Category Archives: Whitehall

How Jeremy Hunt plans to implement Lansley’s sick funding scheme for NHS

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new health secretary Jeremy Hunt: Supporter of switching NHS cash from poor to the rich elderly

Four months ago I wrote a blog (see http://wp.me/pHiYZ-xu)  revealing a dastardly plan to switch NHS funding away from the poorest parts of England to the wealthiest areas under the guise of helping the elderly.

The scheme which drew attacks from Labour effectively meant tearing up the funding formula adopted since Clement Atlee which saw that the poorest deprived areas got more cash than the wealthy. To implement it Lansley was planning to get a health quango to recommend the changes. Thankfully since then nothing has happened..until today.

Jeremy Hunt, the newly appointed health secretary, it turns out is a passionate believer in such a scheme – as it would give loadsa state money to his own constituents in Surrey at the expense of Labour voting people in places like Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland.

I am indebted to a contact for alerting me to this information on Jeremy Hunt’ s own blog.

In his own words he says:

the real problem lies with the inherent  bias in the Government’s NHS funding formula of areas like Surrey. Guildford and Waverley’s population is weighted 9.1% upwards for market forces and 2.0% upwards for age structure but is weighted 25.3% downwards for additional need. The result of this is that the former Guildford & Waverley PCT’s target allocation per un-weighted head of population was £1,176, 15.3% less than the England average of £1,388. This means that even in an area with a large population of older people, the Royal Surrey is losing out”. Jeremy Hunt website (24 July, 2007, http://www.jeremyhunt.org/campaignshow.aspx?id=112&ref=50)
The extend of what this means is brilliantly explained in a user-friendly map by Dr Eoin Clarke – see http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/camerons-new-man-in-charge-of-nhs.html.
So this reshuffle may mean an even worse future for the NHS from the man who befriends Rupert Murdoch. It will great news for  the Tory voting upper middle classes  from Esher to Guildford, but every, very bad news for deprived areas where Labour has a huge majority. It will allow Tory voters to live longer in safe seats and contribute to Labour voters dying  before their they have another chance to vote.Clever man, Mr Hunt. You can quiz him, by e-mailing at huntj@parliament.uk

How Michael Gove plays fast and loose with taxpayers money on school redundos

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 ImageOne would expect a right-wing Tory like education secretary  Michael Gove to be pretty diligent on how he spends taxpayers cash. You wouldn’t expect him to spray public money around without Treasury approval and then tell auditors  to get lost if they pick him up on it.

This is exactly what he has done  by handing out extra cash to his beloved school academies so they can  buy staff  redundos with extra payments without bothering to get it cleared by the Treasury.

And when this was rightly picked up by the National Audit Office – the independent Whitehall body that scrutinises taxpayers’ cash –  he has had the cheek to demand that the NAO and the Treasury go away and forget it.

The row is revealed by me in a piece for Exaro News (http://www.exaronews.com ) this month after the NAO took the decision to qualify the £6.1 billion accounts of the quango that funds academy schools ( now merged into a wider body ) after it found  14 cases of excess severance payments, totalling just under £230,000 at nine academies.

This may not sound much but it only found out about them after checking accounts of 135 academics – just eight percent of them. The other 92 per cent of academy accounts were never scrutinised by the quango. If this figure were applied pro rata the number of excessive unapproved redundo cash would top nearly £3m.

Now this may be good news for the people involved but it seems to me like a repeat performance of what happened in the Thatcher era where millions of pounds of taxpayers money were paid out in early retirements just when cash was short. The result was worse as many of these people are probably still claiming pensions now.

Don’t get me wrong I am not against people getting a good redundo deal ( I got one myself in the private sector) but I do think that where public money is concerned the deal should be scrutinised by the Treasury first. Otherwise every pound paid out on top of normal redundo is being taken out of paying for kids education.

Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, writes in the report: “YPLA ( the now defunct quango) has not required academies to notify them of severance cases or any other payments that require Treasury approval, and so I have concluded that the assurance framework that YPLA had in place for the financial year was not capable of identifying and managing all cases.”

“I have been unable to confirm that, in all material respects, grants to academies conform with the authorities that govern them, and have been applied for the purposes intended by Parliament.”

Michael Gove’s response was: “We do not believe that we need approval for these payments because maintained schools are not required to submit them. We are working with the NAO and HM Treasury on this.”

This conveniently leaves out the fact that these schools are responsible to the  directly elected local authorities, academy schools are responsible to unelected civil servants.

My solution is simple. If Michael Gove wants to spray  taxpayers’ money around in this way, he should pay for it himself. After all the  excellent new search the money website (http://SearchTheMoney.com/) reveals he has received £462,000 in donations, £304,000 from one private equity firm). So he could raise the money for this excessive payments and leave the taxpayer to fund what it should do-public education.

Something rotten in Ruritannia

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Fillingham,Lincolnshire – the most unaccountable parish in England


Picture Credit: Ian Sykes
By David Hencke and Anne Hassan ( my daughter who has been training to be a journalist)

Updated: Since this blog appeared BBC Radio Lincolnshire have followed up the situation in Lincolnshire where some of the councils – who spend up to £140,000 a year – have said that they have prepared accounts but not submitted them to the Audit Commission. The effect of the local broadcast has been to highlight the councils’ behaviour in the county which had until then gone completely unnoticed.

Would you ever pay a bill without the slightest idea of where the money has gone? If you happen to live in 14 parishes across England you would have been doing this for up to the last ten years.

This extraordinary fact is buried in a  report by the Audit Commission on parish council spending (see http://bit.ly/yLaEhD ). It reveals that these parishes have levied a tax on all the householders in their area but have never produced any accounts of how they spent it for the last three years.

The worst place in England is the tiny parish meeting of Fillingham, near Gainsborough, where people have paid taxes- a precept with their council tax- for the last TEN  years and the meeting hasn’t bothered to produce an audited account of how they spent it since 2001.

Despite repeated warnings and rude letters from auditors the councillors there have obdurately refused to publish anything. They are not alone.

In Lincolnshire  there are five other parishes which have not produced accounts for between six and three years running. They are Wycliffe cum Hungarton Parish Meeting (six years);Little Ponton and Stroxton Parish Council (four years) and Fenton, Greatford, and Saxilby with Ingeby parish councils ( all three years).

Outside Lincolnshire there are eight parishes which have not produced accounts for three years or more, two in Leicestershire (Barleythorpe and  Burton Overy), and one each in Shropshire (Bromfield), Dorset (Church Knowle), Lancashire(Carrington), Suffolk (Ilketshall St Laurence),Warwickshire (Luddington)  and Cumbria (Newbiggin).

In addition 133 parish councils  which had submitted accounts have had them qualified for three years running and 567 have received qualifications this last year. This means their basic accounts are at best incorrect, at worst, a work of fiction.

Why should we care? The general opinion that these councils are so miniscule  that  the unreported cash is meaningless (Private Eye does  not even consider them for Rotten Boroughs).

Not so, these bodies – there are 9600 in England – raised a staggering £500m from householders last year.

As the Audit Commission says in its report: “Local electors are entitled to see how their parish council has spent taxpayers’ money. Those parish councils that fail to publish an audited annual return are not providing this most basic level of accountability.”

And it adds: “It is unacceptable that parish councils should fail persistently to produce an annual return, yet still be able to raise a precept.”

My daughter tried to contact three of the parish councils without  any success. Fillingham Parish Meeting’s chairman Mr Andrew Carter at Lake Farm was never available for comment. Mrs Mel Brown, the clerk at Wyeville cum Hungerton slammed the phone down with shock when asked why they had hot submitted accounts for six years . Ms Natalie Bowes, clerk of Little Ponton and Stroxton parish council numbers were unobtainable, despite being on a public website.

I began to  have sympathy with the Audit Commission in trying to chase up our money and whether it had been spent wisely. This is not a good advertisement for localism.

Tax Avoidance:Treasury ” We screwed Up”,BBC ” Nothing is wrong.”

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Treasury mandarin Sir Nick Macpherson- admitting catalogue of errors Pic Courtesy: BBC

Yesterday Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee had the Treasury, the BBC, Revenue and Customs and local government before them. Subject: How have so many publicly paid figures got away with tax avoidance.

You could not draw more of a distinction between the evidence given by Whitehall and the BBC on the  same issue. There are are detailed reports by me and Mark Conrad on the Exaro news website ( http://www.exaronews.com) about the hearing.

Suffice to say Sir Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary to the Treasury, put his hands up. He admitted ” a catalogue of errors” had led Student Loans Company chief, Ed Lester, to get a £182,000 a year  job with the government and avoid having tax and national insurance deducted at source. Indeed Howard Orme, the financial director of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, admitted he originally wanted £260,000 a year to do the job.

The disclosure that 2400 Whitehall staff have personal contracts shocked Sir Nick. He was forthright: “The Treasury had been asking the wrong questions. We were concentrating on value for money and not on the tax implications. We should have looked have looked at the figures more carefully.”

Contrast this with the BBC’s chief financial officer,Zarin Patel, who despite disclosing that the BBC employs a third of staff – some 25,000 – as freelances and admitting that 148 of the 467 journalist talent are paid through personal service companies, thought there was no tax avoidance at all.

Patel said: “There is no difference to the HMRC whatever way this is done.” In other words it doesn’t matter.

Not a view shared by the committee, Margaret Hodge, the chair, pointing out there was nothing worse than ” a person paid by the taxpayer avoiding tax.”

Patel’s complacency was also shattered later when HM Revenue and Customs chief, Lin Homer, revealed the paucity of checks on these people who have personal service companies. She disclosed that over three years the number of checks had been 25,12 and 23 respectively. One MP  even wondered whether this should be made public because it would only encourage more tax avoidance and evasion. This is now going up to 230 – but with 3,000 non journalists at the BBC on personal service contracts alone – how much difference will this make. More grist to the case presented by Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, that the Revenue is indeed well understaffed to do its job.

More interest for Freedom of Information freaks – it emerged that the information I got through  the freedom of information request  which blew the whole story – is now to be used as a case study by Whitehall of how something can go wrong ( or at last I hope so!).

The London borough of Barnet also emerged in its true colours . Evidently it had not replied to a request from the Local Government Association to disclose how many senior staff were on personal service contracts – the number according to the redoubtable Mrs Angry @brokenbarnet is 13. But Mps appear to be on the case – they will need to be vigilant, Barnet has a habit of not co-operating with anyone who wants information.

The hearing was a success. The next stage will be to ensure there is proper action to get these wheezes stamped out, the sooner, the better. And of course end the BBC’s complacency over this issue.

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now with full cast of characters to appear before MPs

davidhencke's avatarWestminster Confidential

On Monday BBC chiefs will appear before Parliament’s most powerful committee, the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

They will be there to answer questions on the vexed question of employing people through personal service companies to avoid paying tax and national insurance at source.

The BBC will be joined be civil servants from Whitehall and local government who have all been exposed of using this device to employ people and avoid paying tax and national insurance at source.

The scandal was first exposed by me on the ExaroNews website (http://www.exaronews.com)  and BBC Newsnight when it was discovered that Ed Lester, the Student Loans chief, had used this device to be paid £182,000 a year.

The furore that followed led Danny Alexander,Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to launch an inquiry which discovered that another 2500 civil servants were using the same device across Whitehall. The review’s findings were also leaked to…

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Why Margaret Hodge must hold the British Tax Avoidance Corporation to account: Updated

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George Entwistle, new director general. Time to tackle tax avoidance? pic courtesy: Metro

On Monday BBC chiefs will appear before Parliament’s most powerful committee, the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

They will be there to answer questions on the vexed question of employing people through personal service companies to avoid paying tax and national insurance at source.

The BBC will be joined be civil servants from Whitehall and local government who have all been exposed of using this device to employ people and avoid paying tax and national insurance at source.

The scandal was first exposed by me on the ExaroNews website (http://www.exaronews.com)  and BBC Newsnight when it was discovered that Ed Lester, the Student Loans chief, had used this device to be paid £182,000 a year.

The furore that followed led Danny Alexander,Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to launch an inquiry which discovered that another 2500 civil servants were using the same device across Whitehall. The review’s findings were also leaked to Exaro and BBC Newsnight.

Less well covered is that the BBC and local government were up to the same thing . Until now both sectors have got away with it. on Monday they can be called to account and should be.

The BBC has enjoyed the protection of Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, and as never been required to disclose the full picture.  Indeed the biggest disclosure came from David Mowat, a former member of the public accounts committee, who  found out through a freedom of information request that the BBC employed 3000 people- more than the whole of Whitehall – through personal service companies. And none of these were journalists who are exempt from FOI because they are regarded as ” talent.” So the full  picture is bound to be much,much bigger.

Similarly Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, has not followed through vigorously what is going on in local government.No attempt has been made to probe tax avoidance at the London boroughs of Barnet, Hackney and Hammersmith and Fulham or the blatant disregard for employing people directly on the Isle of Wight.

Monday will be a great opportunity for the terrier instincts of Margaret Hodge, Richard Bacon, Stephen Barclay, Meg Hillier and Fiona Mactaggart to name but a few to ask a few very pointed questions and demand explanations from the BBC and town halls. I hope they will not disappoint and not be put off by Whitehall  sniping about the way they question witnesses.

The BBC after all would not exist if it did not receive licence  fees from taxpayers and even non taxpayers. Its new director general George Entwistle, should make the Corporation becoming more transparent as a priority. Over to you, Margaret.

Since this has appeared a full cast list of people  summoned to appear has been announced. They are:

 Carolyn Downs, Local Government Association, Zarin Patel, Chief Financial Officer, BBC and David Smith, Head of Employment Tax, BBC; Sir Nicholas MacPherson KCB, Permanent Secretary, HM Treasury, Howard Orme, Finance Director, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, Lin Homer, Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary, HMRC and William Hague, Executive Director, Efficiency and Reform Group, Cabinet Office.

Followers of the story might be interested to know that documents released to me  under Freedom of Information point to Harold Orme being directly connected to the controversial appointment of Ed Lester, head of the Students Loan Company, with the knowledge that he would not have any tax or national insurance directly deducted by the Student Loans Company. This is a good call by the committee.

Exaro  News will have a story up on their website  on Monday evening –  after the committee has met.

Exposed: The Ex Met Police snapper’s website offering “cash for celeb scoops” to public officials

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Matt Sprake: Trying Out the PM’s chair in the Cabinet Room in the 1990s while on the Met Police pay roll. Pic courtesy his Facebook page

Given the Leveson Inquiry is in full swing  can  you imagine this appearing on  a website supplying the national media – from the People to the Press Association?

” Do you know of a story, a scandal, something that made you interested, chances are that a newspaper will pay for that information.  Do you know where a prominent person is living or what they get up to, is a celebrity having an affair that you know of, do you know anyone who’s on reality TV?  You can earn yourself good cash now by calling 01277 (deleted) 24 hours a day and remember, nobody ever needs to know it was you that told us!

All sorts of people have been paid thousands of pounds by us for giving information that leads to a picture being sold or a story being written, are you a doorman, police worker, civil servant, probation officer, prison officer, nurse?  Make some extra money without anyone ever knowing…

Never go direct to a newspaper, come to us, it’s what we do, we are better positioned to get you much more cash. ”

The full story  on this is available  at http://www,exaronews.com   and on the Independent at http://ind.pn/M48suc. Since the disclosure the website has been rapidly redesigned and the page taken down but the website page is captured on the exaronews.com website.

Part of his agency’s website is devoted to its “surveillance photography”, offering a menu of services, including “covert foot follows”, “covert vehicle follows” and ”remote technical surveillance”.

“You can utilise the very same skills that are used by the security services and the police,” clients are promised.

“Our surveillance team has worked for and been trained by various police and government surveillance agencies within the UK. If you need it photographed without being seen, we are your experts.”

So what is the  explanation of the managing director  of  http://newspics.co.uk ,  ( one Matt Sprake, whose company is owned by his wife, Marion, described in her Companies House return as a banker.

According to him  the wording on his agency’s website was “just advertising” aimed at the “general public”.

He said that he would have removed it by now but for the fact that his website is “broken” and cannot be edited because the company that created it went bust.

“We are in the final stages of a company redesigning our website,” he said. “If there was a way of changing it, believe me, I would.” That seems to have  happened remarkably quickly after  the story was published.

On the social-media website, Myspace, he puts his income at between £100,000 and £150,000 a year.

Sprake continued: “I used to work for a specialist department at the Met in Scotland Yard looking, basically, at terrorism work. The level I was working at involved very covert stuff.

“I got out after 10 years. You are limited on the number of years you are allowed to do, so I am now doing other work. But I have still got all that training that is very handy to have.”

He also claimed his staff adhered to the Press Complaints commission code and his site promised to do surveillance work which would be covered by the Code.

The PCC were not so impressed – a spokesperson pointing out the code covered editors of papers not agency photographers.

I tried to contact Trinity Mirror publisher of The People- whose editor has already given evidence to Leveson . Their pages are all over his website including the page offering cash to public officials. But answer came there none.

One cannot  wonder why the reputation of the media is at such a low with such behaviour. If Sprake is telling the truth, it seems to me the height of folly and hubris  in these troubled times to put this on a website. If he is not this is exposing something else that is not particularly savoury and very worrying for ethical standards in the media and the people who are supplying him.

Q:Who’s afraid of the big bad Fox? A:The Charity Commission

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Liam Fox:Back in the News Pic courtesy:Metro

So Liam Fox is back from the political dead after having to quit as defence secretary.  How interesting! It comes after a little noticed report  from the Charity Commission into the affairs of  his doomed charity, Atlantic Bridge.  Conveniently it closes down any further investigation into his dubious past.

Remember this was the charity that promoted the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan view of Anglo-American relations and gave a Margaret Thatcher Freedom medal to Henry Kissinger.

 The Charity Commission would never have looked at it if it had not been the persistence of Stephen Newton the Labour blogger who lodged a complaint. The charity run by Mr Fox and his best man, former special adviser,Adam Werrity ( remember him too?) was found not to be a charity, not have charitable purposes and was also operating in breach of Parliamentary rules from Liam’s office in the House of Commons.You might have thought after the furore  over the Smith Institute which was dragged through a formal inquiry for being too close to Gordon Brown,you would get  a devastating critique from them. You’d be wrong.

The report reveals that because it was a faux charity – HM Revenue and Customs demanded that some £50,000 in back tax, which according to the Financial Times, was paid by Tory donor.billionaire City trader Michael Hintze. See http://on.ft.com/N5zxqS as part of a £53,478 loan to the charity from his hedge fund company CQS.

However the Charity Commission did not believe any of the trustees or for that matter their advisory board were culpable so it could not recover the money from them. As the report says: “in taking such proceedings it would need to be clear that the trustees were sufficiently culpable in law to make good the loss and the proceedings were in the public interest.”

It added that there was ” no evidence the trustees acted in  bad faith” and “no compelling evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.” It accepted the evidence from the trustees that they just thought they were acting lawfully and its was perfectly proper to set up a charity to pursue the political objectives of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Of course it could just be that  Professor Patrick Minford of Conservative Way Forward, Lord Astor of Hever, a hereditary Tory peer, and the lobbyist Andrew Dunlop a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, were a load of naive gits who didn’t have a clue how a charity works or an inkling of charity law. And of course their board of advisers was not stuffed with clever worldly political activists – it  was only composed of William Hague, George Osborne and Michael Gove.

And Liam Fox is so innocent he seems to have forgotten to declare some other US lobbying appointment in his ministerial interests, according to revelations in today’s Political Scrapbook.http://politicalscrapbook.net/

Curiously Dame Suzi Leather . chair of the Charity Commission, could have referred the matter up to Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, to rule on whether there was a case to answer. But conveniently for  Dominic he was not placed in such an embarrassing position.

Of course it was different for the Smith Institute – everybody knows that Gordon Brown and Ed Balls  were  through Wilf Stevenson (now Lord) manipulating charity law and unlike Liam Fox had to be taken to task in much stronger terms. 

Job not well done, Dame Suzi. But I am sure you will be up for peerage as soon as your appointment ends, as a thank you for saving the present Establishment a lot of angst.

Exclusive: Bye,Bye NHS Direct – chief’s leaked e-mail

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Colourful protest against the end of NHS Direct. Pic courtesy:Urban75 blog

The hugely popular NHS Direct service is facing near extinction next year. Health secretary  Andrew Lansley’s decision to replace the well-regarded national service with a piecemeal local service run by any English local provider could mean it will be running nothing by the end of next year.

So far despite providing some of the trials for new cheaper NHS 111 phone line in Luton,Nottingham and Lincolnshire, NHS Direct has failed to secure a single contract.

 This dire news is contained in a confidential e-mail from Nick Chapman, chief executive of the doomed organisation, which is on the Exaro News website ( http://www.exaronews.com).

 It shows with a third of the local areas already choosing their preferred provider for the service NHS Direct has secured the ” preferred provider ” status in just three areas, covering a mere four per cent of the population – Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Somerset and one other area. But even this guarantees nothing.

As Mr Chapman says: “No contracts have yet been signed and there is still a lot of work to be done to agree the final contracts before we start delivering the service.”

And where NHS Direct is putting through pilots, these will be up for grabs by anyone else, once the period is over.

So who is getting them? Despite publicity showing that three of the main for profit providers, Care UK, Capita and Serco have pulled out – this has left   Harmoni  grabbing the biggest share with  Hillingdon, Croydon, Wandsworth, Suffolk, parts of Kent and Sussex and Wiltshire and parts of North Somerset, all now to be run for profit. And the promise of a six month delay may merely serve to persuade more private firms to move in – rather than defend the existing state provided service.

The rest has gone to various trusts and  social enterprises ( some well run by GPs like in Devon, others not so well run) taking over. NHS Direct is being cautious -saying commercial confidentiality stops them revealing the full picture.

 Should we care? According to the BMA we should.

 As Dr Laurance Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GP committee, said: “A potentially dangerous version of NHS 111 is set to burst forth upon an unsuspecting public from April. Patients may end up being sent to the wrong place, waiting longer, blocking A&E and using ambulances needlessly, when a little more consideration might make it all work properly.”

Of course ministers like Simon Burns say it is fine and good value for the taxpayer. But I wonder if the public will like it – particularly if it to be mainly staffed by people with just 90 days training – rather than nurses who might have a better knowledge of medical matters. One wonders whether like a recent call I made to Blackberry, the centre will be spending their time looking up articles on Google to provide the best advice . Very worrying if you are an anxious mother or have a sick child.

 If it ain’t broke, why tear it apart.

Updated Exclusive:: Home Secretary says Gatstrip scandal will be taken seriously

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The disclosures on this website and in the Tribune magazine at the weekend over the strip searching of Afro Caribbeans and the atrocious treatment of a gay man  by border staff at Gatwick Airport will be taken seriously by Theresa May, the home secretary, I was promised today.

Given the widespread interest- with 1700 hits so far and still counting and from the US, Australia and Europe – this is the least I would expect.

I took the opportunity of her appearance at the House of Commons Press Gallery lunch today (Tuesday) to question her about the findings in the report by John Vine, the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency.

She seemed not to be quite au fait with the detail but did respond positively to the issue. She said that Mr Vine was meant to be the Home  Secretary’s source for what is happening on the ground at ports and airports and she always took up his recommendations.

 Given that Mr Vine has made it clear that the behaviour there could have breached the Equalities Act that is good news.

She added: ” I always take the recommendations of Mr Vine seriously and in this case I expect the findings to be taken very seriously. We will respond to his recommendations.”

I shall wait the outcome with interest. The next question is what is the position of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission on this scandal. Given that it is headed by Trevor Phillips, of Afro-Caribbean descent, I expect to see some action here very soon.