Category: National politics

The BBC and Institute of Fiscal Studies are this morning spinning a lie about the last budget. The major driver for the disbenefit to the poor that they point up is of course the curtailing of housing benefits. This is largely a disbenefit to landlords and not to tenants.

Of course whilst the BBC story is headline stuff, the IFS have not published their findings online as of 7:38 am this morning so, as ever, a lie has run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

Does anyone not want to see cases such as the Acton Afghan case tackled? The Acton Afghan case and thousands like it were the product of Labour’s mad Local Housing Allowance scheme. High council rents are a product of Labour’s rent equalisation scheme which entailed them encouraging councils to raise council rents above inflation to equalise them with housing association rents. Both of these moves would have generated spurious increases in income for the poor. Of course they are in reality increases to the income of landlords with tenants on housing benefit. Clamping down on housing benefit curtails landlords’ income, not tenants’.

The IFS need to recast their figures to show the effect on tenants and landlords separately.

Today’s launch of the Your Freedom website in support of Nick Clegg’s great reform bill caught my imagination as it did many others. I put up my idea this morning but it took a few attempts – I guess the system they set up was somewhat overloaded. My idea is a small one:

Abolish regulation requiring no smoking signs in all public buildings

The 2007 smoking ban came with a totally unnecessary regulation that all public places must have a specific sign at the entrance. The regulation was called the Smoke-free (Signs) Regulations 2007. This included places such as churches where no-one ever smokes as well as all businesses and buildings run by volunteers.

In theory those in charge of buildings without signs can be fined £1,000. In practice this never happens but the regulation still exists.

The law abiding British public know that it is against the law to smoke in a public place and observe the ban diligently. These signs were unnecessary the day the ban came in to place and are unnecessary now.

Most people are happy with the ban and this suggestion is in no way meant to undermine it.

Millions of signs have to be maintained to comply with this law. A lot of businessmen and volunteers have to keep putting these signs up if they want to comply strictly with the law.

I will be reading the full coalition agreement with interest over the next few days.

One thing that already leaps out at me is that the coalition has adopted some key Tory policies on transparent government, namely:

• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data.
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.

As someone who has harried the GLA and various government departments to collect information on what they are doing I am thrilled to see this taking place. It already happens at the GLA since Boris came to power (the threshold there is £1,000), see here, and Windsor and Maidenhead council (threshold £500), see here.

I look forward to the power that these measures will give to opposition councillors in Ealing. As a big believer in transparency one of my proudest achievements as a portfolio holder in Ealing was to get the parking people to publish stats showing how many tickets were issued each month for which offence and which location, see here.

I am not very pleased though to see central government getting away with a £25,000 threshold whereas local government has to work with a £500 threshold. I would suggest that £1,000 all round would be more sensible. I know that lots of people think that local government is a bit Mickey Mouse and amateurish. As someone who has tried to sell to both central and local government I can tell you that local government is a lot more penny-pinching and street-wise than central government. This discipline is much more sorely needed in central government and the government has let itself of lightly. It smells prime minister. You really should sort this.

It is good to see the details here. It starts off reassuringly with the deficit.

The parties agree that deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most urgent issue facing Britain. We have therefore agreed that there will need to be:

– a significantly accelerated reduction in the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament, with the main burden of deficit reduction borne by reduced spending rather than increased taxes;

– arrangements that will protect those on low incomes from the effect of public sector pay constraint and other spending constraints; and

– protection of jobs by stopping Labour’s proposed jobs tax.

Quite right.

We are so used to seeing documents filled with colour, white space and silly pictures. It is refreshing to see one of the key documents governing our lives for at least the near future in black and white, literally.

I am doing the politics slot on Petrie Hosken’s show on LBC 97.3 FM tonight from 8pm to 9pm. I have done it a couple of times before but it will be fun to do it at such an interesting time (puts me in mind of a certain Chinese curse).

I will be up with Labour blogger Tim McLoughlin and LibDem PPC and blogger Helen Duffet.

There is really only one issue – which has not been much discussed over the last week I am afraid. The deficit. The structural deficit is about 10% of GDP or about 20% of government expenditure. Depending on our growth over the next couple of years it may be worse than that. The implication is that we need to take £50-80 billion out of government expenditure. This is going to be eye-wateringly real and I am glad the Tories will get to share the opprobrium with the LibDems, remember Mervyn King’s recent warning that whoever wins the election will be out of power for a generation. That way there will be two parties taking the hits and two parties working to nail the problem on Gordon Brown where the blame firmly lies. Maybe these two men can save our country and not wreck their own futures in the process.

I would have preferred to see a majority Conservative government take power four days ago but it is still good to see Cameron in Downing Street today.

It is great to see the back of Gordon Brown. I know that it is usual to speak well of the (politically) dead but Gordon Brown was always the great divider. His repeated use of the construction “strong, stable and principled government” over the last few days was a case in point. Was he saying that a Tory government would be an unprincipled government? A total scuz to the last.