card and government seems to cause Daily Telegraph reports to break out in a hot flush and grab for the nearest keyboard.

Putting aside the claims of 5 star hotel rooms and Michelin star restaurant meals and you see that the majority of the spending is on legitimate items. Using a credit as opposed to the incredibly bureaucratic and expensive claims system I remember from my military days, can only be seen as an improvement. Despite its bureaucracy, that system was open to wide spread abuse, something that is much less likely with a credit card.

The other story that caught my attention is the ongoing storm surrounding public sector pensions. Apparently public sector workers are going to have to pay a lot more in to their pension scheme in order to maintain the levels of payout currently enjoyed. The list of those affected included, doctors, teachers, civil servants and no doubt just about every other public sector worker who gets their pay from the public purse. However, there appears to be one notable exception – Members of Parliament – what a surprise!

Time for Osborne to do his bit

Posted on by • Posted in Government • Tagged , , , , , • Leave a comment

I’ve been following, with growing alarm, the government’s proposals to overhaul the planning system and to effectively scrap the legislation that underpins it. My alarm comes from what could be seen as a simplistic, or even nieve, approach to the planning system by this government. Alternatively the more paranoid amongst us could see these changes as no more than a form of cronyism, designed to swell the bank accounts of landowners and developers, many of whom are more likely to be Tory supporters than not.

However, there may also be an additional reason why the government has decided to open the development flood gates. Recent newspaper headlines seem to suggest that government has given up trying to get the Treasury to ease its stranglehold on the economy and have now decided that dismantling the planning system is an easier option, using the drive for growth as the reason (excuse?).

Apparently David Cameron is having trouble persuading George Osborne that he needs to do his bit to encourage growth, through easing the tax burden on businesses. As the Chancellor of Exchequer appears to have more clout than any other minister, including the Prime Minister, it seems that the planning system is to be sacrificed instead.

Is building huge swaths of minimum quality housing and vast areas of souless industrial estates, the best way to do it? I doubt it and I doubt that our childrens’ children will think so either.

We’ve had it! It’s official

Posted on by • Posted in Government • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

I’ve been having a lot of my chords struck recently and none more so than by this piece on today’s ConservativeHome website.

Cameron warns that Britain is facing a crisis of confidence with a “general feeling” that the “best days” of the country are now behind us.

“In the interview [with the Big Issue], Mr Cameron said: “Over the past few years, this country has had some real knocks and people’s confidence in our country has been shaken to the core. I’m talking about the expenses scandal, the financial crisis, this whole disgraceful and sorry episode of phone hacking. There’s a sense that the rich and the powerful – politicians, bankers, the press and the police – have been serving themselves, not each other.“Add to all that the way the world is changing, with the rise of new powers like China and India, and I think there’s a general feeling that maybe our best days as a country are behind us.””

I’m glad David Cameron has been honest about the current malaise our country seems to be suffering, but I’m somewhat concerned that he doesn’t go on to tell us how he’s going to fix it. Also, as you might expect from a Eurosceptic, I think he’s ducked the other major reason why many of us may feel that the country’s ‘had it’ – our membership of the EU and that organisation’s relentless hunger for more power.

If David Cameron thinks he’s dealt with the EU issue, by the passage of the recent Parliamentary bill requiring that a referendum be held on any proposals to increase the EU powers further, he’s wrong. The EU already has too much power over British citizens and far too much influence on what happens in our country. Until that situation changes, the British people will continue to feel powerless and to some degree, both helpless and hopeless.

So my simple message to David Cameron is, ‘Good analysis, but needs more work – now what are you going to do to change things?’.

Even more important things are going on

Posted on by • Posted in Everyday life, Government • Tagged , , , , , , , , , • 1 Comment

Phone hacking is a nasty business, particularly when perpetrated against victims of crime. Bringing those responsible for the hacking to justice should be a priority for the authorities, especially because of the shocking involvement of police officers. However, it’s time the media moved on and put some equally important, but even more far reaching news on the front page.

Today’s Sunday Telegraph has a wealth of stories that deserve much greater coverage and I hope will resurface on the front pages of our daily press in the weeks to come.

One of these stories is about the scandalous and irresponsible proposals put forward by the government, for a wind farm tax on businesses. These proposals if pushed, or should it be blown, through, will cost the biggest employer in the county of Northumberland, £40m a year! If there’s anybody who doesn’t think that such a hit will cost jobs and a lot of them, please post a comment explaining why.

Another massive story for me, is the passing of The European Union Act 2011 last Wednesday. Providing it does what it says on the tin, this act is big news for the British people. However, lets not get carried away, because all the act does is put on the brakes – it doesn’t put anything into reverse. Please keep writing to your MP if you think reversing off of the EU toll road completely is a must.

Another story that we should all be writing to our MPs about, is the proposal by Tory MP Dominic Raab, to change the immigration laws. He proposes to limit the use of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the one that guarantees the “right to family life”. The idea is to prevent convicted foreign criminals, or more accurately, their lawyers, from using this as a way of avoiding deportation. However, this is a one man proposal and not put forward by the Government, so they could strangle it at birth if they get the urge. For that reason we, the British people, need to let the Government know, loud and clear, that this is something we, the British people, want to happen. Write to your MP and complete the Home Office survey at: http://www.ukba.home office.gov.uk/family-migration-consult.

Another day, another ‘sell off’?

Posted on by • Posted in Government • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

I see from the latest Planning News that the government now thinks that council planning services are fair game when it comes to competition – is there no limit to what they will try to ‘sell off’, or should I say more accurately, off load?

How do you convert what is currently an impartial process, that is all about achieving the best outcome, into a profit making business, without it becoming biased and open to accusations of corruption?

The big question for me is, what damage will they do to the current system in order to attract these competitors?

Half measures could cost council taxpayers dear!

Posted on by • Posted in Everyday life, Government • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Whilst I applaud the government’s proposals to make it slightly easier for teachers to do their job by restraining unruly or even violent pupils when needed, I fear this could prove to be yet another piece of bad legislation by a government that, like its predecessor, is often in too much of hurry to please.

To date I have not seen any proposals to prevent the restrained pupil’s parents, who can often be more badly behaved than their off-spring, from reaching for the Yellow Pages and setting the whole no-win, no-fee gravy train in motion.

What’s the point of telling teachers that they now have protection at one level, if in fact the education authority that employs them can still itself be sued by self serving parents?  It’s also worth remembering that it is local taxpayers, through their council tax bills, who will ultimately be picking up the bill for the avalanche of law suits that are likely to follow as newly empowered teachers begin to flex their new found muscles.

Government now needs to finish the job by offering the local taxpayer protection from the often unruly and sometimes ‘violently’ greedy parents and lawyers, who could soon be stalking the corridors of town halls up and down the land.

Same old game with a different name

Posted on by • Posted in District council stuff, Government • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

I see from today’s Sunday Telegraph that parish and town councils are going to be encouraged to take on more local services as a way of forcing sorry, encouraging, the cause of Localism and the ‘Big Society’.

No problem with that as a concept, given that the cost of running many of the basic services that people value, is often inflated by the management structure of the organisation that runs the service, but without adding any real value to it.

Unfortunately, what is likely to happen is that, as these grassroots organisations gain more and more power, they are going to turn in to the ‘bureacratic monsters’ they were supposed to be replacing. Those little parish councils currently run by a part time clerk, who probably works for one or even two other parish councils, will suddenly find there’s a need for both a full time clerk, a book keeper or accountant, somebody who has some legal training, an HR expert just in case they get problems with employment law, an elf and safety expert, etc, etc.

Parish and town councils at present are not answerable to anybody, other than their voters, for excessive increases in their precept (their version of the council tax) unlike district councils, that can be capped and forced to re-bill by central government. So the next stage in this charade will be the need to introduce legislation requiring parish and town councils to submit balanced budgets and within government limits – how long before the first parish or town council kicks out their parish clerk and appoints a high paid chief executive? Before you know it you’ll be back where we are today, just using different names for it!

No money = no more waste!

Posted on by • Posted in Government • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Had a light bulb moment this morning after reading yet another newspaper item on how the government has come up with yet another way to throw our money at the wind energy industry.

Apparently they are thinking of paying Ireland to use some of their waterspace to build even more of these useless monstrosities. Huhne and Hendry have come up with this latest scatterbrain idea in pursuit of the ludicrous commitment we made to the EU of 32% of our electricity from renewables within 9 years. It doesn’t seem to matter how many people raise concerns, nor how often we read about the hopeless performance of wind turbines – when the wind doesn’t blow fossil fuels kick in and when the wind does blow, but we don’t need the energy, we pay the companies a fortune to turn them off – our democratically elected leaders continue to throw our money at these things.

My light bulb moment came when I realised that those countries currently struggling with sovereign debt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, would almost certainly have stopped subsidising things such as wind turbines by now. Likewise, they would also have stopped throwing money at foreign countries, via an overseas aid programme. Britain gives billions of £s to India even though that country is building its own nuclear weapons program, has a space programme to put an India in space and gives money to African countries via its own overseas aid programme!

Are we as taxpayers completely insane in putting up with these wasteful practices, perpetrated by those who were elected to represent our interests, whilst at the same time cutting back on everything in sight?

My lightbulb moment by the way – join the Euro as quickly as possible and become one of the PIGS. I don’t think you’ll find Greece throwing money at the wind energy industry or giving India hundreds of millions of Greek Euros do you?