The problem is when you get out of the big cities public transport is a compelte joke-
Teeside / Middlesbrough - not excatly the biggest city but pretty big. To get a bus to work would take me 4 changes and take about an hour - car is 13 minutes on a good day. Its actuly quicker to walk!
BTW the online tax disk is great - used it twice now and very quick and efficent (not something I would have EVER thought I would have heard my self say- mainly due to my day to day dealings with correcting the advice the Inland Revenue have given.)
Car tax, tax on petrol, stuff like that...
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Yeh sounds good doesn't it ? All those faceless, suited bowler hat wearing civil servants pushing pens.rdobbie wrote: I'd achieve this saving by sacking all the consultants and the grossly incompetant and ineffective civil servant pen pushers who cost us billions of pounds every year.
They're doing this already. The government are in a programme cutting the civil service by 100,000 jobs but its not paying for your road tax its supposedly freeing up money for education, health, defence, housing and overseas aid. Are you seeing it yet ?
Lets just hope theres somebody left to answer the phone when you're waiting for your giro / pension / tax credit.
Why are we all saying the Online Tax disc service is good. Sine when was paying an overpriced and missrepresented tax good. Come on guys, keep on side. For a start we get taxed for cars far more than we should, second it doesnt get send on the roads anyway, and third it just means the overpaid, underworked civils servants have even less to do......
Put the tax on the fuel....i still say all being equal its probably better. If you buy a fuel effeicient car then you pay lex tax per mile......
Here's another one......
when we buy and use our cars here's how the government rake it in:
-we pay tax on our earnings;
-tax for the people who buy a new car;
-Road tax (thats not spent on the roads);
-MoT (£15 goes to inland revenue - so nothing to do with car safety then);
-Fue tax;
-tax o parts;
-Tax on services;
-and even tax on the advert we place when we finally have had enough and want to sell it;
now thats depressing!
Put the tax on the fuel....i still say all being equal its probably better. If you buy a fuel effeicient car then you pay lex tax per mile......
Here's another one......
when we buy and use our cars here's how the government rake it in:
-we pay tax on our earnings;
-tax for the people who buy a new car;
-Road tax (thats not spent on the roads);
-MoT (£15 goes to inland revenue - so nothing to do with car safety then);
-Fue tax;
-tax o parts;
-Tax on services;
-and even tax on the advert we place when we finally have had enough and want to sell it;
now thats depressing!
nothing like a sweeping generalisation to back up your argumentpete917 wrote:and third it just means the overpaid, underworked civils servants have even less to do......

mind you, the faceless beaurocrats in north east lincolnshire are well known for being bone idle... looking at no-one in particular.
If you really think the government are engaged in a programme to tighten up the belt of the civil service, then you're very deluded I'm afraid. This government is wasting more taxpayers' money than any other government in history, and it's getting worse not better.Square Eyes wrote:Yeh sounds good doesn't it ? All those faceless, suited bowler hat wearing civil servants pushing pens.rdobbie wrote: I'd achieve this saving by sacking all the consultants and the grossly incompetant and ineffective civil servant pen pushers who cost us billions of pounds every year.
They're doing this already. The government are in a programme cutting the civil service by 100,000 jobs but its not paying for your road tax its supposedly freeing up money for education, health, defence, housing and overseas aid. Are you seeing it yet ?
Lets just hope theres somebody left to answer the phone when you're waiting for your giro / pension / tax credit.
I should have been more specific in my original post, but if you want a few examples of how this government pisses billions of pounds of our money up the wall, you should have a look at "The Bumper Book of Government Waste: The scandal of the squandered billions from Lord Irvine's wallpaper to EU saunas" by Matthew Elliott and Lee Rotherham.
If you can't be arsed getting the book, just read the book description and it gives you the general idea:
Even if they just saved a fraction of that £81 billion they could quite painlessly bring petrol down to about 60p a litre (to get back to the original point). And that's before we even consider the £3 billion of our money the government's spent so far on invading and occupying Iraq...Welcome to the world of waste. You are about to enter a twilight zone of crazy spending, political correctness, utter incompetence, and fantastic jollies, all funded by the British taxpayer.
In this book, the authors have highlighted a myriad of examples of Government waste and useless spending, taken from thousands of examples held on file. The figures have been compiled from independent reports, media coverage and official statistics. Added together, they come to £81 billion of waste.
- In 1997, the Government plundered £2 billion per week from its people. In 2004-05, the figure was £4.8 billion.
- The Arts Council spent £77,000 sending a team of artists to the North Pole to make a snowman.
- Quangos cost over £22 billion per year.
- Local government pension schemes are in deficit to the tune of £27 billion. The taxpayer will fund the difference.
- 459 books were withdrawn from the EU's Luxembourg library last year. The cost to taxpayers was £2,138 per book.
- Ken Livingstone's office now costs £13.9 million to run. His staff includes 58 media and marketing personnel!
- Between 2000 and 2005, one in every two new jobs created was in the public sector, many of them administrative.
- Nottinghamshire tourism bosses spent £120,000 of taxpayers' money rebranding the county with a big 'N'.
- Each European member of Parliament (MEP) costs £2.4 million per year in salary, expenses, perks and administration.
- In 2005, 20 out of 24 government departments overspent their budgets. The total overspend was £7.1 billion.
These are just a few of the alarming facts and figures revealed in The Bumper Book of Government Waste. If you wasted your family's money on this scale, you would probably be locked up. Why should the Government get away with it?
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Ah right. I'd better bow to your superior knowledge then, you read it from a book.rdobbie wrote: If you really think the government are engaged in a programme to tighten up the belt of the civil service, then you're very deluded I'm afraid. This government is wasting more taxpayers' money than any other government in history, and it's getting worse not better.
And your superior knowledge comes from...?Square Eyes wrote:Ah right. I'd better bow to your superior knowledge then, you read it from a book.rdobbie wrote: If you really think the government are engaged in a programme to tighten up the belt of the civil service, then you're very deluded I'm afraid. This government is wasting more taxpayers' money than any other government in history, and it's getting worse not better.