Taxpayers are footing a bill of more than £100million for the salaries of nearly 5000 bureaucrats with no job to do the Tories claim.

It was bad enough yesterday reading that Ofsted were advertising for 12 press officers, costing taxpayers over £400,000. Now we see more non-jobs from the two, yes two, job supplements in the Guardian. Take the Public Relations Officer at Dorset...

The government says it is actively looking at ways to reduce public sector waste. I was sceptical and after reading it has recruited 50,000 more public officials this year, no doubt performing essential work, duplicating others' essential work, my healthy scepticism was well founded. The Taxpayers' Alliance - in their regular 'Non-Job of the Week' feature, have highli...

So runs the rather foolish quote from the Taxpayers’ Alliance in a story from the Daily Express expressing outrage at a job ad for a Director of Digital Engagement. The Government should have better things to spend money on than a pointless deputy Twittercrat. The public sector as a whole should be tightening its belt during

Test candidates to produce a shortlist. Then tell them to submit sealed bids saying what pay they will want. Cheapest to taxpayers gets the job. If all the bids are too high, the job will be readvertised. If there's more than one acceptable lowest bid, the winner will be picked by lot.

This week’s non-job was always going to be pretty serious seeing as one in four councils lost millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in failing Icelandic banks. Inflation reached the benchmark of 5.2%, meaning if councils want to increase council...

Secure in his non-job at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), the smug Chris Daniel has joined the right-wing chorus of those demonising local authorities and their spending. Daniel’s article, filled with needlessly pejorative terms and phrases, such as “Councils ... gorging on taxpayers’ money”, “councils hiking the cost”, “councils ... have gor...

Cllr Ken Meeson, from Solihull Council writes for the Local Government blog accusing the TaxPayers' Alliance of getting our facts wrong and only knocking councils, not praising those that do a good job. His article is a mix of distortion...

Labour, trying to save marginal seats (e.g. in Coventry), is offering ‘loans’ of SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY SEVEN MILLION POUNDS of taxpayers’ money. The car companies, Jaguar in particular, do not have enough customers. They do not have a sustainable competitive advantage and are failing. It is Schumpeterian creative destruction, and the job losses would be tragic...

Might Alistair Darling prove to be a hero of the Labour endgame? When he was first appointed, I argued that he'd be a puppet - "no more a Chancellor than Captain Scarlet was an actor". I have since heard plenty of stories to the contrary: that he is doing a pretty good job saving taxpayers from the baser intentions of Brown, Balls, Cooper etc. He has been busy chasing Shriti Vadera ...