Ex-HMRC head goes through revolving door; forgets everything he ever knew (or should know)

From The Guardian:

The former head of HM Revenue and Customs has called on the government to scrap a controversial tax break designed to help entrepreneurs, which he said was costing the country £2bn a year in lost tax yet provided “no incentive for real entrepreneurship”.

Sir Edward Troup, who was executive chair of HMRC from 2016 until January 2018, said whichever party won the general election on 12 December should abolish the “entrepreneurs’ relief” applied to capital gains tax (CGT).

Troup’s intervention on Wednesday came in response to a Guardian report on Tuesday showing thousands of the country’s richest people were exploiting the policy to pay as little as 10% tax on billions of pounds’ worth of capital gains...

Troup, who is now a consultant at McKinsey, said there was a “very strong case for [whichever party won the election] to ramp down entrepreneurs’ relief immediately”.

Whatever your view, gut instinct tells me that if people build up a business from scratch and sell it, such gains ought to be taxed at a lower rate (aka Entrepreneur's Relief) than straight investment gains, which of necessity mainly accrue to the already wealthy. We can argue about the finer details later on (the £10 million limit for Entrepreneur's Relief seems excessively high to me, why not go back to retirement relief and just exempt the first £1 million or so and tax the rest at full rates?).

For some reason, this ex-HMRC head is homing in on Entrepreneur's Relief while missing the obvious targets.

1. Investor's Relief, which is a 10% CGT rate for people who in subscribe for new shares in the right kind of company, and

2. SEIS, EIS and VCT reliefs, which include a 0% CGT rate on shares (among many other goodies).

It's those two items which are designed to - and do - benefit the already wealthy, not Entrepreneur's Relief.

How the heck he ended up running HMRC is a mystery to me, he'd have failed the most basic tax exam. And presumably McKinsey took him on for his other marketable skills. Maybe he knows how to unblock paper jams in printers or something?

Nobody move or your our income gets hurt!

From the BBC:

Boris Johnson's Brexit deal will leave the UK £70bn worse off than if it had remained in the EU, a study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has found.

It concluded that GDP would be 3.5% lower in 10 years' time under the deal.The independent forecaster's outlook is one of the first assessments of how the economy will fare under the new deal...

By force of habit (h/t Devil's Kitchen ca. ten years ago), let's have a look at NIESR's most recent accounts and see who funds them.

Page 26:

Income from research work
European Commission Institutions - £112,162
Research Councils - £402,651
Government departments - £1,506,958
Trusts and Foundations - £680,902
Other - £152,444.

In case you are wondering, 'Research Councils' are just yet more quangos.

Nobody move or your children get hurt!

From the BBC:

Children's safety could be put at risk if the UK leaves the EU without proper plans for child protection, the UK's four children's commissioners warn.

Child abuse, exploitation, abduction and how family law matters are dealt with if a child has one parent from the EU, are all "immediate issues".

In a letter to Stephen Barclay, the minister for exiting the EU, the commissioners ask for reassurance...

The commissioners highlight their fears over co-operation on child protection and law enforcement after Brexit, saying that prevention of child abuse and exploitation often involves international collaboration.

The Revolving Door, still spinning.

From The Telegraph:

The former head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is joining a City law firm that acted on some of the agency's most high-profile cases while he was in charge.

Slaughter and May, one of the UK's so-called "magic circle" firms that can charge clients more than £1,000 an hour, has hired Sir David Green as a senior consultant despite fears that there could be a conflict of interest.

*could*

Conscious UN-coupling

Ryan Bourne in yesterday's City AM:

According to the UN, Britain is ranked 156th out of 165 participating countries for “kids’ rights”. If you think this is a genuine reflection of the welfare and rights of children here relative to other countries – including Venezuela and Saudi Arabia – who are ranked higher than us, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Then again, what are we to expect from an organisation whose Human Rights Council recently appointed a representative from Saudi Arabia to its 2018-2022 “Commission on the Status of Women”, which is “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality”? In Saudi Arabia, women are still banned from driving.

But no doubt we can look forward to that Commission criticising Britain’s so-called “gender pay gap”, as representatives from Sudan and Algeria did in our 2012 Universal Review. This featured other delights, such as Russia criticising “police brutality” in the UK, Vietnam denouncing our “austerity”, Cuba urging us to protect economic and social rights, and China discussing the freedom to protest...

Why are British taxpayers funding this nonsense?

It's a good question and I don't know the answer. I'd ask the same about our membership of NATO.

Strewth Sheila, 'Straya has fake charities too!

From the BBC:

The vast majority of Australians worry that national drinking habits are excessive, according to new research.

An online poll commissioned by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (Fare) also found 92% of Australians believe alcohol is linked to domestic violence.

Fare surveyed 1,820 people across Australia...

Ho hum.

From FARE's our history page:

The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), formerly the Alcohol Education & Rehabilitation Foundation (AERF), is an independent, not-for-profit, national health organisation based in Canberra, Australia.

Established in 2001 by the Australian Parliament with a $115 million grant, the Foundation was set up to distribute funding for programs and research that aimed to prevent the harms caused by alcohol and licit substance misuse...

The balance sheet on page 11 of their 2015 accounts shows they've burned through two-thirds of the original $115 million.

Note 2 on page 20 shows all their investment income, the next largest source is government funding of $164,217, previous year $226,377.

That ban on taxpayer-funded charities lobbying the government...

… is not so much loopholes as a gate without a fence.

From the BBC:

Organisations given UK government grants will be banned from using the money to try to persuade ministers to change the law or increase spending.

A new clause will be added into all new and renewed grant agreements to ensure funds are spent on good causes, rather than on political campaigns. Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock said "the farce of government lobbying government" had to stop.

Voluntary groups said the rules could threaten their freedom to speak out. Critics also said the restrictions, which come into effect in May and will only apply to grants from central UK government departments, could be hard to enforce.

Many people, including lawyers, somehow believe that money can be earmarked, streamed and traced. It can't*.

For example, 'charities' which are ninety per cent taxpayer funded can still use the other ten per cent of their income to pay for lobbying and spend the ninety per cent on whatever the government asks them to spend it on. So this measure achieves nothing, apart from perhaps restricting the amount that such charities can spend on lobbying slightly - the question is, as usual, was the measure supposed to achieve anything or is the loophole intentional?

And how do you define lobbying? If a 'charity' pays for advertising to sway public opinion, knowing that politicians will bow with the wind, is that still 'lobbying' in the narrow sense?

The only solution is to prevent charities in receipt of a single penny of public money whatsoever from doing any 'awareness raising' or advertising whatsoever. Unless of course 'raising awareness' is the whole point, like for example road safety campaigns (reminding kids to look left and right, warning against the dangers of drink driving etc). But these things are so basic, the government can do it themselves without resorting to an overpriced quango.

* It riles me for example when somebody wins a few quid on the lottery or something, and people ask them "What are you going to spend it on?". That lottery money just goes into the pot. Instead of giving the usual answer "Buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday" it would be just as correct to answer "I will spend it on normal household expenditure and then save up my normal salary to buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday"

Quangocrat Surname Of The Week

Spotted by MBK in The Times:

Kids Company was facing further questions over managerial and financial misconduct yesterday after it emerged that two children of the vice-chairman were employed by the charity before its collapse.

Sasha and Jamie Handover, the daughter and son of the charity’s vice-chairman Richard Handover, were paid nearly £50,000 per year between them.

More interesting stuff re Alcohol Concern...

Posted in the comments by Adam Collyer:

From the Alcohol Concern website:

"The Alcohol Harm Map, produced by Alcohol Concern in partnership with the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck Ltd. The purpose of the map is to reveal the real harm and cost of alcohol at a local level, so that local authorities and local health providers can ensure that alcohol prevention and treatment services are available to those with drinking problems..."

From Lundbeck's website, one of their UK products is called Selincro (generic name nalmefene).

And from the website of NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (the government agency which recommends which products should be used by the NHS):

"NICE has been asked to appraise nalmefene for reducing alcohol consumption in people with alcohol dependence in a single technology appraisal. The expected date of publication of the appraisal is November 2014."

Perfect timing it seems...

In through the out door.

From City AM:

Top software company Sage Group yesterday announced that Stephen Kelly would succeed Guy Berruyer as group chief executive from 5 November...

Kelly is currently operations chief and head of efficiency for the UK government where he works to cut red tape and improve the government's contacts with IT suppliers.

The new role will land Kelley with a basic annual salary of £790,000 and he will be part of the company's annual bonus and performance share plan. Furthermore, Kelly will receive a one-off performance share plan award of £987,500 with a six-year vesting period against demanding share return performance conditions.

"Half of meddling Higher Education quangocrats could be sacked, say students"

Via MBK, from The Telegraph:

Half of the so-called great and good who head up one quango after another should be sacked as part of sweeping reforms to Britain’s “messy, muddled” system for running higher education system, according to leading students.

Froderick Loud, the former president of the Students Union, said Britain had “too many Vice Chancellors, Provosts and quangos”, and think tanks in cities such as London, London, Cambridge and Oxford should be closed or merged.

The existing system of meddling in higher education was “unnecessary and inefficient” because large numbers of overpaid ex-lecturers and failed politicians are “trying to do too many things at once”, he said.

A fellow student also suggested that elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge should focus on research and stop pandering to do-gooders and busybodies altogether – affecting well over 6,000 civil servants a year who are currently enrolled at the two competing government departments, the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The comments were made just after last orders at a student pub near Gresham College, London, by somebody on the second year of his BSc in Sports Studies who had been propping up the bar for the last six hours.

Outbreak of common sense

The much vaunted Savage Tory Cuts are no such thing of course, this is largely shroud waving. Here's an example to warm the cockles of the heart

From the BBC:

Councils in England are using public health budgets to fund other services, the British Medical Journal has said. Local councils in England took over responsibility - and funding - for public health last April.

The BMJ says Freedom of Information requests reveal a third have stopped at least one public health service, with money being spent on other services such as parks and leisure instead...

The BMJ report says it found "examples of councils reducing funding for a wide range of public health services, including those for substance misuse, sexual health, smoking cessation, obesity, and school nursing".

Public health funds had been diverted to other areas including trading standards, citizens' advice bureaux, domestic abuse services*, housing, parks and green spaces, and sport and leisure centres, it said.

The caption at the top of the article says "Measures to tackle smoking and drinking come under the public health remit" which is complete and utter rubbish, because that's not what public health is. Neither is obesity.

Public health is refuse collection, inspecting food outlets for cleanliness, tackling vermin, making sure the sewers work, testing immigrants for TB, teaching children to cross the road safely etc.

So it seems to me that local councils are spending less on nannying and more on the sort of stuff we expect them to do.

Amen to that, brothers!

* They don't read each other's memos any more. From another of today' articles by the BBC:

Thousands of people are at risk of harm or even murder because of widespread police failure in England and Wales to tackle domestic abuse, a report says.

"People in think tanks leading desperate lives, says report"

From the BBC:

Think tank researchers are leading "desperate lives" in which they publish largely unfounded reports purporting to show that "rape is used as a weapon against young women and carrying drugs and guns is seen as normal" as a cry for help, a think tank has said.

The Centre for Social Justice said the "daily suffering" of dozens of researchers "goes largely unnoticed". Think tanks and pressure groups are so desperate for attention that they will make outlandish claims such as "Girls as young as eight are being used to carry drugs", it added.

The CSJ called for career advisers to be embedded in the Westminster village to identify victims, and for more support to be given to help people who moved straight from university to running the country to find meaningful employment and recognition in the real world.

The CSJ - a right-leaning think tank established by current cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith when he was Conservative Party leader - carried out the research with the London charity XLP, speaking to current and former think tank members, voluntary organisations and government agencies.

"NHS complaints system not complicated enough"

From the BBC:

The complaints system for the NHS in England is "not complicated enough" and needs another layer of bureaucray, according to another layer of bureaucracy.

Healthwatch England says more than 70 organisations are involved in dealing with complaints about the NHS and social care. The quango recommends that the government increases their funding tenfold to enable them to create a 71st organisation which would wobble on top of the pyramid.

The new body will enable those who are not happy with the existing complaints system to be able to register their complaints about the complaints system.

NHS England says it is committed to improving the system for handling complaints about the way in which complaints about the way complaints about poor medical treatment are handled are handled and is piloting a new approach.

Following a review which revealed deep dissatisfaction with Healthwatch England's procedures, a 72nd organisation has been created, which will be known as Healthwatch Englandwatch.

"Fakecharity tax may be necessary, English blogger says"

From the BBC:

'Involuntary pledges'

The blogger Mark Wadsworth, who often posts about 'fakecharities', supposedly independent bodies who receive most of their funding from the UK government to churn out press releases to make it look as if there were some sort of scientific basis or popular support for whatever crap the UK government came up with in the first place, says the fakecharity Sustain consumes more than £2 million of taxpayers' money a year.

Adding a 20p tax for every baseless lie such people pump out would raise more than £1.1bn.

Unlike Sustain, Mark Wadsworth does not receive about £2 million a year from the following:

A-Team Foundation
BBC Wildlife Fund
Big Lottery Fund - Changing Spaces programme
Big Lottery Local Food Fund (various)
British Heart Foundation
Campaign to Protect Rural England
City Bridge Trust -
Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
European Commission (via Defra's Rural Payments Agency)
European Fisheries Fund
Friends of.The Regent's Park ' .
Garfield Weston Foundation
Greater London Authority (various)
Interreg IVB NWE (European Regional Development Fund)
John Ellerman Foundation
Kenneth Miller Trust
Network for Social Change
PoldeiT-Puckham Charitable Foundation
Practical Action
Rowan Trust
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Russell Partnership
Sheepdrove Trust
Social Action Fund (The Social Investment Business Limited)
Stichting DLO
Tides Foundation (Patagonia Environmental Grants programme)
Tudor Trust
Waterloo Foundation

"See page 8 of their last submitted accounts if you think I'm joking," added Mark Wadsworth.

The Daily Mail on top form

From The Daily Mail:

The government’s flagship benefits overhaul is costing £225,000 per person to introduce, new figures show.

The much-delayed Universal Credit combining six benefits into one has so far cost £612million. Iain Duncan Smith once claimed 1million people be receiving the payments by April this year, but with just six months to go there were only 2,720 signed up.

The Universal Credit project has suffered a series of setbacks, with ministers forced to admit the target of having all new and existing claimants on Universal Credit by 2017 will be missed. Labour claimed that if the project had stayed o track the cost per person signed up by now would be only £612.

"That thing is scary", says man paid to make us scared about that thing.

From the BBC:

"Dark scary" things used by frightening people will continue to evolve in an attempt to evade the people who can never quite manage to prove their existence, let along track them down, the UK's thought crime boss has claimed.

Last week, a notorious market place for very worrying things, the Silk Road, which most people had never heard of before, was shut down after a months and years had been wasted on investigation.

Andy Archibald, interim head of the National Troubling Things Unit (NTTU), said his officers were busy inventing new bogeymen who would be used to sustain a climate of fear. But he said new methods were needed to keep up the illusion that the general public is constantly at risk.

"A service used by office workers to circumvent their employers' firewalls evolves and will resecure itself, probably becoming self-aware and launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack on humanity in the next few years,," Mr Archibald told the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

"The success we've had in making people feel slightly uneasy all the time may not necessarily mean that by the same routes and same approaches we can sustain the myth that we live in a world full of hidden dangers.

"We have to continually probe and identify people's phobias and then to reinforce them using other tools.

"It's not simply a case of because we were able to successfully launch a myth into the public consciousness on this occasion that we'll be able to do it next time around as well.

"But simply sticking the word "dark" or "shadow" in front of otherwise entirely neutral things seems to help.

"We based that one on Gordon Brown's idea that there is a vast but invisible 'shadow banking system' as well as an actual banking system which is already sinister enough."

"Cyber-blackmailers abusing millions of UK taxpayers"

From the BBC:

British taxpayers are being blackmailed into funding the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), a quango which has threatened them with wildly exaggerated stories about children performing sex acts online.

It is almost impossible to prove that their urban myth about abusers posing online as children and talking victims into sexual acts or sharing of images, then threatening to send pictures to the child's family and friends, is a wild exaggeration at best and a outright fabrication at worst.

Ceop claimed that in 12 cases over two years, 424 children had been blackmailed in this way - 184 of them in the UK. Even if those figures are correct, that equates to about 0.001% of UK children who use the internet.

The only bit of hard evidence they have is the suicide of a 17-year-old in the UK, which might well have been internet-related. The other six suicides they refer to clearly happened outside the UK.

The quango then scraped the barrel by claiming that another seven seriously self-harmed, of whom six were from the UK.

With a complete lack of respect for his or his family's dignity, the quango is claiming that Daniel Perry, from Dunfermline, Fife, took his own life in the summer after blackmailers demanded thousands of pounds having tricked him into thinking he was chatting with a US girl.

F1 Film Rush: Call to Show the Truth about the 70s

From FASH:

Rush – the new film about the 1970’s Formula One rivalry between drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda – is a sharp reminder of how the polyester industry used sport to recruit new young wearers. The drivers are plastered in polyester clothing, while flares are commonplace both indoors and out throughout the film.

To counter the inevitable platform heel and sheepskin coat imagery shown in the film, taste campaigners in the UK are calling for warning ads about the impact of bad style to be shown in advance of the film.

Rush will remind older viewers of how the sideburn industry dominated hair until they were outlawed in 1979. Younger viewers will be surprised at the extent to which they were splashed on the sides of the drivers’ heads. Today, bugger grips only exist on the faces of ironic hipsters - something that would end if its prohibition were introduced by law.

The film shows how far we have come since the days when Fabergé shamelessly promoted their brands through sport. The sub-text of the companies’ near monopoly of Henry Cooper sponsorship was that their brands were as alluring and exciting as the sport itself.

And it worked. Evidence shows that children were more likely to start wearing Brut 33 after being exposed to Henry Cooper through advertising and sponsorship. There is also good evidence to show that adverts for cheap aftershave in films encourages young people to start a lifetime habit.

FASH acknowledges that felt hats were a major part of fashion in the 1970s and therefore it is not surprising that such appears in the film. However, FASH is also calling on the film industry to require the showing of anti-garish advertisements to be shown in advance of any film containing felt hats or flares, as there is evidence to show that this will help inoculate young people against the harmful effects of 70s fashion in films.

The Gravy Train...

... only stops to pick up, never to set down.

Just when we thought that the guard had made an exception in the case of Chris Huhne, we find that he was just in the toilets all the time and now has taken his seat again.