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Oxfam's Max Lawson gives a roundup of the prospects for some of the different bank tax ideas currently on the table.
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wiredgov reports on the Information Commissioner's concerns that the Government's benefits crackdown plans might be a snoop too far for data protection rules.
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Alice Hood
The Audit Commission will be scrapped, Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles announced this afternoon. The Commission is an independent watchdog charged with auditing and supporting local councils to ensure that they deliver effective, value for money services. In a move set to raise plenty of questions (and eyebrows) the audit functions of the Commission will be moved to the private sector. Its research activities will simply cease.
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Richard Exell
Plans for a zero-carbon development at Shoreham are to go ahead, but the future of other planned eco-towns remains in the balance.
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Richard Exell
According to the Nationwide Consumer Confidence Index, consumer confidence fell for the third month in a row in July, it now stands at 56, having reached 84 in February (the average during the recession is 63). The Expectations Index, which measures consumers’ beliefs about how things will stand in 6 months’ time has also been falling for five months, and now stands at 76 (the average during the recession has been 85).
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Interesting responses to the Prime Minister's views on benefit fraud from Tax Research and Community Links
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Cuts Watch
Cuts Watch #200: More CLG cuts including support for young people and services to reduce overcrowding
Nicola Smith
The Department for Communities has published a list of new cuts on its website. The list was uploaded to their site yesterday but does not yet appear to have been press released. Cuts include: the Inspiring Communities pilot, which provided grant funding to neighbourhood partnerships seeking to raise the aspirations and educational attainment of local young people; the Overcrowding Pathfinders Pilots, which allowed local authority pathfinders to explore ways to tackle overcrowding and under-occupation and a cut of £1.3 million to a budget titled ‘supporting social tenants into work’.
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Nicola Smith
Cuts to regional Business Link services are starting to impact on jobs. 125 staff in Yorkshire are reportedly facing redundancy, as are 47 in the West Midlands. Many positions in Durham are also at risk.
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Nicola Smith
This week the Prime Minister has been keen to tell us about the massive savings that are available should fraud and error be completely removed from the administration of tax credit and benefit payments, promising that this would be “the first and the deepest” of forthcoming spending cuts.
Channel Four’s Fact Check does a good job of breaking the figures down, and pointing out the low probability of the entire £5.2 billion being saved. But the DWP’s recently published ‘draft structural reform plan‘ does even better, setting out the Department’s aim to ‘reduce fraud and error in the benefits system to a maximum of 1.8% of expenditure’.
A few quick calculations therefore reveal the scale of what is actually being promised.
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Alice Hood
One early indication of the impact of the Building Schools for the Future cuts cropped up in yesterday’s unemployment stats: an 11.5% increase in unemployment among architects over the past month. This is the first rise in unemployment in the profession for ten months after levels peaked in August 2009, reports journal BD.
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Nicola Smith
The Government has scrapped the £50m Migration Impacts Fund, which was intended to support public services in areas experiencing high levels of migration.