Author Archives: Mark Pack

From the Mirror:

Olympics minister Tessa Jowell has spent over £40,000 of taxpayers’ cash refurbishing a second office.

The Mirror revealed weeks ago how she has earned herself the nickname of Two Desks because she works from two different bases.

But the full cost of her extravagance has now been revealed in a written Parliamentary answer…

It is the fifth time in six years that Ms Jowell has had an office decorated.

Lib Dem Don Foster said: “Tessa Jowell’s fondness for office design has been widely documented and the huge amount of public money being wasted here demonstrates how profligate this government has become with

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Guido had the evidence: one of the budget documents talking about increasing VAT to 18.5% in 2011-12. Labour’s response? It’s a horrible editing blunder and that isn’t their plan, that bit shouldn’t have been in the paperwork, and so on.

Vince Cable has nicely summed up the situation:

This is either gross incompetence or duplicitous.  It may be that this may be one option that they didn’t pursue.  But if that is the case, why did it find itself in public documents?…

There are two explanations: they did pull it and maybe one of the reasons that the deficit is so alarmingly

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Online fraud is a serious problem, but that shouldn’t be a reason to turn off your critical faculties when a firm that sells software to deal with online fraud issues a news release on the topic.

On Monday the software firm Symantec issued a press release, which included this combination of claims:

While stolen credit card numbers sell for as little as $0.10 to $25 per card, the average advertised stolen credit card limit observed by Symantec was more than $4,000. Symantec has calculated that the potential worth of all credit cards advertised during the reporting period was $5.3 billion.

The $5.3 …

Following on from my weekend post about an example of how Ordnance Survey’s business model holds back innovative use of public data, yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report included this:

The HM Treasury/Shareholder Executive assessment of trading funds has considered the potential for innovation and growth from increasing commercial and other use of public sector information. It will shortly publish some key principles for the re-use of this information, consider how these currently apply in each of the trading funds and how they might apply in the future, and the role of the Office of Public Sector Information in ensuring that Government policy

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The Ordnance Survey (OS) has accussed the Met of breaking the (legally binding) terms of use for its data when the Met started producing maps showing crime levels across London.

At the heart of the dispute is the problem that although the OS is a public body, it is also expected to hit profit targets each year, and therefore treats letting others – including other public bodies – use its data as a commercial transaction. This means that many possible interesting developments matching up data or pointing people at data are hindered, or never happen, because of the costs involved.

In this …

Earlier this week, Nick Clegg called for urgent action to make more funds available for businesses and mortgages, saying that, “We need to do something and do something fast. We have to look at ways to get money back into the real economy”.

Robert Peston has blogged today about some of the issues behind this problem:

The primary motive of the £400bn of additional taxpayer support provided last month by the Treasury was to prevent the collapse of the banking system (and really it wasn’t such a bad thing to prevent a meltdown of most of our banks).

Or to put it

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From the BBC:

The government should consider lending directly to businesses and mortgages as banks fail to live up to promises to lend more, Nick Clegg has suggested.

The Lib Dem leader says the government has been “supine” and “weak” in not forcing banks to act, despite giving them billions of taxpayers’ pounds.

Mr Clegg said these were “not normal times” and solvent businesses were being put at risk by lack of funding.

There was “growing public anger” and urgent action was needed, he added.

Mr Clegg says the government should lend directly to companies through the Post Office, local authorities or even by creating

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During the week Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg gave a speech to the Association of Convenience Stores about the future for Britain’s shops:

The supermarkets don’t just have the planning system working in their favour, they’ve also got the tax man eating out of the palm of their hands.

They say that every little helps but then set up hugely complex tax avoidance schemes. They are jumping through loophole after loophole while the Chancellor sits idly by as ordinary families and small business struggle to make ends meet.

Tax avoidance in this country isn’t small scale. It’s a slick and highly lucrative industry.

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Michael Cross writes in The Guardian:

The Netherlands, which in 2004 and 2006 enthusiastically promoted e-voting for overseas voters as a step towards an all-electronic election, will next year revert to paper ballots. The U-turn followed a successful campaign by a group opposed to all electronic polling machines: its tactics included buying a couple of machines to crack their software.

Leontine Loeber, of the Dutch Electoral Council, told this summer’s European Electronic Voting conference in Austria that it is a mistake to treat voting as just another transaction that can be computerised in the quest for efficiency and modernity. Unlike banking,

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Politicians frequently complain about the coverage the media gives to politics (not enough of it, too superficial, too negative etc.) But what does the public make of it all?

The Committee on Standards in Public Life this week published their third report into public attitudes towards standards of conduct in public life, which included this conclusion based on their research:

People are generally positive about the way in which the media covers political news, with the exception that they are widely critical of the tabloid press, which they see as setting out to tarnish the names of politicians, with little regard

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