Thanks to everybody who voted in last week's Fun Online Poll. Responses to the question "Who is better value for taxpayers' money?" (bearing in mind they appear to cost about the same amount of money) were:
The Royal Family - 67%
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission - 4%
Neither - 29%
Which is pretty much as I expected. FWIW, I am mildly pro-Royal family, because they are fairly cheap to run (I was once handed a Communist Party leaflet that said they cost each UK citizen 60p a year!), they bring in a lot of tourists, and more to the point, whatever we replaced them with would probably be far worse/more expensive.
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Continuing in the same vein, I found out last week that the UK has, per capita, nearly twice as many public sector employees as the Republic of Ireland (or perhaps it's one-and-a-half times as many, but certainly a lot more). I've never been to Ireland, but from talking to people who have, I've never been given the impression that public services there are noticeably worse than in the UK.
So I'd be grateful if all you jet setters and globe trotters could give me a steer on how public services compare on either side of the Irish Sea. Vote here or use the widget in the side-bar.
Monday 23 November 2009
Fun Online Poll Results: value for taxpayers' money
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7 comments:
Do they have public service over in Ireland?
Her Majesty is a snip.
I love the annual BBC phone in of 'are the royals too expensive'
They never seem to compare the cost to something else publicly funded, like the BBC for instance.
JH, they have coppers, teachers and nurses on the public payroll, that much I do know.
BQ, they cost about 1% of what the BBC costs, just to put it in perspective.
Have you not accepted many things as self evident here:
1) How much revenue do the RF bring in
2) How much do they cost UK PLC
3) How much rent do they collect
I don't think you can account for much unless you have at least some order of magnitude numbers on this ?
We could replace them with... No royal family. Make their land common property. Use it in an LVT experiment. If it fails just put some new petty princes in place
RS, the fact that the RF benefit enormously from agricultural subsidies etc is a separate issue but let's imagine that we had LVT, I still think there's no harm in using part of London's LVT receipts to pay for changing of guard tomfoolery and upkeep of Buckingham Palace etc.
Now ask yourself:
1) How much revenue does the EHRC bring in (£ nil)
2) How much does the EHRC cost UK plc (£ a lot)
3) How much rent do they collect (about £30 million a year, in total).
Do we need to mention how much benefit the EHRC delivers ? Can it be measured ? Is there a benefit?
How much is 2) roughly ?
I just did some rough numbers on the RF rent returns. Might be wrong:
$200m
http://gco2e.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-much-rent-does-queen-collect-from.html
RS, the answers re the EHRC are "Oh, go on then", "Yes", "None whatsoever", and "£ hundreds of millions".
RF rent and CAP returns are also in the order of £ hundreds of millions.
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