No value for money from the office created by Rachel Reeves
So how's this for a turn-up from the Office for Value for Money (OVfM)? It won't be reviewing any of them. No, as its chairman David Goldstone has just told the National Audit Office (NAO) chief, Gareth Davies, over five pages of total blather: 'In line with our principle not to duplicate the work of others we did not review HS2, Sizewell C and Dreadnought, as they are already subject to extensive [scrutiny]'.
How convenient is that? Among her budget triumphs, the OVfM was invented by Rachel Reeves to 'root out waste and inefficiency' and 'help us realise the benefits from every pound of public spending'.
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The Sun
a few seconds ago
- The Sun
Labour want to use you & your home as cash cows – so council spending can keep spiralling and migrants can keep coming
NO one can say that this government is short of ideas. It is just that every single one of them involves one thing: How to extract even more of our money. 3 3 This week alone has seen a bewildering number of proposals dangled before us, many of which revolve around using our homes as cash cows. One day we learned that Rachel Reeves is considering replacing stamp duty and council tax with a new property tax which would be levied annually on our homes, proportionate to their current value. Then it turned out that actually this new tax wouldn't necessarily mean abolishing council tax — it would run alongside it, raising money from any home sold for more than £500,000. If fact, it transpired that we could face rising council tax bills. Angela Rayner reportedly wants them ratcheted up in more prosperous areas in order to subsidise poorer ones. Then came another suggestion: That higher-value homes might lose their exemption from capital gains tax. It could mean anyone selling a family home having to pay 24 per cent of the profit they have made on their property since they bought it, possibly decades ago. The Chancellor seems to have it in her head that Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis caused by greedy Baby Boomers — those born between the mid- 1940s and 1960s. They have monopolised the housing stock, and therefore she is justified in milking them for all they are worth. It is the same mentality that saw the Bolsheviks blaming the middle classes for every ill and sending them off to the gulags after the Russian Revolution. Is Labour's National Insurance hike a tax on working people? Last year's Budget already meted out punishment for buy to let investors, who were whacked with a two per cent rise in stamp duty. Now Reeves is coming for owner-occupiers too. But it shouldn't take her too much to realise that her proposals would make the housing crisis even worse. 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Reeves' plan to trim a modest £5billion from the benefits bill was quickly reversed when Keir Starmer realised he could suffer the humiliation of a Commons defeat. That has put an end to Reeves' efforts to balance the books with a combination of spending cuts as well as tax rises. Now, we are just getting the tax rises instead. We are being hammered because Labour MPs refuse to believe there is any such thing as wasteful public spending. Sadly, there is — and it permeates every area of government. But clearly the current government isn't going to do anything about it.
The Independent
29 minutes ago
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Explained: How much is the government paying to house asylum seekers in hotels?
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Daily Mail
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- Daily Mail
Take them to the tower: As Scotland's NHS is on its knees nationalist MSPs want to end oath of allegiance to King
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