Britannia Radio

Last week, I asked whether you could think of any new ways to help people understand what £1.2 trillion means. There were lots of fantastic answers, but the prize goes to M. B. Evans who pointed out that, if they were seconds, our 1.2 trillion pounds of national debt would be equivalent to 38,052 years! Or, in other words, if we paid down the national debt at a rate of £1,000 a second, it would still take over 38 years before we had paid it off! We certainly need to keep working to arm people with the facts about the national debt and how their money is being taken and spent. To give another example, the roughly £350 million that has been paid to the over 2,500 town hall executives making more than £100,000 revealed in our new Town Hall Rich List is the same as the annual Council Tax bill for about 300,000 families living in ordinary Band D properties. - Matt Sinclair, Chief Executive 2,525 council staff made over £100k in 2011-12 All the details are in the latest Town Hall Rich List. At the very top of the list is Katherine Kerswell who received £589,165 from Kent County Council, including an enormous sum to leave her job as Group Managing Director, just to go straight into another public sector role at the Cabinet Office. Bridlington fights back Over seventy people turned out last Saturday in Bridlington to protest at an expensive regeneration scheme that has left important parts of the town derelict. We will keep up the fight to hold the councillors, officers and consultants responsible to account. Queen’s Speech There was important progress at the Queen’s Speech, with some ugly new regulations ditched, but ministers still have a lot of work to do if they really want to help with the pressure on family budgets and our dysfunctional tax system