TAXPAYERS MONEY

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Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office, has travelled to over 43 countries in the last three years, including exotic destinations such as Mauritius and Bahamas, at a cost to taxpayers of £336,000. His wife Lady Bourn has accompanied him on 22 of the stays at a cost of £76,000 in travel expenses. The couple also travel first class on all long haul flights and business class on shorter visits. Sir John's job? To ensure that public money is spent properly. (Source: Daily Mail, May/07)

The new Home Office, currently a hole in the ground, will be too small to accommodate all its staff, it has emerged. Officials were accused of poor planning after a report from the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed there will be no room for 1,500 of the department's 5,000 staff when the multi-million-pound building is completed. NAO head Sir John Bourn said the Home Office was getting the private finance initiative project at a good price. But his report added, "It is very unlikely that it will be possible to house all staff in one building."

When the project was announced in March 2003, a Home Office spokesman said it was intended to vacate five offices in Millbank and Victoria, bringing most staff together at a single address. The NAO found there were 4,900 Home Office and Prison Service staff, but space for just 3,450 at 2 Marsham Street in Westminster, which has been designed by world-class architect Sir Terry Farrell. The Home Office is due to move into the new building, on the site of the old Department of the Environment building, in 2005. It will pay a monthly charge for the building and services which will amount, over the 29-year life of the project, to £311 million at current prices.

Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said, "Staff numbers today are almost twice as high as was predicted four years ago. This is poor planning based on a false assumption. The building that they have so carefully negotiated cannot fit all their staff. On current levels almost 3,500 staff members will get high-quality accommodation but a staggering 1,500 staff will be left out in the cold." The NAO disclosed that in 2000 the developers, French-owned Annes Gate Property, were asked to provide for an extra 500 staff in the building but that planners prohibited further expansion.

Ministers are using taxpayers’ cash to promote their own successes, and bury their failures. The advertising budget was just £51.6 million when Labour came to power in 1997. But official figures showed the cost had soared to £162 MILLION by 2002. Ministers also blew a massive £333,351 renaming Whitehall departments and giving them glossy advertising slogans and logos. The cost of Whitehall departments has soared from £17 billion to £19.7 billion in two years. Voters have no choice in how cash is spent, much of it goes on politically-correct jobs such as gay and lesbian outreach workers.

Night-time magistrates’ sittings were scrapped after £5.4 MILLION was spent on the experiment. They were set up to deal with yobs and drunks, rather than have them clogging up court time during the day. But pilot schemes showed six out of ten cases were remanded to further, daytime, hearings. Experts say the cost ran at around £6,000 per hour. A further £100 MILLION will be spent on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, set up to please Sinn Fein. Yet the IRA still refuse to surrender their weapons and the peace process is gridlocked.

Ministers have blown £650 MILLION on the fight against truancy, only to see the numbers rising. Official figures show a 25% increase in the number of pupils bunking off from secondary school. Overall, 15% more youngsters are skipping classes since Labour came to power. But Labour has spent £500 million on the Pupil Support Grant to fund anti-truancy measures, with a further £66 million on the issue this year, and an extra £87.8 million on their Behaviour Improvement Programme.

An amazing £1.1 BILLION has been spent trying to boost education in run-down inner cities, with little or nothing to show for it. A report by watchdog Ofsted said the £800 million Excellence In Cities crusade had a “negligible” effect and a further £320 million for Education Action Zones shows virtually no rise in standards. Ministers have also invested £14 million on a Fast Track teacher programme. The aim was to encourage graduates into the classroom. But only 230 new teachers were lured by the scheme, meaning we pay £60,000 for each one.

Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash that was earmarked for cancer patients has simply gone missing. Just £1 in every tenner of funding actually goes to patients, according to MPs on the Science Committee. Their hard-hitting report revealed around £200 MILLION destined specifically for patients was instead spent by hospitals on clearing debt. The Cancer Tsar, Mike Richards, admitted a further £81 MILLION NHS cancer cash has gone astray.

The public spending watchdog says Tony Blair’s promise to provide a world-class NHS is doomed to fail. The Audit Commission said the extra BILLIONS raised in tax is in danger of being wasted. “It will end in tears,” they warned. Experts say new foundation hospitals don’t have the expertise needed to spend huge sums of extra cash being channeled into the NHS. And the NHS Modernisation Board say A&E and cancer care waits are still too long, with nearly 30,000 scheduled ops axed on the day of surgery.

In their wisdom Labour set up a panel to appoint the “people’s peers.” The aim was to ensure folk from ordinary backgrounds would be made Lords. But the panel, which costs £120,000 a year to run, hasn’t picked a single figure for two years. The “people’s panel” was set up to give voters around the country their own chance to voice concerns to ministers. But so far it has cost taxpayers a whopping £1.3 BILLION, without having any effect on government policy.

Ministers have blown virtually £1 MILLION on a magazine that no one wanted to read. The NHS Magazine was published just ten times in total and found just 22 buyers for each edition, against a total cost to taxpayers of around £900,000. The International Development Department also blew £30,000 reprinting its annual report to airbrush out its former boss Clare Short after her embarrassing departure from the Cabinet. They shredded copies of the original the day after Miss Short finally quit.

Tony Blair challenged the voters to “judge me” on his pledge to slash the nation’s welfare spending. But Britain’s bill has soared by a staggering 50% under the current Labour administration. Government figures show that Chancellor Gordon Brown has allowed spending to climb every year since 1997. The bill for handouts stood at a costly £95 billion a year when Labour won power. The figure will have shot up to a staggering £235 BILLION by 2006.

But the daddy of all waste must be the £850m on the Millenium Dome which was going to be funded solely by private investment and not cost the taxpayer a penny. Taxpayers were landed with a £28.7million bill for the Millenium Dome after a failure of the first bid to sell it.

Tory leader David Cameron was given a chauffeur-driven car costing taxpayers' £53,000 a year. His supporters complained that the Vauxhall Vectra has 100,000 miles on the clock and came with two previous owners, former Opposition leaders Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith. One Tory said, "David would like a more environmentally friendly car next time." But Lib Dem Norman Baker said, "This is an abuse of taxpayers' cash." Something the Lib Dems would never do. (Source: The People, Mar/06)