The TaxPayers' Alliance - Campaign

How much for a chess tournament?

Liverpool’s taxpayers will be shocked to know they have to stump up a whopping £150,000 for…wait for it…a chess tournament. 

This tale of incompetence started with the Liverpool Culture Company (LCC), a semi-private body, agreeing to pay for the European Chess Tournament, but reneged on the £100,000 deal. 

Out of the blue, however, the North West Development Agency (NWDA), a taxpayer-funded quango, has emerged with £150,000 of taxpayers’ money to fund the tournament. What are they using, golden pawns? 

But alas if you look closely enough you find this is yet another story of government bureaucrats going along hand in glove with each other to squander yet more taxpayers’ money. 

Follow this trail if you will.  The Liverpool Culture Company was meant to have funded the European Chess Tournament in Liverpool.  The Chairman of the LCC is Bryan Gray.  The Chairman of the NWDA now funding the tournament is Bryan Gray.  The chief operating officer of the LCC is Bernice Law.  The deputy chief executive of the NWDA is Bernice Law.  Isn’t it odd that the same people are involved in spending your money on a chess tournament when a private body was meant to?  You draw your conclusions from those links, but it seems to us that taxpayers’ money is being used where it shouldn’t be and far too much is being used on a mere chess tournament.

Feel free to email Bernice Law to find out why the taxpayer should foot the bill.

We should strongly expose this to the local papers.  Send your letters to the Liverpool Daily Post:

Letters Editor
Liverpool Daily Post
PO Box 48,
Old Hall Street,
Liverpool,
L69 3EB,
United Kingdom
Email: alastair.machray@liverpoolecho.co.uk

And the Liverpool Echo:

Letters Editor
The Liverpool Echo
PO Box 48,
Old Hall Street,
Liverpool,
L69 3EB,
United Kingdom
email: letters@liverpoolecho.co.uk

Have your say on council allowances

Our campaign director Mark Wallace noticed this from the BBC Website:

“A panel which reviews councillors' allowances in Lancashire is looking for two new people to sit on its board.

The independent remuneration panel monitors Lancaster City Council's members' allowance scheme and makes recommendations on potential changes.

Meetings take place on an average of two to three times a year at Lancaster Town Hall but are more frequent when a review of the scheme is to take place.

Anyone interested in applying should contact the council.

Reviews are undertaken every four years with the next review set to take place in 2011.”

You can find information of the role on the Lancaster City Council website.  If you would like to know more about the appointments, please telephone Lancaster City Council’s Corporate Director (Finance & Performance), Roger Muckle, on 01524 582022.

An application form, together with full details of the requirements of the appointment, the type of person we are seeking and additional background information, is available from: Democratic Services, Town Hall, Dalton Square, Lancaster, LA1 1PJ.  Telephone 01524 582096, email democracy@lancaster.gov.uk or download a form from the Council’s website www.lancaster.gov.uk

If you don't live in Lancaster but want to hold your elected local representatives to account on their expenses, contact your council and enquire about its remuneration panel and see if you can get on it.  As always, if you break through, do contact me so we can be kept up to date with the campaign on the ground.

£6000-plus on one set of annual reports

In a response to a tip off from a TPA activist, I issued a Freedom of Information request to the 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust in the North West.  The issue was over their annual report, not so much the content of the report itself, but the brochure produced at the taxpayers’ expense. 

At a cost of £4 per copy, 1500 copies were produced, resulting in a bill to the taxpayer of £6000.  As you can see above, it's clearly an expensive, hefty report.  My source was sent 3 of these by post, at a cost of roughly £8 postage – odd seeing as the Trust could easily have emailed the report to our activist.

Seeing as the Trust didn’t send any by email, this resulted in a total postage bill for all posted reports of £21.20.  That doesn’t sound that bad, but factor in that the Trust only posted 40 sets of accounts, it raises an interesting question:

1. If the Trust was only planning to send out 40 annual reports, why did they order 1500 copies?

Part of the answer lies in the Trust’s response.  To distribute the remaining 1460 annual reports, they were “taken to events and distributed in the organisation”.  So, we have to ask,

2. Why did the Trust order 1500 copies of the annual report seeing as only 40 were sent them and/or actively asked for them?
3. Couldn’t the report have been internally emailed within the organisation?
4. How many people work for the Five Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust?

You can ask these questions by contacting the freedom of information officer at the Trust and asking these much needed questions.

£6021.20 may not seem like a lot of money in the total budget of an NHS Trust.  It seems even less compared to the budgets of whole government departments.  But when we compare it to the £4,539.60p maximum basic state pension for a single person this year and suddenly we see the money spent on these annual reports could have made a big difference elsewhere. This report should have been internally emailed and sent electronically where possible to save money – ordering 1500 hardcopies therefore amounts to a gross waste of taxpayers’ money.   

It is precisely this culture of waste we need to root out and expose.  If politicians and public servants think that wasting one penny of taxpayers’ money is a bad idea, then they’ll be less inclined to waste thousands and millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.  Think of it as Broken Windows Policing on the state sector’s spending, if we stop the low level waste, there’ll be no wasters around to squander huge sums of taxpayers’ money.

TPA Organiser in Liverpool newspaper

Three cheers to our Liverpool Organiser Veronica Hind.  She managed to get a letter in the Liverpool Daily Post speaking out in favour of our report into University non-courses.  For your interest it is reprinted here:

"Letter: You say - What a waste
Veronica Hind
6 September 2007
Liverpool Echo

The recent Taxpayers' Alliance report into university Mickey Mouse courses shows how much waste there is. Liverpool John Moores University has two prime examples of such waste with degrees in Outdoor Education with Adventure Tourism and Physical Activity, Exercise and Health.

Do these really need to be degrees? Although students pay tuition fees, taxpayers still pay huge sums for degrees and end up subsidising non courses like Outdoor Education.

This taxpayer cared for her family while both working full time and paying full fees for degree studies with the Open University, yet now finds herself at the age of 67 and retired in 1997 on the grounds of permanent ill health, still paying income tax plus 12.5 % of my income in council tax.

We need more scientists and innovators, not more students encouraged to defer entry into the real world by spending three years in university learning what they easily could do via effective on-the-job training in the workplace.

Veronica Hind, Liverpool organiser, the Taxpayers' Alliance"

Veronica’s letter is a prime example of an activist letter.  It’s short, to the point and makes a clear argument.  Moreover, her letter is open to a readership of over a hundred thousand.  If only a handful read it and want to get in touch, that’s more potential recruits, more people to write letters and continue the paper-campaign for lower taxes.  If you want to do as Veronica did and get involved, you can write into the Epping Guardian about our non-job or to the Tower Hamlets Recorder about public libraries using taxpayers money to stock books inciting violence and hatred.  The more people see that we are the campaign on the rise, making our voice heard and the more willing they’ll be to join the winning team.

Libraries stocking books of hate

The Centre for Social Cohesion reports that libraries are spending public funds to stock books that promote Islamic extremism and glorify terrorism.  The libraries in London, Birmingham and Blackburn stocked books by convicted preachers Abu Hamza and Abdullah Al-Faisal.  The report's main focus, however, is on public libraries in Tower Hamlets.  It exposes eight lending libraries in Tower Hamlets that glorify, incite and endorse acts of terrorism against those of other religions and faiths.  You can read the full report here.

Taxpayers should be alarmed and outraged that our taxes are going to pay for works inciting violence.  Moreover, where is the accountability in the system to at least offer a balance?  It would be wrong to ban any book; we like to believe we are all reasonable people able to interpret ideas and debate issues facing us.  But we should draw the line when so many of these radical books appear on public bookshelves. 

We’re rallying our members in Tower Hamlets and the wider country to write into Tower Hamlets newspapers and make this an issue.  It’s not fair, right or just for our taxes to fund books preaching hate and violence.  So make your voice heard.  Write to:

Letters Editor
The Tower Hamlets Recorder
182 - 184 High Street North,
London,
E6 2JD,
United Kingdom
Email: john.finn@newhamrecorder.co.uk (specify that the letter is for the Tower Hamlets Recorder letters page)

Campaign Diary 5th September 2007

Interactive forum for TPA Supporters in St. Albans

TPA organiser Martin Thornhill has set up a yahoo group to help St. Albans TaxPayers’ Alliance activists and supporters coordinate campaigns and get in touch, share ideas and debate the issues.  Go to http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/stalbanstaxpayersalliance/ and join in.  We’re an interactive, grassroots campaign where no idea is too small or daft to be heard or debated.  If you’re reading this and live in St. Albans, then join the forum and get in touch.

Liverpool TaxPayers’ Alliance

I will be in Liverpool on Wednesday 19th September meeting TPA activists and discussing the development of a Liverpool branch of the TPA.  If you’re a TPA member or supporter or just interested in meeting and talking about developing a TPA branch in Liverpool, then email me at tim.aker@taxpayersalliance.com.  I look forward to meeting you.

Islington TaxPayers’ Alliance

The first meeting of the Islington TaxPayers’ Alliance will be in Islington on 11th September.  If you’d like to come and join us and share your ideas then email me at tim.aker@taxpayersalliance.com.  We hope to kick start our campaign in Islington with a petition against inheritance tax, so please come along and help the campaign.

Waste and Over-Spending 

If you’ve found any examples of local government waste, then please email them to us and write to your local papers exposing it.  As we report in our non-job of the week and in our survey of the Guardian jobs page, local government waste and over-spending are soaking up incredible amounts of taxpayer’s money and is one we have to put front and centre of public debates.

It's Rochdale...but not as we know it

If anyone needs convincing that Regional Development Agencies are a waste of time, space and money, one should look at the Rochdale Development Agency.  The Times reports this morning that the Rochdale Development Agency has been advertising Rochdale by using pictures of Manchester.

Yes.  They advertised Rochdale by showing pictures of a completely different area fifteen miles away.  Why?  The development agency said it was to “reflect the aspirations of Rochdale’s citizens”. 

It’s a fraud, a complete fraud to show pictures of one area and advertise it as another.  It’s not an aspiration to show Manchester as Rochdale - it’s a lie to the people.  But faced with these blatant facts Paul Rowen, the Rochdale MP and as leader of Rochdale council commissioned the false advertisements, said the development agency would “not apologise”.

Don’t be surprised.  Since when have we expected a local government apparatchik-and-newly-made-MP to apologise for a blatant waste of taxpayers’ money?  The fact is they won’t, even when faced with something so clearly wasteful because their careers have been advanced through these white elephants and is dependent on them.

These people need to be woken up.  From behind their taxpayer funded desks in town halls far from the concerns of ordinary people, they won’t hear us until we shout loud and clear that we’ve had enough.  So get active.  Write to the Rochdale Development Agency and their local papers expressing outrage at how they can lie with our money:

The address for the Chairman of the Rochdale Development Agency is:
P Ewbank
Chairman, Rochdale Development Agency
Partnership House
Sparrow Hill
Rochdale
OL16 1QT

Email:  info@investinrochdale.co.uk (in your subject area stress it is for the attention of P Ewbank)

The address of the Rochdale local paper is:
Letters Editor
The Rochdale Observer
Observer Buildings,
Drake Street,
Rochdale,
OL16 1PH,
United Kingdom

Email: rochdaleobserver@gmwn.co.uk (put in your subject area that this is a letter for the Rochdale Observer and Rochdale Express)

Write in and give the bureaucrats what for!