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TaxPayers' Alliance Bulletin - 17th December 2010 New website launched As you may have noticed this week, the TPA has a brand new website. You can still find us at the same address:www.taxpayersalliance.com Our Digital Director Andy Whitehurst is building the site which will be easier to use, have far more interactive features and looks fantastic. Users of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can recommend our blog posts or tweet them to their friends with the touch of a button, which will help us to spread our message of lower taxes and better government to more people. We have a great range of videos and photos going up on the site with more coming in due course and soon the archive with all of the TPA’s research will be much easier to access by topic. We hope you like how the site is shaping up; please bear with us as we finish it. Let us know if things aren't working or if you have any suggestions by emailing Andy at info@taxpayersalliance.com Details of Localism Bill announced Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, launched the Localism Bill on Tuesday. There were some great measures in there. For example, Councillors will have to approve and be required to publish new chief executive pay rules that management will have to follow. Also, councils will have the right to keep proceeds from business rates - Eric Pickles said in his Commons Statement (read more on the Guardian website here) that he believes "there are clearly going to be a number of authorities who won't require any funding from central government." That is promising, but the Localism Bill does not go far enough in decentralising revenue raising powers. Our research on this found that the UK misses out on further economic growth because of our centralised and bureaucratic tax system. For more on this, and a few other potential issues with the Bill, see Rory Meakin’s blog on the TPA website. Councillors in East Riding re-selected Over a number of months our National Grassroots Coordinator Andrew Allison has been running a TPA campaign against an outrageous waste of money in the East Riding of Yorkshire. In March we wrote about the £364k early retirement payout handed out to Sue Lockwood, Director of Corporate Resources, that got taxpayers marching through the streets. A few weeks ago, we found out that the councillors responsible for the decision, after a serious investigation, been deselected – a fact we announced on a previous bulletin. It looked like justice had been done for once and the accountability might really force councillors to stop wasting our money by rewarding themselves so generously or risk losing comfortable posts. Unfortunately the decision has now been reversed after an appeal process. Andrew rightly describes this as "farcical". None of the evidence from the original panel was presented, and the deselected councillors strongest defence was that they had been hard done by. This damages accountability and taxpayers deserve much, much better. MP expenses, when will they learn? MPs' expenses were back in the headlines again this week. There was more shame brought on the House of Commons when the Auditor General refused to sign off its accounts in full because of concerns about the "regularity" of payments to MPs. The head of the National Audit Office said they could not confirm the validity of £13.9 million of claims because they were unable to inspect supporting documentation. So MPs had been allowed to claim millions of pounds in expenses last year, without adequate checks and balances. It was a blow that these were claims made after the expenses scandal, and for us it was further evidence that many MPs remain out of touch with the taxpayers who pay their salaries and expenses. TPA Director, Matthew Sinclair, reacted angrily to the revelations, saying: "The Auditor General's refusal to sign off the Commons accounts shows how far the system got out of control. Too many politicians are still so out of touch they think of themselves as the victims in the MPs' expenses scandal but in reality it was ordinary families who were ripped off. Taxpayers' money has clearly been abused on a huge scale as millions of pounds paid in expenses went to MPs who have swindled the public, and millions more was not properly justified. This is an ongoing stain on the reputation of Parliament and justice has to be done, those responsible need to be punished severely." His comments were picked up by several newspapers: Daily Mail: £14m MPs' dubious expenses claims are written off after only a trickle of illegitimate funds refunded Politics.co.uk: 'Unsupported' expenses lead auditors to refuse signing off Commons books Daily Express: NEW MPS SCANDAL AS AUDITOR REFUSES TO SIGN £14M EXPENSES The Press and Journal: MPs' expenses prompt new furore Chief Executive Matthew Elliott talks tax and TPA Our Chief Executive Matthew Elliott sits down with Reason.tv to discuss the rising frustration with taxes in Britain and how the TaxPayers’ Alliance grew from a small group that met in coffee shops to a national media player. If you have 5 minutes spare you might like to click here to watch the full interview. Do let us know what you think on our website or facebook group - it's great to hear your feedback. Best of the Blogs Grassroots: Welsh Taxpayer funding luxuries of the minorities - Lee Canning asks why arts funding is increasing as core services are cut. Economics 101: Chris Huhne is deluded and the Government are ripping off consumers -Matthew Sinclair attacks the Government continuing to rip off consumers to support prohibitively expensive sources of energy like offshore wind Economics 101: We have the details of the Irish bailout – it's still a bad idea - Matthew Sinclair discusses the details of the Irish bailout and points out that leading economists think the package is a bad idea Better Government: Council competence and the Localism Bill - Rory Meakin sees some merit in the Government's localism bill, but still has some serious reservations... Grassroots: Deselected councillors reinstated in a farcical appeals process - Andrew Allison is furious - and rightly so - at the farcical appeals process that reinstated the ten shamed Conservative councillors of East Riding