Category Archives: Politics

Government, Politics, Scotland

Police Scotland: ‘Computer revamp hits £45m’…

SCOTLAND’s unitary police force is facing a fresh crisis after it emerged that the budget for a crime-fighting computer project has almost quadrupled to £45 million.

Earlier this year it was disclosed that Police Scotland is using eight separate IT databases from the former regional system.

The systems, though, are incompatible with each other, despite the merger of Scottish Police forces into a single force on April 1.

This has led to warnings that criminals may escape detection because of poor sharing of intelligence.

At First Minister’s Questions, yesterday, at Holyrood in Edinburgh, Alex Salmond said the cost of replacing the police computer network is estimated to be £45 million over a decade.

The Scottish Government had originally estimated that integrating the systems of the old eight forces would initially cost £12 million over three years.

Lewis Macdonald, the justice spokesman for Labour, said that public faith is dwindling fast following one calamity after another for the new police service.

It has been revealed that police have been privately briefing for two years that integration would cost £45 million. The Scottish Police Authority (SPA), the body set up to oversee the new force, made the revelation. The true figure was only made public yesterday at First Minister’s Questions.

Information and communications technology (ICT) integration has been described as Police Scotland’s priority but critics fear the Scottish Parliament’s scrutiny of ICT has been downgraded following the resignation of three senior SPA executives, events that have prompted claims of a leadership crisis.

Mr Salmond insists the resignations ‘will have no impact’ on ICT integration because the SPA’s chief information officer remains in post. The First Minister said the ‘proposal for the acquisition of the single ICT system to cover recording, management, analysis of data and crime, vulnerable persons, criminal justice and custody, missing persons and property is a major advance’.

The First Minister added:

… Discussions with the SPA indicate the estimated total cost of £45 million over ten years is affordable within their existing budget.

Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) have previously heard the present ‘hamfisted’ IT network still relies on outdated floppy discs, does not comply with police regulations and leave officers open to criticism if a prisoner dies in custody.

South Scotland Labour MSP Graeme Pearson, a member of Holyrood’s justice committee, said:

… This is the first time this number has been brought to light and brings to a conclusion the ambiguity that has existed up to now about the cost and the likely way forward for the service; £12 million was the Government’s guess and it was obviously an unreasonable figure.

Mr Pearson also said that a highly publicised ‘turf war’ between Police Scotland and the SPA over division of power at the top of the new service has been resolved. He added:

… Many of the major government issues have been reallocated so that Police Scotland will be in charge of human resources, finance and corporate services… The SPA will do what it was designed to do: utilise governance and accountability by watching the way the service delivers according to the strategy. Until now, the SPA deemed it would be responsible for all support staff, all ICT, be the accountable officers for finance and human resources and so forth.

Holyrood’s justice sub-committee on policing will question SPA chairman Vic Emery and Police Scotland chief constable Sir Stephen House on the SPA resignations. That meeting will take place next Thursday. An SPA spokesman said the papers for the next SPA meeting on Wednesday would include details of the revised ICT strategy.

The SPA further added that the £12 million was only a theoretical figure that existed in a Government document. It says there is ‘no ring-fenced sum’ in its capital budget purely for technology.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Politics, United States

The United States and Britain hold peace talks with the Taliban…

The UK has announced it is set to join peace talks with the Taliban to bring an end to the 12-year conflict in Afghanistan that has cost more than 400 British lives.

Washington announced earlier this week that negotiations with the Taliban will begin as early as today in the Gulf state of Qatar.

David Cameron gave his backing to the peace plan and revealed that the UK has been ‘fully engaged’ in the process for some time.

A number of Conservative MPs warn the talks could lead to a sell-out that hands southern Afghanistan back to the militants who have killed 444 British servicemen since 2001. It has also emerged that Taliban fighters are likely to be released as a ‘confidence-building measure’ as part of the talks.

It is understood that British intelligence officers have been conducting secret negotiations with the Taliban for the past two years to help pave the way for the talks. Intelligence agents and diplomats are likely to join in if the initial exchanges suggest that a deal can be done.

Under the terms of the arrangement, the Taliban has vowed to break its links with Al-Qaeda terrorists in exchange for a role in running Afghanistan when Western combat troops withdraw at the end of next year.

The announcement was made immediately after NATO handed over control for combat operations to Afghan security forces in every region of the country.

The talks in the Qatari capital, Doha, where the Taliban has opened an office, may also include representatives of the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai.

While the US will have its first formal meeting with the Taliban in several years, it is expected that will be quickly followed up by a meeting between the Taliban and the High Peace Council – the structure that President Karzai has set up for talks of this nature.

The initial meeting with the Taliban is likely to be an ‘exchange of agendas’ in which both sides lay out what issues they want addressed. Prisoner exchanges will be one topic for discussion.

MI6 officers have been engaged on and off for more than two years in an attempt to get Afghans to talk to each other. The intelligence service believes this will lead to a positive outcome.

Mr Cameron has acknowledged that the talks would be ‘difficult’ for many people to accept, but he said we need to match the security response in Afghanistan with a political process to try and make sure that as many people as possible give up violence and join the political process.

The Prime Minister said that we should be very proud of what our Armed Forces have done because the proportion of terror plots against Britain emanating from Afghanistan has ‘radically reduced’ since 2001.

Conservative MP Bob Stewart, who commanded British Forces in Bosnia, has warned that the Taliban holds the ‘whip hand’ and negotiators need to ‘get the talks right’ or British service people would have ‘died in vain.’

General Khodaidad of Afghanistan, the former counter-narcotics minister, said the country’s armed forces would need to be able to prevent the return of Taliban control in the south, including Helmand province where British troops have been fighting.

Khodaidad says that the Afghan National Army will not be able to control Afghanistan for the long term. Like others he believes that some parts of Afghanistan will fall into the hands of the Taliban.

The military have always been clear that there needs to be a political solution. The irony now is that the country is not just handed back to the Taliban, the very regime which was toppled by the West in 2001.

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Britain, Economic, G8, Government, Politics

G8 Summit: Making taxation fair…

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People are often curious and sceptical of global summits. A view often expressed is that they are grand talking shops that produce little in the way of real change.

But in the case of the G8 Summit being held in Loch Erne, Northern Ireland, this might not necessarily be a bad thing. It might even prove to be the best possible outcome.

David Cameron has listed three priorities of the summit: to advance trade, ensuring tax compliance and promoting greater transparency.

The subject of corporation tax, despite seeming staid and dry, is likely to feature at the top of this list. The issue of whether multinational businesses in particular should pay more has turned into a highly-emotive issue.

There is widespread indignation at companies’ minimal corporation tax contributions on multi-billion pound sales in the UK, but the issue is not as simple and straightforward as has been portrayed.

It may appear there is an open-and-shut-case for forcing multinationals to pay more but, as any company executive will know, turnover does not automatically convert into profit.

Sadly, taxes are ultimately borne by shareholders, business owners, employees and customers; some are merely collected by businesses.

It is good in many respects to hear the prime minister professing himself ‘proud to be a low-tax, free-enterprise politician’ and he is right when he says that ‘low taxes are only sustainable if what is owed is actually paid.’

Mr Cameron is on shakier ground, though, when he differentiates between the compliance of small firms and multinational conglomerates, painting the later as simply abusive.

Tax experts will acknowledge that there is no real difference in attitude between large global corporations, small business owners and individuals towards paying tax. They all want to pay as little as possible within the confines of the law, if this maintains an acceptable relationship with Her Majesty’s Customs & Revenue (HMRC).

Global businesses may have more opportunities to manage the system, by channelling payments and receipts to the most tax friendly countries.

Equally, large firms have to contend with a great deal of bureaucracy due to the complexities of operating in different regimes.

It probably would be best if the leaders at the G8 Summit resist the temptation to announce anything but the vaguest form of agreement and focus, instead, on three areas of concern. The first should be to introduce additional measures to prevent tax evasion. Secondly, measures should also be introduced to increase the exchange of information between countries to improve cross-border transparency. And, thirdly, an agreement should be aimed for that sets out a common vocabulary that recognises the public desire to prevent abusive tax practices. Such an agreement should also discourage individual countries from labelling routine and accepted tax planning as avoidance.

The problem, however, is that there is no prospect of an event such as the G8 Summit defining even in the broadest terms, what might be meant by tax avoidance or, indeed ‘aggressive tax avoidance’, because the meaning of these concepts is highly subjective. For example, the coalition government has rightly introduced a number of tax reliefs to promote the UK as an attractive country for business investment. The Patent Box tax regime, introduced to boost research and development in the UK, is seen here as a worthwhile tax incentive, but other countries may believe it promotes tax avoidance. Clearly, then, what one country’s perception of what is a valid and desirable tax break may often be regarded by other countries as an incentive to avoid tax.

The worst outcome of the G8 Summit would be an ill-conceived proposal to change the global approach to taxing businesses, focusing solely on where turnover is generated rather than where profits are earned.

There are plenty of valid reasons to resist a proposal such as this, including the damage this would inflict upon UK companies whose primary sources of revenue lie in overseas markets.

We should hope the prime minister and other G8 leaders resist the urge to make global tax policy on the hoof to provide some popular but transient sound-bites.

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