Town hall staff and the equipment they use racked up 282,961 attempts to access streaming services including Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video over the last year, according to a Freedom of Information blitz from the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Over 47 councils…
There were 88,651 attempts to reach Netflix, 80,061 for Disney+ and 114,249 for Amazon Prime Video. Amazon was the single most popular destination, with more than 114,000 hits recorded across authorities…
Mid Ulster District Council topped the table with 63,583 streaming attempts. Cambridgeshire County Council was close behind on 57,433. In London, Redbridge Council recorded 34,713 attempts. The numbers cover attempted access on council networks and devices, meaning workers were reaching for boxsets and films on time and kit funded by council tax payers…
Concerningly across the councils that responded there were 162,037 attempts to access pornography in the last year, mostly from Wandsworth Council. Callum McGoldrick, Investigations Campaign Manager at the TPA said:
“Town hall staff have been caught with their pants down. While council tax hits record highs, bureaucrats are busy searching for hard-core content instead of doing hard work. It’s high time councils stopped making a mockery of taxpayers and focused on their day jobs.”
It’s not just taxpayers who are feeling blue…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”