Treasury

I wouldn’t normally start the day by linking to a public sector website – but this one is actually worth your time.  It’s the launch version of data.gov.uk, created with the help of Tim Berners-Lee among others, which aims to present statistics about government performance in a straightforward, easy-to-access way.  You’ll get a sense of what’s there by rummaging around this page: there’s stuff on benefits, deaths, immigration, traffic, and so on. Ok, so it’s not perfect.  You’d hardly call the current crop of data exhaustive, and you could complain that much of it was available previously if you knew where to look for it.  But this is the earliest

As we’re still in that period of the year for looking back as well as forward, I thought I’d share with CoffeeHousers a political timeline I put together. It’s not everything which happened in the political year, mind – but rather the important events in the debate over spending cuts. This debate has, at very least, been in the background to almost every political discussion in 2009, and it will dominate the years ahead – so this kind of exercise probably has some posterity value. But, aside from that, you can also draw a couple of conclusions from the timeline (and I do so below). Anyway, here it is, starting a bit before

Has Brown got away with his horror Budget?  Reading the Populus poll in this morning’s Times, you might be tempted to say he has.  Sure, there’s some bad news in there for the government: trust in Dave ‘n’ George’s ability to manage the economy has hit an all-time high, and only 12 percent of respondents think that the measures outlined in the PBR will be sufficient to deal with our country’s fiscal woes.  But Labour types will also seize on those numbers which show quite high levels of support for the individual proposals annouced on Wednesday.  78 percent back the bonus tax.  61 percent back the capping of public sector

The truth about the Pre-Budget Report was revealed today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies: the new National Insurance tax will hit everyone on £14k or over, not £20k – and there are implied 19 per cent cuts of some £40 billion in the “non-protected” areas. The event was sold out, because it now has the reputation as the only place you learn the truth about Budgets passed by this government. Yet again, Gemma Tetlow from the IFS has unearthed the cuts which the Chancellor felt he had to conceal from the public (and – unwittingly, I hope – lied about this morning on the radio). Coffee House showed you yesterday that the

The National Audit Office’s report into the government’s handling of the banking crisis and taxpayers’ continued exposure is a pandora’s box of financial horrors. The NAO estimate that taxpayers are underwriting liabilities exceeding £850bn and, buried in the document, is the revelation that the FSA and the Treasury gave RBS “a clean bill of health” in October 2008, days before the bank nearly collapsed. Details are scarce and I haven’t seen the relevant Treasury document to which the NAO refers; but this disclosure is astonishing, even by the standards of Fred the Shred, the FSA et al. This crisis was caused not by market failure but by systemic incompetence within