The TaxPayers' Alliance - Media Coverage

Cambridge News: Police to employ self-help guru for £80,000

Paul McGee will run his course Shut Up and Move On to help with officers deal with setbacks.POLICE are being taught how to be more positive by a self-help guru - with taxpayers footing the £82,000 bill.

The Cambridgeshire force has been criticised for hiring motivational speaker Paul 'SUMO guy' McGee to teach officers how to stop dwelling on setbacks.

His course, Shut Up and Move On (SUMO), has also been used to motivate Manchester United FC and to spark up ailing Marks & Spencer bosses. But Mark Wallace, campaign director of the Taxpayers' Alliance, slammed the move as money down the drain.

He said: "This is clearly a waste of money and what it does is make officers more unhappy. They will see this as just more red tape and management gimmicks rather than the money being spent to fight crime on the front line."

But Chief Constable Julie Spence has defended her decision to pay for Mr McGee's services.

Mrs Spence said: "To improve public services an investment in staff needs to be made.

Allowing staff to do their own thing the way they've always done it does not get the most from taxpayers' money.

"There's a blind belief that just having police officers and doing things the way they have always been done will deliver the required results but that's just not true."

The force has already spent £14,000 on the course and has earmarked another £68,000 to pay Mr McGee's bill, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

More than 2,700 officers are taking the three-hour long sessions at £29 each and 179 special constables have been invited to attend.

Ian Crowson, who served as an officer with the force for 30 years and is now a force resilience and business continuity officer, said: "I found it extremely useful and have already put some of it into practice in planning the force's response to a swine flu emergency. As a taxpayer, I think it is worth the money."

Mr McGee recently worked as an audience warm-up man on Question Time and appeared in BBC television comedy show Joker In The Pack.

He also performed street theatre in Hollywood during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, according to his website.

The former probation officer was unavailable for comment as he was in Singapore yesterday (Thursday, 16 July).

The Gazette: £79,000 spent on free food and drinks for councillors

MORE than £79,000 was spent on free meals and booze for county councillors in one year, new figures have revealed.

Councillors spending time at Essex County Council, in Chelmsford, are allowed a free meal and drink at the members’ only restaurant, courtesy of Essex taxpayers.

According to the latest figures, a total of £79,442 was spent on the restaurant’s fees between April 2007 and March 2008, making an average of just over £1,059 for each member.

It comes after the county’s allowances bill for councillors topped £1.54million in the same year.

Matthew Elliot, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said the restaurant was an unnecessary cost.

He said: "This is a vast amount to spend on unnecessary perks like free food and drink. Essex’s councillors already get generous allowances and having a subsidised canteen and bar is another step towards the excess the public might expect from greedy MPs, rather than local councillors."

The cost has been defended by councillors and ex-councillors from all parties. They defended the meals as they avoided councillors claiming for food while working at County Hall.

However, Tom Smith-Hughes, leader of county councils Lib Dem group, said he has called for a review of restaurant costs. He said: "The issue is whether they need a separate facility because there is a canteen in County Hall. The caterers could just come in for the five to six times a year all the councillors meet."

Planning in the Media: While politicians argued over where public spending cuts should be made, the familiar scapegoat of the quango led the field.

While politicians argued over where public spending cuts should be made, the familiar scapegoat of the quango led the field.

The Economist noted that up to 1,164 are spending between £34 billion according to the government and £100 billion a year according to the Taxpayers Alliance. "The main reason why quangos are under attack is that culling them seems to offer a way to tame public spending without hitting essential services," the magazine explained. "The main attraction of quangos is that they allow politicians to duck tough decisions."

Government moves to promote microgeneration will be a test of whether ministers trust the public over their civil servants, said Geoffrey Lean in The Daily Telegraph. For decades the UK has generated its energy from big installations, whether power stations that "belch out" carbon to "mammoth" nuclear plants and "oversized" wind farms, he said. Civil servants have always done all they can to stifle microgeneration. "Why? Because it means someone else - worse, millions of someone elses - make decisions instead of them. And, as every mandarin believes, the man from Whitehall knows best."

In an interview in The Independent, Paul Golby, chief executive of power company E.ON UK, said the country has little room to manoeuvre if it is to plug a future energy gap. "We are a no society - no to coal, no to nuclear, no to wind turbines. But then how do we keep the lights on?" he asked. "Our industry is not trusted. Somehow we have to get better at explaining that people can't have low-carbon, cheap electricity and no power stations or wind farms in sight."

The New Statesman derided how low on the political agenda transport policy sits. "Politicians on both sides of the divide have failed scandalously to give proper importance to transport policy and, in particular, to the railways," it said. "After 12 years of New Labour, we are astonishingly on our 11th transport supremo." Little wonder, the magazine pondered, that the UK is "no closer to establishing an integrated transport policy" than when John Prescott first aired "this piquant platitude" in 1997.

House builders face a bleak future as mortgage lending falls to its lowest level for decades, according to the Financial Times. The industry is blaming the shortage of finance as the main cause for nearly £3 billion in losses from listed companies since last spring. Barratt chief executive Mark Clare told the paper: "If you've got an existing home or a very substantial deposit you can get access to finance but otherwise you're stuck."

The Conservatives are heralding a "new era of council house building, in a radical shift that would undo 30 years of right-wing thinking", said The Observer. "Conservative insiders are quick to stress they do not wish to see a return to the days of large-scale municipal estates," the paper added. "But they are preparing the ground to allow councils to build tens of thousands of homes in smaller developments."

The Guardian: Track and Field

The Taxpayers' Alliance group was supplying outrage on demand this week after the BBC sent 324 staff to cover the T in the Park festival. That's actually several dozen less than the Beeb took to Glastonbury, but the resulting online coverage is similarly comprehensive. Head to bbc.co.uk/tinthepark before Monday morning to watch highlights of around 40 of the weekend's biggest acts, without having to suffer the inane presenters' hyperbole, which blighted the TV coverage. Sadly, a poorly Blur only signed off one song from their set, but there are goodly sized chunks of performances by the Killers, Elbow, Pendulum, Pet Shop Boys, Kings of Leon and Bloc Party. The BBC is also offering footage from 22 new and unsigned bands who played the Introducing stage.

Given that 7.2m Glastonbury videos were watched on the BBC's site in the week they were online, the licence fee cash funding this particular aspect of the BBC's festival coverage does seem like money well spent.

If you'd like to know which songs from a particular set the BBC didn't include in their highlights, then head over to Setlist.fm. This Liechtenstein-based site offers song running-orders of live shows from across the globe. Its rapidly growing army of users are clearly a diligent bunch, as full details of more than 50 T in the Park performances were up on the site by Monday afternoon. As well as seeing the running orders, you can click a play button to hear individual tracks or the whole set using existing YouTube videos (as opposed to the actual versions performed at a particular show). You're also only a couple of clicks from seeing a full list of every song a particular artist has performed and when/where they've played it. Behold the Wikipedia of setlists.

The enormously popular MP3 blog trawler Hypemachine launched a new chart last week aimed at highlighting the most popular songs on Twitter (hypem.com/twitter). The chart monitors Twitter for links pointing to tracks on Hype Machine, then uses a brain-addling formula to calculate how far the link has spread, based on the number of followers of whoever posted it - and awards points accordingly.

The problem, as the influential US blog TechCrunch.com soon pointed out, is that a single Twitter user with a large number of followers has the power to send any track directly to No 1 in Hype Machine's chart. Indeed, TechCrunch (with 900,000 Twitter followers) did just that with Rick Astley. But although the formula may need a little tweaking, the concept seems sound, with tracks already beginning to bubble up the chart based on multiple posts by lower-profile Twitter users. Worth keeping an eye on.

Daily Express: PAGAN POLICE HOLIDAY TO CELEBRATE FESTIVALS

POLICE who worship heathen gods will get eight days off a year to celebrate pagan festivals.

They are also in line for thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money in recognition of their status as a "community" of pagans.

Home Office

chiefs this week gave their backing to the Pagan Police Association which will be entitled to public funding, along the lines of that given to other rank-and-file organisations like the National Black Police Association.

Once recognised as a minority, officers will be given time off for the eight annual pagan festivals, including Halloween and the summer solstice.

Last year the Home Office introduced a pagan oath which can be used in the courts and yesterday officials said self-styled witches, Druids and heathens were welcome in the police.

But last night there was growing anger that public money should be spent supporting the policemen’s "religion".

Matthew Elliott, Cheif Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: "This is utterly ridiculous and a total waste of money. Police can follow whatever religion they like but there is no reason why taxpayers should fund them to lobby for their personal beliefs.

"Instead of bending over backwards to fund this politically correct group, the Government should have told them to get on with the fight against crime.

"The last thing we need is a police force split up into innumerable minority groups."

Laura Midgely, of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: "The police have got a very clear job to do – they should just get on and do it."

Heathen PC Andy Pardy, of Hertfordshire police, met Home Office officials this week to discuss the creation of an officially-sanctioned pagan support group for police nationwide.

The association will provide support and guidance to pagan officers around the country who want to fit their beliefs around their police work.

More than 30,000 people claimed to be practising pagans in the 2001 census.

There are believed to be up to 200,000 pagans in Britain.

There are also believed to be more than 500 pagan police in Britain, including a 50-strong coven in London’s Metropolitan force.

The cult was the subject of the 1973 classic film The Wicker Man, starring Brit Ekland .

Adherents worship nature and believe in many gods. Practices include witchcraft and druidism.

As a heathen, PC Pardy, who has been a policeman for seven years, worships Viking gods, including hammer-wielding Thor, the one-eyed Odin and the god of fertility, Freyr.

Another heathen, PC Andy Hill, of Staffordshire police, is a practising wiccan – a pagan witch. He is also the founder of paganpolice groupuk.co.uk, a website for police officers.

PC Hill, who claims he has cast spells to help his promotion prospects, said: "This is nothing to do with black magic, or devil worshipping.

"Witchcraft is not the hocus pocus, puff of smoke, turning people into frogs stuff you see on the TV. It is working with nature for good."

A Home Office spokesman said: "The Government wants a police service that reflects the diverse communities it serves."

The Times: Nuclear Decommissioning Authority pledges action on million-pound bonuses

Britain’s nuclear clean-up agency has begun a review of its pay structure after The Times revealed that public servants were being paid millions of pounds in "guaranteed" taxpayer-funded bonuses every year.

Stephen Henwood, chairman of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), whose clean-up activities at 19 nuclear sites, including Sellafield, absorbed £1.6 billion of public money last year, said that the system needed to be reformed.

He said that four non-executive NDA directors were conducting a detailed review of the bonus scheme, under which some staff members have been asked to maintain a "tidy desk policy" as a criterion for payment. "I think there is room for improvement," he said. "There is scope for a more direct link to performance."

The Times

revealed in April that the NDA paid nearly £3.8 million in bonuses last year to its 315 staff. The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also showed that all of the NDA’s regular workers received a bonus in both 2008 and 2007.

The payments, which ranged from an average of just under £12,000 to nearly £37,000, were made on top of regular salary payments totalling £19.5 million.

Fresh details of the pay deal will be unveiled on Monday in the NDA’s annual accounts.

Since its formation in 2005, the NDA, which consumes around half of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s £3 billion budget, has struggled to recruit and retain staff.

It took the Sellafield-based organisation a year to recruit a new chief executive, Tony Fountain, after the departure of his predecessor, Ian Roxburgh. Mr Fountain, whose appointment was announced last month, takes up his position in October. He will join the NDA from BP, where he was chief operating officer of its Fuels Value Chains business.

Mr Henwood said that the review of the bonus scheme was being led by Jim McLaughlin, director of human resources, who joined last year from Royal Bank of Scotland. He is working with David Illingworth, chairman of the NDA’s audit committee, and three other non-executives.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the campaigning group, said: "It is good news that the NDA is planning to reform this severely flawed bonus system. Handing out millions of pounds with apparently no consideration for performance or wider economic conditions is unjustified and wasteful."

Although 58 per cent of its £2.78 billion budget comes from taxpayers, the NDA is technically a "non-departmental public body", a type of quango, rather than a regular arm of the Civil Service.

This arm’s-length relationship precludes it from the pay restrictions imposed on regular government departments.

The NDA’s report will also contain fresh estimates of the cost of cleaning up Britain’s contaminated nuclear sites, last put at £70 billion.

The bulk of the NDA’s budget is used to pay subcontractor firms, which employed 18,467 staff on its sites last year. Its budget for the three years to 2011 is £8.5 billion. The clean-up of nuclear facilities has been paid for with a mix of funds.

The NDA’s commercial income, the bulk of which comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel at Sellafield, as well as the sale of electricity from the NDA’s two remaining operational power stations at Wylfa and Oldbury, has fallen short of expectations in recent years.

Gone fission

— The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is a non-departmental public body, established under the Energy Act 2004

— It is responsible for the decommissioning and clean-up of Britain’s civil public-sector nuclear sites

— The NDA is responsible for developing UK-wide strategy for nuclear low-level waste; long-term management arrangements for higher radioactive waste; and the clean-up of 19 former UKAEA and BNFL sites run by British Nuclear Fuels and the UK Atomic Energy Authority

— Its 2009-10 annual budget of £2.78 billion comprises £1.63 billion in government "grant in aid" and £1.15 billion in project income

Herald Series: Police website cost £100,000

THAMES Valley Police has been criticised for spending more than £100,000 redesigning its website — even though there were no problems with the old one.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show the project cost £72,903.76 plus the salaries of four IT workers who spent four months working on it.

But the force has defended the redesign as "important" because its previous site was criticised for being cluttered and difficult to navigate.

Senior officers pushed ahead with the redesign for the site because they thought "the force needed a website which allowed more interaction with the public".

But last night Mark Wallace, campaign director for the Taxpayers' Alliance, a watchdog that scruntinises the way taxpayers’ money is spent, said it was a complete waste of public cash.

He said: "This is a staggering amount to spend on a website – particularly in the middle of a recession when the police are supposedly strapped for cash.

"Thames Valley Police should think about what its mission is — fighting crime or maintaining a super-glossy web presence.

"They should have stuck with the old site and focused on getting police out catching criminals."

Gerry Webb, chairman of Blackbird Leys Parish Council, said the cash should have been spent on high-visibilty patrols, not just after crimes had been committed, but as a preventative measure.

He said: "It think £100,000 for a website is unbelievable — you can’t justify it.

"If that’s what it cost for Thames Valley Police, what has it cost for the rest of the country’s police forces? The money should have been spent elsewhere."

The cost of the redesign could have paid the salaries of six police community support officers for a year.

Thames Valley Police defended the expenditure as necessary to meet Government standards and accessibility guidelines.

Force spokesman Danny Donovan said: "To do this, the website had to be reconstructed.

"This provided the opportunity to redesign its look and feel, and also put it into a ‘content management system’ (CMS).

"This was important as the previous site had been criticised for being cluttered and difficult to navigate.

"We had previously purchased a CMS system for our intranet, so the costs were reduced when compared to purchasing a new system.

"The chosen supplier was selected based on their experience with information-rich sites, using an in-house CMS, having a user-centred approach, and a competitive price.

"The website is now hosted internally which saves on external hosting costs and will help with the future development of the site.

"The redesign also included consultation with the public – and feedback on the new design and navigation has so far been very positive."

Monsters and Critics: Camilla's helicopter row

Britain's Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, is embroiled in a row over her helicopter use.

The 61-year-old royal - the wife of Prince Charles - reportedly used a helicopter for a 75-mile journey last week, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £3,000.

The royal was in Portsmouth to meet royal navy medics and present them with medals.

The visit lasted two and a half hours, prompting some people to query why she couldn't have used a car for the trip.

Britain's Daily Express writer Richard Palmer wrote on the paper's blog: "She had no other official engagements that day so it was not that she needed to get somewhere else in a hurry on taxpayer-funded business.

"Clarence House officials, while insisting that all travel decisions are assessed for value for money along with other factors such as disruption to the public, could only justify it by saying that Portsmouth was a long way from London."

Camilla is not the only royal to be criticised for her use of air travel.

Prince Andrew - whose love of private aircraft has earned him the nickname 'Air Miles Andy' - was criticised when he used a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter to travel just 146 miles last week, at a cost of £4,000.

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers' Alliance said: "The royals should rein in their spending in these tough times. Prince Andrew could have driven and saved thousands of pounds."

This is Local London: Taxpayer-funded council magazines face merger

"PROPAGANDA" council magazines produced with £300,000 of taxpayers’ cash are to be merged in a cost savings move.

The five magazines will be slimmed down from a total 120 pages to 32 under the pilot, which would slash copies from 406,000 to 200,000.

The idea will be trialled next year for four issues and will feature Buckinghamshire County Council information along with either news from Wycombe, Chiltern, South Bucks or Ayelsbury Vale district councils.

Savings have not been estimated for the move, part of a the "Pathfinder" cash savings drive to merge services between councils in Buckinghamshire.

Council leaders said the magazines were needed get out information about council services – but the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s Marc Wallace hit out.

He said: "The proposals might save a bit of money but it would be much better to scrap these magazines altogether.

"People don’t pay their taxes for propaganda and glossy literature telling them how great the council is."

Yet County council deputy leader Bill Chapple said residents valued its 28-page quarterly Buckinghamshire Times publication.

The latest issues offers a page on "our successes in 2008/09", a history of local government and an interview with county celebrity Johnny Ball who describes opposition to council incinerator "utterly false" and the plan "green and efficient".

And in his introduction, leader David Shakespeare warns of Government under-funding and says: "To be honest, our task over the coming years is simply to do the best job we can with the inadequate funds at our disposal."

The authority this year raised its share of the council tax by 3.7 per cent, giving it £1,056.61 from an average band D property.

Cllr Chapple told Bucks Free Press: "We are a form of newspaper, we are more than that because we are giving out first-hand information from the providers to the people who are the customers."

He said: "It must be more cost effective and cut a lot of the duplication."

A statement from Wycombe District Council, which publishes "Community Voice", said authorities were "committed" to merging services to save cash.

It said: "We anticipate that this project will result in cost savings for each council."

It said: "However, as we are in the very early stages of this project and we are about to enter the tendering process for the production of this magazine, we are unable to provide more specific information about the production costs or potential cost savings."

Chiltern District Council leader John Warder said: "We need to keep the communication with our electors but we need to do it as economically as possible."

A survey found 45 per cent of readers thought the "Chiltern Chronicle" was "rubbish" he said and, while information was on the council’s website, many residents did not have a computer.

"There are a group of people who say they are quite useful," he said.

PoliceProfessional.com: Over £1bn paid into police pensions in three years

Recent Home Office figures show that the amount being paid to police authorities to bridge the gap in police officer pensions has more than doubled in the last three years, and may be set to climb higher.

More than £1.08 billion has been paid into the police pension schemes during the past three years, with a Home Office contribution to retirement pay hitting a total of £546 million in the 2008/09 financial year. This is a 60 per cent increase from the previous year, when £340 million was injected, and more than double the £199 million of 2006/07.

There are now more than 140,000 police officers in retirement.

It became clear three years ago that the bills were beginning to impact on force budgets, which led to the Home Office agreeing to a rescue plan to see the shortfall met by taxpayers.

The figures have led to criticism from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, which said that the amounts were "utterly unfair" at a time when many are seeing their private pensions cut.

Matthew Sinclair, research director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: "It is utterly unfair that taxpayers are having to pay even more to subsidise gold-plated public sector pensions.
Recent Home Office figures show that the amount being paid to police authorities to bridge the gap in police officer pensions has more than doubled in the last three years, and may be set to climb higher.

More than £1.08 billion has been paid into the police pension schemes during the past three years, with a Home Office contribution to retirement pay hitting a total of £546 million in the 2008/09 financial year. This is a 60 per cent increase from the previous year, when £340 million was injected, and more than double the £199 million of 2006/07.

There are now more than 140,000 police officers in retirement.

It became clear three years ago that the bills were beginning to impact on force budgets, which led to the Home Office agreeing to a rescue plan to see the shortfall met by taxpayers.

The figures have led to criticism from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, which said that the amounts were "utterly unfair" at a time when many are seeing their private pensions cut.

Matthew Sinclair, research director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: "It is utterly unfair that taxpayers are having to pay even more to subsidise gold-plated public sector pensions.

"Final salary schemes are now extremely rare in the private sector, where companies have had to cancel them in the face of a tax raid and an ageing population. But they are still the norm for public sector workers.

"That isn’t affordable and people in the private sector are now paying more in taxes to fund public sector pensions than they are to provide for their own old age.

But Ian Rennie, General Secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales, defended the pensions. "The police pension scheme (PPS) was introduced to take account of the difficult, demanding and often dangerous job that police officers do on behalf of society and unlike other public sector workers, police officers contribute 11 per cent of their salary towards their pension," he said.

The Home Office insisted that despite these figures, overall costs have been reduced.

A spokesperson said: "Entitlement to a police pension has always been regarded as a key element of the remuneration of police officers to enable them to undertake their role with confidence, and in recognition of the demanding nature of police work.

"It must be recognised that police officers have to pay a high level of contributions for membership of these schemes.

"This government recognises the issue and has put measures in place to tackle factors such as the costs of increasing longevity.

"We have been reforming public service pensions, including measures such as introducing higher pension ages and cost-capping to limit employer costs, to ensure the continuing affordability of these schemes.

"The new police pension scheme, which sees member contribute nine per cent of their salary, was introduced in April 2006 for all new entrants, and costs about 20 per cent less than PPS, in recognition of the need for a more modern and more affordable scheme."