Tag Archives: HM Government

When I arrived in the Chief Secretary’s office in June, I was expecting to find a note telling me how much cash there was.

Instead all I got was a few pieces of cricket memorabilia and a rather sweet cat.

But what I did inherit were public finances in much better shape than in 2010. The deficit is down and the economy has enjoyed years of sustained growth.

On every street corner, I can see untapped potential. I see the ambition to succeed from the founders of firms to the leaders of social enterprises. In every business, school and hospital, we have huge talent.

I know that the best days of Britain are ahead of us.

In order to turbocharge our success, we need to unleash this potential within our economy.

And for that we must look to public services.

Why?

Because around a fifth of the economy is in the public domain.

And because:

Education

Infrastructure

Health care

Planning

Regulation

…are all under the control of the government.

Unlocking our potential is not about increasing the size of the state.

It’s not about what you spend – it’s about how you spend it.

We’ve made good progress over the last seven years, reducing the deficit while improving front-line services. Some say we can’t go any further, but I don’t accept that defeatism.

I know we can: it’s about unleashing a new era in technology, creativity and ideas.

In Britain we have some of the best public servants in the world.

But we need to give our public sector leaders new freedom…

Robustly measure our output…and make sure we spend every penny well.

Achievements to date

We’ve made huge progress since 2010:

• 4 years of uninterrupted economic growth

• a record number of start-ups created: we rank 3rd, with over 650,000 founded in 2016 alone

• we now have 22 billion-dollar tech companies based in the UK, from St Ives to Inverness

• the unemployment rate at its lowest since 1975

• millions more children in good or outstanding schools, and more student choosing to pursue maths at A-level

• historically high cancer survival rates

We didn’t achieve all this by losing control of the public finances.

We did it by harnessing the creative, innovative spirit that has driven Britain’s success for centuries…

By shifting money to the front line in health, policing and education…And by giving those on the front line the power to transform what they do.

Moving from inputs to outputs

So why is so much of the public spending debate just about how much money there is?

No company would measure its performance by its cost base.

You don’t see Sainsbury’s saying we’re doing better this year because we’re spending more money on products we’re buying to sell to our customers. Deliveroo didn’t come up with their new operating model by deciding what the budget was first and then buying up bikes.

The reason we’ve got such a high number of start-ups and our businesses are so successful is because they are constantly finding new and better ways to deliver their services.

Why do we only ask:

How big is her Budget?

How much are we spending?

Is it more this year or last year?

Is it more in Manchester or Bristol?

What number is attached to that announcement? And to be clear, there aren’t any spending announcement here today.

Of course, public services do require money. So let me set out the facts:

• public spending is currently 38.9% of GDP

• this year, it will hit £800 billion for the first time – that’s around £29,000 per household, and in line with what other major economies are spending

• on education, we spend more as a percentage of GDP than countries like Germany or Japan, and our health spending is 9.7% of our GDP, more than the EU average

• our public services are important. We value them highly. And that is exactly why they have been, and will continue to be, well invested in

How do we make public services better?

Hard working taxpayers want to know that every penny that they pay is going to good use.

Lower productivity means less value achieved for every pound spent: fewer operations conducted, fewer children educated well, fewer bins collected.

And the result? A substantial budget deficit on the eve of the UK’s biggest financial crisis in 80 years.

Let me be clear – there are some things only government can do.

But allowing the state to grow squeezes out the freedom and enterprise of the private sector.

It raises the tax burden on both individuals and businesses, slowing and stifling the innovation which drives our economy and our success.

If we want to make sure our public services continue to lead the world, we shouldn’t be losing control of the public finances or wrecking the economy.

We need a balanced approach – investing while driving productivity and value for money.

Productivity doesn’t mean we’re expecting people to work harder – people already work hard.

It’s about giving people the means and the freedom to maximise the impact of what they do. And making sure public services are having the greatest impact on people’s lives.

We have commissioned Sir Michael Barber to look at how we do exactly this.

For me there are three key areas:

Firstly, we need to continue to move towards a system that rewards the impact money has, rather than the amount of money spent.

Secondly, we must cultivate leadership in public services. We know what we want to see, but we should give those on the front line freedom to deliver.

And, finally, we must open up more of our public services to new ideas and disruptive innovation. We need to think big.

1. Impact

Firstly: we must rigorously measure the impact each pound spent has. If we can’t measure results, people will talk about what they always talk about: money.

We’re now much better at investing in economic infrastructure. With more sophisticated analysis we’re making better decisions than ever about where we invest taxpayers’ money. This means families and businesses see maximum gain when we spend money on roads or railways.

For example, in 2015, we were able to prioritise the dualling of the A11 to Norfolk, because it had a very high cost-benefit ratio compared to other projects.

Now we need to go beyond concrete and steel and use this approach to look at how government spending affects people.

We’re already doing this in higher education. We’ve recently published data measuring the impact of a university course on students’ prospects. It’s a new tool for comparing the return on investment at different institutions and courses.

It shows, for example, that students taking engineering at the OU can earn well over £50,000 five years after graduating.

And our Teaching Excellence Framework is incorporating earnings data, and providing a measure of the overall value-add that universities and courses provide.

However, effective measurement is not just about holding ourselves to our own standards, it is also about benchmarking our performance against other countries – noting where we are better and when we are not, so we can improve. We know how to benchmark. We simply need to do it more.

Prioritisation

This measurement can help us prioritise.

We are already doing this by rebalancing public spending. For example, by helping people into work, we’ve reduced the Jobseekers Allowance bill by £2.1 billion since 2010. And we are increasing public investment to around £1 in every £8, as opposed to £1 in every £14 in recent decades. And we are reprioritising within out Budgets.

On Education, our prioritisation of funding to the front line has meant that we’ve been able to put £1.3 billion extra into core schools funding. The evidence shows that high quality teaching that is the key factor of educational performance.

But we need to go further.

We need to back brave leaders, like Simon Bailey of Norfolk Constabulary, who is reshaping his force to deal with the changing nature of crime: making difficult decisions so he can invest in the IT required to deal with increasingly complex crimes such as adult and child abuse, sexual offences and cyber-crime.

2. Leadership freedom

As Charlie Mayfield identified in his report industry productivity, leadership is an area where the UK has much to learn.

To use his exact words: While we have world class, high performing businesses, in far too many UK firms of all sizes, management performance falls behind the best international standards.

Our public services are no different.

We need to move away from the idea that great leadership and management is something that you are born with. That someone is either Winston Churchill or David Brent.

Some of our most successful innovations like academies, foundation trusts and reform prisons have been about enabling and empowering leaders: giving them the freedom to lead and the accountability that comes with that.

Take the Michaela School, run by Katherine Birblesingh, that I visited in Wembley.

Katherine has reorganised the school day to eliminate the time normally lost moving from classroom to classroom.

Over time, it means hours – days – of time spent in the classroom instead of wasted in the corridor.

Taken together, seemingly insignificant changes can have a huge impact on children’s lives.

The Michaela School was recently rated ‘outstanding’ in every category by Ofsted.

Or take Worthing Hospital, where trust leader, Marianne Griffiths, has embraced the Japanese concept of Kaizen – continuous improvement.

This has been adopted by the brilliant team on Beckett Ward, led by deputy Sister Sue Grace.

Instead of lodging a complaint to senior management and waiting six weeks for a response, the team gather each day for an “improvement huddle”.

One such improvement was a nurse’s suggestion to move admin desks onto the patient bays. This would mean nurses could supervise patients while doing paperwork. Otherwise known as “BayWatch”.

Once put into practice, falls by frail patients dropped by 80%. We know our nurses are working their socks off.

The problem is, there are often too many barriers to making the small changes that have a big impact.

As a government, we must do more to empower our public servants, remove these barriers and provide them with the means and support to unlock their potential.

In the way we design frameworks and spending controls, the Treasury – whilst protecting public money – must make sure we are allowing leaders to lead and giving them freedom over how to achieve results.

3. Disruption is good

Finally, I want to take on this notion that the public sector should resist outside influence.

The public sector does not exist in a bubble and business should not be treated as the enemy.

Don’t critics realise that the cheap flights they take – the lattes they sip – and the smartphones they post their dubious comments from are all results of free enterprise.

Rather than ignoring or denying the virtues of enterprise we should be harnessing it for the public good.

Both of my parents worked in the public sector in Leeds, my dad as a university lecturer and my mum as a nurse and then teacher. In fact, my father is still working as a mathematics lecturer today.

The institutions that they worked in – Leeds University and the Infirmary – emerged in the city’s days as a wool town, and were paid for and heavily influenced by the industrialists of the day.

Fast forward to today, and we can easily see the huge contribution made by entrepreneurs and business people – like Lord Harris and Paul Marshall – to our public service. Both have brought their energy and drive to the academies and free schools movement, where performance is outstripping other schools in the state sector.

Public private partnerships, like the Docklands Light Railway, are some of the most effective and popular public services in the UK.

From Ask the Midwife, an app which is helping expectant mothers to access NHS services quicker and more effectively…

…to the brilliant IT company Reveal Media that supply bodyworn cameras to police, saving time and speeding up prosecutions

…to the transformative effect that digital flood information is having on coastal towns and villages vulnerable to flooding – technology only available because of the innovations of world leading software companies.

We must champion a rich, vibrant, creative, enterprising public sphere where all ideas are welcome.

Looking forward

We want to see new ideas challenging the status quo of our public services.

Government doesn’t always have the answers, but we can create structures to empower people – liberating our public servants and making the most of those opportunities.

This idea that some monolithic planned state will solve Britain’s problems in our rapidly changing and incredibly diverse world is ludicrous.

The best ideas often come from those on the front line. We need a public sector open enough to harness new ideas for the public good.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way in understanding how to get the most from public services.

It’s not about spending money we don’t have.

It’s about championing the ambitious and the enterprising.

It’s about rigorous measurement of what we do and being willing to reprioritise.

It’s about opening up more of the public sector to new ideas and innovation, unleashing creativity in the way we approach our day to day delivery of public services.

In this way, we can harness the untapped potential of the public sector and its people to help drive our economy and put us in a strong position to thrive.

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Mrs Rokeya Monir, the sole registered director of Nawab Lounge Ltd, which traded as Nawab, an Indian restaurant and takeaway in Thatcham, Berkshire has been disqualified from acting as a company director for seven years having given disqualification undertakings to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, which commenced on 28 September 2017 for employing three illegal workers.

Monir’s disqualification follows investigations carried out by the Insolvency Service and Home Office Immigration Enforcement.

Having inspected the premises in January 2015, Home Office Immigration Enforcement officials found three illegal workers and imposed a penalty of £30,000.

On 27 February 2015, Home Office Immigration Enforcement issued Nawab Lounge Ltd with a Notification of Liability for a Civil Penalty for £30,000 in respect of the company’s employment of three illegal workers. Payment was due on or before 31 March 2015, however, on 5 August 2015 Nawab Lounge Ltd went into liquidation and the penalty remained unpaid.

Commenting on the disqualification, David Brooks a Chief Investigator with the Insolvency Service said:

The Insolvency Service rigorously pursues directors who fail to pay penalties imposed by the government for breaking employment and immigration laws. We have worked closely in this case with our colleagues at the Home Office to achieve this disqualification.

The director sought to gain an unfair advantage over her competitors by employing individuals who did not have the right to work in the UK in breach of her duty as a director.

The public has a right to expect that those who break the law will face the consequences. If you fail to comply with your obligations, the Insolvency Service will investigate and you run the risk of being removed from the business environment.

Rokeya Monir, 49, was the sole registered director of Nawab Lounge Ltd, company number 08732028, which was incorporated in October 2013 and traded as an Indian restaurant and takeaway from The Broadway, Thatcham, Berkshire.

Mrs Monir resides at Battery Hill, Winchester, SO22 4DD and her date of birth is 25 July 1968.

She has been disqualified for a period of 7 years commencing from 28 September 2017.

A disqualification order has the effect that without specific permission of a court, a person with a disqualification cannot:

• act as a director of a company
• take part, directly or indirectly, in the promotion, formation or management of a company or limited liability partnership
• be a receiver of a company’s property

Disqualification undertakings are the administrative equivalent of a disqualification order but do not involve court proceedings.

Persons subject to a disqualification order are bound by a range of other restrictions.

The Insolvency Service, an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), administers the insolvency regime, and aims to deliver and promote a range of investigation and enforcement activities both civil and criminal in nature, to support fair and open markets. We do this by effectively enforcing the statutory company and insolvency regimes, maintaining public confidence in those regimes and reducing the harm caused to victims of fraudulent activity and to the business community, including dealing with the disqualification of directors in corporate failures.

BEIS’ mission is to build a dynamic and competitive UK economy that works for all, in particular by creating the conditions for business success and promoting an open global economy. The Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions team contributes to this aim by taking action to deter fraud and to regulate the market. They investigate and prosecute a range of offences, primarily relating to personal or company insolvencies.

The agency also authorises and regulates the insolvency profession, assesses and pays statutory entitlement to redundancy payments when an employer cannot or will not pay employees, provides banking and investment services for bankruptcy and liquidation estate funds and advises ministers and other government departments on insolvency law and practice.

Further information about the work of the Insolvency Service, and how to complain about financial misconduct, is available.

You can also follow the Insolvency Service on:

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Mr Ajaz Manan Din Mir, a registered director of Emerald City Ltd, which traded as Anokha Indian Bar and Restaurant from Burgon Street, London, has been disqualified from acting as a company director for seven years commencing on 20 September 2017.

The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy brought proceedings against Ajaz Manan Din Mir and on 30 August 2017 the case was heard in the High Court. Upon hearing the evidence, and with Mr Mir failing to appear in court, a seven year disqualification order was made and Mr Mir was also ordered to pay costs of £4,230.

Although Mr Mir provided some accounting records to the liquidator these were inadequate and it was not possible in particular to verify what the total takings were including those made by cash and whether over £300,000 paid out from the company’s bank accounts related to bona fide business expenditure. No wages records were provided either so it was not possible to establish the position with regards employees and tax due.

Mr Mir had also failed to ensure that Emerald City Ltd had complied with its statutory obligations to HMRC in particular that it had failed to submit a number of VAT returns to HMRC. HMRC duly raised assessments including an officer’s assessment and at liquidation the amount stated as being owed to HMRC in relation to VAT was just over £129,000.

Additionally, no annual accounts were filed with Companies House.

An analysis of the company’s bank accounts carried out by the Insolvency Service revealed that from September 2013 onwards, a total in excess of £332,000 was paid out from the accounts, of which, nothing was paid to HMRC in respect of the arrears of the VAT debt.

Commenting on the disqualification, Lawrence Zussman, Deputy Head of Investigations with the Insolvency Service said:

The period of this disqualification sends a clear message that this kind of behaviour from company directors will not be tolerated. Company directors have a statutory duty under the Companies Act to keep adequate company records which should satisfactorily explain payments.

If you fail to comply with statutory legislation, or if you treat creditors such as HMRC differently to others, then you have not taken your responsibilities as a director seriously and the Insolvency Service will not hesitate to investigate and you run the risk of being removed from the business environment.

Ajaz Manan Din Mir, 54, was a registered director of Emerald City Ltd (Company Registration No. 08029250), which was incorporated in April 2012 and traded as an Indian Restaurant from Burgon Street, London.

Mr Mir has been disqualified for 7 years from 20 September 2017. He is of London and his date of birth is 31 January 1963.

The disqualification order was made by Registrar Barber in the High Court of Justice on 30 August 2017. Miss Jessica Powers, appeared for the Claimant, with the Defendant neither attending nor being represented.

A disqualification order has the effect that without specific permission of a court, a person with a disqualification cannot:

• act as a director of a company
• take part, directly or indirectly, in the promotion, formation or management of a company or limited liability partnership
• be a receiver of a company’s property

Persons subject to a disqualification order are bound by a range of other restrictions.

The Insolvency Service, an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), administers the insolvency regime, and aims to deliver and promote a range of investigation and enforcement activities both civil and criminal in nature, to support fair and open markets. We do this by effectively enforcing the statutory company and insolvency regimes, maintaining public confidence in those regimes and reducing the harm caused to victims of fraudulent activity and to the business community, including dealing with the disqualification of directors in corporate failures.

BEIS’ mission is to build a dynamic and competitive UK economy that works for all, in particular by creating the conditions for business success and promoting an open global economy. The Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions team contributes to this aim by taking action to deter fraud and to regulate the market. They investigate and prosecute a range of offences, primarily relating to personal or company insolvencies.

The agency also authorises and regulates the insolvency profession, assesses and pays statutory entitlement to redundancy payments when an employer cannot or will not pay employees, provides banking and investment services for bankruptcy and liquidation estate funds and advises ministers and other government departments on insolvency law and practice.

Further information about the work of the Insolvency Service, and how to complain about financial misconduct, is available.

You can also follow the Insolvency Service on:

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The Queen has appointed Lady Susan Haughey, CBE, DL, as Lord-Lieutenant for Lanarkshire.

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Hampshire Capital Ventures Limited (Hampshire Capital), and its successor, Solaris Vision Ltd, a Bulgarian registered company, registration number 204122391, were wound up by the High Court on 18 October 2017. Hampshire Capital, followed by Solaris Vision Ltd, operated using the trading styles Magnum Options and Magnum Options EU, via a trading platform, using the websites www.magnumoptions.eu and latterly www.magnumoptions.com.

There were 41 complaints made to the police against Magnum Options in the period February 2016 to March 2017, with customers reporting losses of over £750,000.

Those websites offered members of the public the opportunity to conduct binary options trading, which is a form of fixed-odds betting on movements in financial markets. The websites made numerous claims as to possible investment returns, with an 81% return rate per trade used as a headline throughout the websites.

Solaris Vision Ltd was placed into provisional liquidation by the High Court in London on 8 August 2017, on the application of the Insolvency Service, due to its concerns that the company were posing an ongoing risk to the public by operation of its fraudulent trading platform. The websites have not been accessible since 25 September 2017.

The investigation into both companies found that they had attracted customers through viral internet marketing, offering guaranteed fixed returns as set out throughout the above websites. Customers were not made aware of terms and conditions at the point of sale. Those terms and conditions were deemed to be onerous and unfair on customers, requiring them to trade 30 or 40 times their account balances in order to make withdrawals. Even when some customers did do so, no pay-outs were made. Customers who sought withdrawals or repayments of their deposits were mainly met with silence from the companies, who were only contactable by email after the time customers signed up for trading.

In other instances the companies had made unauthorised withdrawals from customers credit or debit cards, a point which Registrar Jones stressed was of serious concern during the winding up hearing on 18 October 2017.
Neither company cooperated with the investigation.

The companies targeted customers worldwide, all the while giving the impression that they operated out of the UK, by referring to UK trading addresses on the websites. Those addresses turned out to be accommodation addresses, for which neither company were authorised to use.

Hampshire Capital has previously come to the attention of public authorities in other countries, as follows: On 13 May 2016, the British Columbia Securities Commission published a notice, referring to ‘Magnum Options, operated by Hampshire Capital Ventures Ltd’ and advising residents to exercise caution when dealing with “firms that are not registered to trade or advise in BC”.

On 14 December 2016, the Director of the Securities Division of the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan made a temporary order restraining Hampshire from carrying out certain activities.

On 16 January 2017, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission published a notice advising that Hampshire “could be involved in a scam” and warning: “Do not deal with this business as it is unlicensed in Australia”.

Hampshire Capital Ventures Limited – company registration number 09883248 – was incorporated on 23 November 20115. Its registered office is that of a company formations and accommodation services provider, Company Formations, at Fernhills House, Todd Street, Bury, BL9 5BJ. Solaris Vision Ltd was incorporated in Bulgaria on 15.06.15, registration number 204122391. The company’s registered office address is Zh.K, Mladost 4, Bl. 428, Entr. 1, 1st/3rd Floor, Sofia 1715, Bulgaria. The company’s sole director is a Hristo Stilianov Dobrev.

The petition to wind up the companies were presented in the High Court on 7 August 2017, under the provisions of section 124A of the Insolvency Act 1986 following confidential enquiries by Company Investigations under section 447 of the Companies Act 1985, as amended.

All enquiries concerning the affairs of the companies should be made to: The Official Receiver, Public Interest Unit, 4 Abbey Orchard Street, London, SW1P 2HT. Telephone: 0207 637 1110, Email: piu.or@insolvency.gsi.gov.uk.

Company Investigations, part of the Insolvency Service, uses powers under the Companies Act 1985 to conduct confidential fact-finding investigations into the activities of live limited companies in the UK on behalf of the Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Further information about live company investigations is available here

The Insolvency Service, an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), administers the insolvency regime, and aims to deliver and promote a range of investigation and enforcement activities both civil and criminal in nature, to support fair and open markets. We do this by effectively enforcing the statutory company and insolvency regimes, maintaining public confidence in those regimes and reducing the harm caused to victims of fraudulent activity and to the business community, including dealing with the disqualification of directors in corporate failures.

BEIS’ mission is to build a dynamic and competitive UK economy that works for all, in particular by creating the conditions for business success and promoting an open global economy. The Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions team contributes to this aim by taking action to deter fraud and to regulate the market. They investigate and prosecute a range of offences, primarily relating to personal or company insolvencies.

The agency also authorises and regulates the insolvency profession, assesses and pays statutory entitlement to redundancy payments when an employer cannot or will not pay employees, provides banking and investment services for bankruptcy and liquidation estate funds and advises ministers and other government departments on insolvency law and practice.

Further information about the work of the Insolvency Service, and how to complain about financial misconduct, is available.

You can also follow the Insolvency Service on: * Twitter * LinkedIn * YouTube

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