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TaxPayers' Alliance Bulletin - 8th October 2010 Events in the Freedom Zone at Conservative Party Conference This year the TPA held a number of events in The Freedom Association's Freedom Zone at the Conservative Party Conference. They were a huge success and helped promote lower taxes and better services, better value for taxpayers' money. Most were packed out with all the seats full and lots of people standing or sitting in the aisles. The first TPA event was on economic policy, and particularly taxes and spending. The panel featured Fraser Nelson (Editor of the Spectator magazine), Mark Field MP (Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster), and TPA Director Matthew Sinclair. The event was chaired by respected economist Ruth Lea. The speakers argued that cuts in spending were necessary and not as drastic as they were being portrayed and that tax hikes threatened our growth and competitiveness. The second event brought together the most effective councils to discuss how they had managed to cut spending and deliver lower taxes and a Minister responsible for working with local government. The speakers were Cllr David Burbage (Leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead), Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh (Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council), Cllr Edward Lister (Leader of Wandsworth Council) and Bob Neill MP (Minister for Local Government). The event was chaired by TPA Chairman Andrew Allum. The speakers set out, to an audience including lots of councillors who could repeat their successses, how they cut spending and what central government could do to free them to deliver results. Some of the recommendations were reported in an article on the BBC website. The speeches and the ensuing Q&A session were incredibly encouraging and constructive. The third event looked at Britain's relationship with the European Union. The speakers were Douglas Carswell MP (Member of Parliament for Clacton), Dan Hannan MEP (Conservative MEP for the South East of England), Bill Cash MP (Member of Parliament for Stone and Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee in the House of Commons), and Chris Heaton-Harris MP (former MEP and now Member of Parliament for Daventry). TPA EU Analyst Lee Rotherham chaired the session. The speakers argued that the EU was imposing a huge burden on British taxpayers and businesses, and that the Government's policy was not an effective defence of British sovereignty. The final TPA event looked at taxpayer funded radicalisation. TPA Director Matthew Sinclair discussed our work exposing the misuse of local authority anti-extremism grants and campaign against taxpayer funded hate education in the Palestinian territories. Douglas Murray (Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion) and Paul Goodman (former MP and Conservative spokesman on these issues, now co-editor of the popular ConservativeHome website) talked about how the Government's Prevent anti-extremism policy had gone wrong and the abuses of taxpayers' money that the TPA's research exposed. Their contributions were followed by a lively discussion about the serious issues around Islamist radicalisation. TPA staff made their presence felt around the conference. Director Matthew Sinclair spoke at events on aviation taxes and climate change policy. Other staff attended a number of events asking probing questions and gave interviews for the broadcast media. It was a great opportunity to make our views heard and speak up for taxpayers' interests. Progress on public sector pension reform Yesterday John Hutton's independent commission on public sector pensions produced its initial recommendationson how to cut the cost to taxpayers. The report argued that employee contribution rates should rise, matching the TPA's recommendation in our report How to save £50bn, our book How to cut public spending, and our own submission to the Hutton Commission. There were also further recommendations such as shifing away from final salary pensions, pretty much extinct in the private sector but still the norm in the public sector. We need to urge the Government to implement these recommendations as soon as possible, reiterating to George Osborne that public section pension schemes are unsustainable and in desperate need of overhaul. If you would like to contact Mr Osborne, you can do so by emailing him at contact@georgeosborne.co.uk or by writing to him at: Rt Hon George Osborne MP Chancellor of the Exchequer HM Treasury Horse Guards Road London SW1A 2HQ Please share this with your friends through Facebook, Twitter, and email, and encourage others to do the same. This is an opportunity to reform our burdensome public sector pension schemes, and we can’t let it pass us by. Scrap Consumer Focus Following on from our calls for the Government to scrap the Carbon Trust and the Equality and Human Rights Commmission, we have today called for Consumer Focus to be abolished. The quango duplicates the work of many companies, charities and campaigns like Which? that do similar work advising and representing consumers. It also can't be truly independent as a taxpayer funded organisation and works to advance wider agendas that aren't the job of a consumer watchdog. We need your help to secure its abolition. We want you to add your voice in the call to abolish Consumer Focus, and you can do so by e-mailingcablev@parliament.uk or writing to him at: Rt Hon Dr Vincent Cable Ministerial Correspondence Unit Department for Business, Innovation & Skills 1 Victoria Street London SW1H 0ET Please share this letter, along with the others, with your friends through Facebook, Twitter, and email, and encourage other people to do the same. Together we can save taxpayers across the country millions of pounds. EU Defence Integration This week we released a new paper on EU defence integration by Lee Rotherham. It sets out how the estimated bill for the EU having incorporated defence into its treaties is currently running at around €932 million per annum (£777 million), in addition to direct national military expenditure. That equates to around £80 million a year from UK taxpayers. Futhermore, British participation in the European Defence Agency is a threat to national identity and defence capability, and the expansion of EU defence integration also threatens Britain’s very particular technological privileges arising from our relationship with the United States. You can read the full report here, which includes a foreword from Rear Admiral Richard Heaslip CB, who used to run Britain's nuclear deterrent. With the Ministry of Defence likely to face cuts, this kind of EU waste should be first to go. Best of the Blogs Better Government: Laws on strikes need reforming - Jennifer Dunn with her take on yet another London Tube strike Grassroots: Car parking in Hull and Sheffield - TPA Grassroots Coordinator Andrew Allison on contrasting approaches to city centre parking Better Government: Lessons in transparency - Chris Daniel on how Eric Pickles and Hammersmith & Fulham Council are setting the pace in local government transparency Economics 101: Cuts can be more unpopular if they're more timid - Matthew Sinclair wonders whether the Treasury could have avoided the fiasco of the last few days and saved taxpayers more money by making the tough calls Better Government: Localism in transport policy - Jennifer Dunn wonders whether transport secretary Philip Hammond really is serious about localism www.taxpayersalliance.com