Where our money's gone

The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne has a commentary in today's Sunday Times.

This part of the article stood out for me:

for every extra £100 that Brown has spent since 1997, only £30 has been used to improve frontline public services. Thanks to the way he has run the Treasury, the rest has gone on cost-inflation, bureaucracy and waste.

That says it all about this Government really doesn't it? It also tells you exactly why I am running for Parliament.

Helping with the cost of living

The official inflation rate at the moment is 2.7%, I think it's pretty clear to all of us that this doesn't reflect the true increase in the cost of living in the past twelve months.

I've certainly found that the combination of increases in utility costs, the mortgage rate, council tax and fuel duty have hit my pocket.

As many of you may know, I'm one of the owners of Rubyz, the cabaret restaurants in Bournemouth. A night out with us is one of those luxuries people tend to cut out if money is tight, and we've noticed in the last six months that many of our regular customers aren't coming as often as before. The answer from most is that money is tight and therefore they simply don't have the spare cash to go out as much as possible.

Talking to other people with small businesses this seems to be fairly common.

I'm therefore very pleased that the party is recognising this fact with the second update of their 'Sort it' web site. The publicity for the site says:

Life is expensive and the cost of living is increasing faster than our salaries, making our pockets feel ever emptier.

But don’t panic, there are ways to cut the cost of living and live your life for less.

Just click below to check out the sort-it website’s latest issue – ‘live life for less.’

http://www.sort-it.co.uk

The site has links to a number of different web addresses where you can compare the cost of utility companies, find out where the cheapest petrol is in your area and even compare the cost of your weekly shop between supermarkets.

Homes for MOD staff

The Sunday Times is reporting that the Ministry of Defence are spending £2.3 billion on a contract to refurbish and run their headquarters in Whitehall. You can read the full story here.

The Conservatives are requesting an investigation by the National Audit Office in the scheme.

Expenditure on the new home for ministers and civil servants will include:

• Luxury office chairs worth more than £1,000 for each of the 3,100 civil servants


• 
  The purchase of more than 3,500 oak doors for a total cost of £3m, or up to £1,200 each
  


• The restoration of a “terrazzo” marble and stone floor in the renovated “pillared hall”
  


• A restaurant, a coffee bar, three large plasma screens on each of the 10 floors, a gym and “quiet rooms” where staff can take a break.

The MoD expects to spend £75,000 per person working in the building on refurbishment and upgrades over the next ten years. This contrasts with an anticipated expenditure of £25,000 per person for those living in MoD accommodation, this figure includes ongoing maintenance.

This Government has asked our armed forces to undertake enormously challenging missions, while simultaniously cutting investment in them.

Our role as a leading western democracy places responsibilities on us in the fight against terror. It will be our armed forces who are required to fulfill much of this responsibilty for us. We should therefore be ensuring that proper investment is made in those who undertake these tasks, in their equipment and in their welfare.

Spending £2.3 billion on new offices isn't to my mind investment in the right place, we're right to be asking for the whole scheme to be properly audited and reviewed.

Festive Debt and Job Applications

There are two reports out today, which in my mind are linked if not in their cause then in a way to resolve the problems they highlight.

The first is from accountants Grant Thornton, predicting that 30,000 people will declare bankruptcy in the first quarter of this year. They estimate that 10,000 of these people will need to do so because of excessive spending in the lead up to Christmas. You can read the full report here.

The second is from the Recruitment and Employment Federation for the BBC, which found that 47% of job applications contained spelling or grammatical errors. You can see the details of the survey here.

The issue in both these cases to my mind is education. Our curriculum should be focussing on the basics of good English, both spelling and grammar.

Similarly, the curriculum should be looking at basic life skills, not least personal economics. I wasn’t taught any basic money management skills in school, I learnt about handling a budget largely through my parents, I was lucky, they were in business and therefore basic finance and economics was part of my upbringing.

There are now two generations who have been educated since the freeing of credit controls. Very many people of my and successive generations have no education in how to handle money, it’s a matter of learning from experience.

Freeing credit was a Conservative policy and its effects have been to invigorate our economy and provide enormous personal freedom. With that freedom comes the need for responsibility and the danger of living beyond your means. Teaching the basics of money management and how credit works would in my opinion go some considerable way to tackling the problem of personal debt.

The Conservative Party have made a good start with the ‘Sort it’ campaign. That’s just the kind of initiative that should be transferred to our schools.