New figures from the Office for National Statistics today show that public service productivity continues to fail to recover from its pandemic-era crash and has actually fallen by 1.1% in Q2 2023 compared to the year before. Inputs grew faster than outputs by 0.6%. CEBR notes that “without productivity growth, the economy cannot prosper – a continuation of this trend would mean that taxes will rise while public services will collapse for lack of funding in a death spiral”. Robbing individuals and the productive private sector to fund failing public services is a recipe for doom loops…

Now that taxes are so high our overlords at HMRC can afford to put their feet up – they had the fewest staff out of the entire civil service in the office last week, with only 41% turning up. Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed…

Now this is a strike Guido can get behind. HMRC staff have voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking the day off on March 15. Presented with the opportunity of dodging duties on Budget Day, 84.13% of HMRC staff voted in favour of strike action. A bit of respite for Gary Lineker then…

Yesterday, members enrolled in the noble “fight for fair pay, pensions justice and to defend jobs through the defence of our redundancy scheme” and Guido could not be more supportive. Hopefully it will develop into a long-term strike ..

In preparation for the busy day, the Public and Commercial Services Union is putting on ‘Strike Schools’ for all PCS members. These 2 hour webinars will cover a variety of issues, presumably including how to hold up a sign safely, how to use a megaphone and donkey jacket fashion tips. See you on the picket line comrades – solidarity!

Last year Guido revealed HMRC had 16 equality and inclusion tsars on the payroll, at a cost to the taxpayer of a whopping £1,019,534 a year. Since then, with inflation soaring, the taxman’s need for diversity as he/she/they/them raid your pockets has obviously swollen too. Now they’ve gone from 16 to 22 full-time diversity officers…

According to new Freedom of Information data, since August the department’s central Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Team has, on average, hired an extra pronoun expert every month. The top-ranking new joiner starting on a salary of up to £80,384…

Of the 22 in total, two are now at Grade 6 level (£80,384 a year), seven are at Grade 7 (£66,712 a year), and another seven are now “Higher Officers” (£42,057 a year). In total, assuming the six new hires are London-based, and the cream of the crop, that’s an additional £374,351 to the wage bill courtesy of the taxpayer – or £1,393,885 a year…

In December, HMRC’s phone lines closed for several days due to a “technical issue”, and every year thousands of self-employed workers complain about waiting times ahead of the self-assessment deadline. Don’t worry though, at least they won’t misgender you when they finally pick up.

In June, Guido reported on HMRC’s latest cash splurge: three diversity officer roles on salaries up to £50,000. At the time, hiring just three seemed excessive for a department whose main responsibility is to take money from people’s pockets. It turns out that’s the tip of the iceberg.

A new Freedom of Information response reveals the taxman actually has 16 full time diversity tsars on the payroll, at an astonishing cost of £1,019,534 a year. Since 2019, the total bill comes to over £3 million. The Equality Act never meant it was impossible to stop 16 people hoovering up millions in taxpayers’ cash over the last three years. This wasn’t inevitable. 

That £3 million sum is just for the dedicated diversity brigade; the FoI makes clear there are others on the public payroll who occasionally take on these responsibilities in addition to their “regular duties”. Regular duties in this case meaning the actual work taxpayers expect them to do, such as – for instance – trying to claw back the billions lost to COVID fraud…

Of the 16, one is on a Grade 6 salary, which reaches up to £80,384 in London. Five more are on Grade 7, which tops out at £66,712. Then there’s the ‘Race Delivery Programme’, which somehow has “16.87 full-time equivalent staff”, and a total budget of £1.5 million for 2022-23. How is any of this reasonable or justified? Hand over your pay cheques, HMRC have got rainbows to paint and pronouns to wear…

Just because Saj is trying to crack down on the taxpayer waste in the NHS, doesn’t mean the woke whack-a-mole game is over. HMRC are now on the lookout for 3 new Diversity & Inclusion managers, with salaries starting on £34,000 and going all the way up to nearly £50,000. It never ends.

Budding diversity tsars in Belfast have until the end of the month to get their applications in at Erskine House, with diversity business manager, consultant, and adviser roles all up for grabs.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance investigations campaign manager Elliot Keck adds:

“Taxpayers are fed up of paying for diversity non-jobs. We’re told that tax cuts are years away, yet the tax collectors are still happy to splash the cash on needless hires. Government bodies should get a grip on these unnecessary posts.”

All these jobs should be part of the human resource department’s responsibilities. At least we can rest assured when the taxman raids your pockets, he/she/zi/zir represents the whole community…

The Treasury has finally published its net zero review, and it confirms the inevitable: taxes will have to go up across the board. Who’d have guessed that “you can’t put a single figure on it” meant “it’ll cost a fortune”?

The Treasury warns that “beyond taxation and public spending that directly apply to households, [net zero] will affect households directly through the goods and services they buy and indirectly through the costs on businesses“. Raising the cash will also mean rethinking the tax code, because revenues from fossil fuel related taxes will inevitably drop to zero by 2050. Fuel Duty, Vehicle Excise Duty, Landfill Tax, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the Carbon Price Floor will all have to be scrapped at some point.

Macro-economic analysis released by Bank of America says that to achieve net zero globally will cost $150 trillion in capital investment by 2050, an amount so colossal that the investment bank’s economists say it is beyond the capability of the private sector and taxpayers combined. It will, the economists argue, require central banks globally to undertake massive quantitative easing. Despite that analysis none of the increased public spending in Britain will be funded by additional borrowing, according to the Treasury:

“Seeking to pass the costs onto future taxpayers through borrowing would deviate from the polluter pays principle, would not be consistent with intergenerational fairness nor fiscal sustainability, and could blunt incentives.”

Instead, HMRC is “exploring options to further strengthen the analytical approach to monitoring, evaluating and quantifying the environmental impacts of tax measures”, like introducing a plastic packaging tax. “Overall, a combination of tax, regulation, spending and other facilitative levers will be required.” In other words: brace yourselves.