Tories' 100 Greatest Failures Since 2010

By Dr Eoin Clarke

1. Under the Tories homelessness has shot up 31% (here).
2. Tory boasts that they would turn Britain into a “tax haven” have come to pass, at least for the rich (here).
3. Too many of the jobs created under the Tories have been part time (here). Evidence shows that record numbers of those in work want extra hours but cannot get them (here).
4. There are now 600,000 less public sector workers than there was when the Tories came to power (here).
5. The Universal Benefit Payment is forcing families to move into squalid housing, typically defined as the lowest 33% of houses by rental value in an area (here). Given that 46% of private rental homes are deemed sub-standard, this is cruel (ONS).
6. The UK Statistics Authority has rebuked Michael Gove for his consistent misuse of government statistics (here).
7. The Tory Work Programme has delivered just a 2% success rate (here), after they ignored NAO warnings it was a waste of money.
8. The Tories will cut Corporation Tax (profit tax) by 25%, from levels of 28% to 21% (here). This is at the same time as scrapping Child Benefit for some earners and cutting Child Tax Credits (here)
9. The Tories spent a year demonising benefit claimants with their “curtain pulling” stigma, even though £66bn goes unclaimed every Parliament in benefits.
10. The Tories failed to make permanent the Bankers’ Bonus Tax and profiteers in the City of London are still being rewarded, disproportionately, for taking unnecessary risks.
11. The Tories showed no sympathy for the families suffering from Child Benefit Cuts. One Tory MP labelled mothers complaining about losing Child Benefit as engaging in “fiscal nimbyism” and urged them to live within their means (evidence).
12. The Tories refused to regulate the Fast Food industry. Instead, they asked their nudge unit to consider “fat taxes” on the poor. They even stopped obsese people having access to some NHS operations. Unashamed of their deeds, one Tory MP said NHS Patients should pay for their medicines if they contract illnesses through “Lifestyle Choice” (evidence).
13. The Tories launched a war on women, by cutting Tax Credits and accusing feminism of holding back men.
14. The Tories have wasted more than £90 billion of taxpayers’ cash (here).
15. The Tories have increasingly refused Freedom of Information Requests, and havechanged the rules to make it easier for an FOI request to be refused (here).
16. The Tories have axed 5,000 Firemen & Firewomen (here).
17. The Tories have axed 28,000 staff in Police Forces throughout the country (here).
18. The Tories have accepted £20 million of donations from people who have directly benefitted from their policies. The blame lies not with the donors, but the Tories for creating unnecessary conflicts of interest by accepting the cash.
19. The Tories have abolished Remploy, and sacked 5,000 disabled workers in one day. Oblivious to the sensitivities of what they were doing, the workers were formally sacked on international day for disabled people (here).
20. The Tories are on course to issue 3 million National Insurance numbers to overseas nationals this parliament, a failing by their own pronouncements, although I welcome our new arrivals (here).
21. The Tories announced scrapped the 50p Rate of Tax, and in doing so have given a tax cut to millionaires (evidence).
22. The Tories admit they will now have to borrow at least £150 billion extra this parliament because of their failed growth. That figure has since grown again (here).
23. The poor treatment of exceptionally talented foreign students has been one of the saddest features of 2012. The revoking of their visas has meant that some of our brightest students have been, de facto, deported (evidence).
24. The plans announced to halt teachers automatic progression through the Main Pay Scale could end up costing teachers up to £10,000. There are real fears among Unions that these plans amount to pay freezes through the back door (evidence).
25. The numbers of workers not even being paid the National Minimum Wage has grown under this government, with women being the worst affected (here).
26. The numbers of homes built under the Tories are at levels lower than any time since the Second World War (here).
27. The numbers applying to go to university have declined 2 years running, this year by 6% alone. These are dangerous times, where aspiration for educational advancement is becoming unfulfilled (here).
28. The number of working households now relying on Housing Benefit to make their rent payments has doubled (here).
29. The number of families on housing waiting lists is now at a record high, after Grant Shapps failed to solve the lack of affordable housing supply (here).
30. The NHS is wasting more money than ever before. Agency Spend among Foundation Trusts has climbed 50%. We are now paying private consultancies hundreds of millions to assist the new CCGs, to audit accounts, and to report on the future viability of NHS Trusts (here).
31. The government have failed to tackle payday loan companies, leaving it to crusading backbench MPs to campaign for (here).
32. The government blamed the poor for being unemployed as unemployment stayed stubbornly above 2.4 million. One Tory MP even accused the unemployed of playing the system and warned of a “rude awakening” as unemployment reached 2.5million (evidence).
33. The average NHS worker has had a real terms pay cut of £1,600 due to George Osborne’s pay freeze (here).
34. Suicide Rates have begun to rise again & the Tories have failed to accurately devise policies to tackle what I call medicine cupboard Britain (here & here).
35. Staff Cuts: 85,000 less people are employed by the state in Health & Social Care. 42,000 less are employed in the actual NHS (here).
36. Rail Fares have risen more than 20% since the Tories came to power (here)
37. Privatisation: £7bn worth of the NHS has been privatised and 90% of it has been handed to a tiny number of companies.
38. Private landlords are recouping a record amount of £42bn a year from tenants, yet the Tories only answer was to cap housing benefit, instead of capping private rents (here).
39. Personal debt continues to rocket while George Osborne shifts the bankers debt from the state to us.
40. Patient Satisfaction: When Labour left office NHS Patient Satisfaction was the highest it had ever been (73%). It has since taken a record slump to (58%). Just over half of people are now happy with what the NHS has to offer. (here)
41. Parents, pupils and teachers did not want academy status for their schools, but Michael Gove has ignored local democracy and forced academisation upon them (evidence).
42. Parents have serious concerns about drafting in 100s of ex-soldiers to teach our children. The army has had a history of bullying, and soldiers have faced severe psychological pressure as a result of a decade of illegal wars. Using these personnel to nurture our children is a step in the wrong direction. (evidence).
43. Our NHS Foundation Trusts are facing increasing economic instability. In total, 7 NHS Trusts face ‘hit squads’. The NAO concluded that PFI was not the main cause. In fact, rising spend on Agency Staff as a result of Lansley’s recruitment freeze was the main reason.
44. Of the top 10 private health companies in the UK, who have all seen their business blossom under the Tories, there have been 100+ Care Quality Commission Inspections on their premises in 2012 which have reported shortcomings at their sites.
45. No 2 local NHS areas in 2012 offer the same health entitlement. North Yorkshire patients, for example, are losing their right to follow up appointments and health visitors as £10m of cuts are being made to local services (here). Children’s rights to expensive cancer drugs now vary from trust to trust (here).
46. NHS Treatments such as cataracts, hip replacements are no longer available free of charge on the NHS in some parts of England for some patients. In total, 22 Treatments are now restricted.
47. Nearly 7,000 Nurses have been axed under the Tories and thousands more have received redundancy notices.
48. More than 400 Sure Start Children Centres have now been shut under the Tories, this from a party who promised not only to protect them but to extend them (evidence).
49. £1.3 trillion of damage has been done to economy through lost growth & ballooning debt and misspent money.
50. Michael Gove scrapped EMA that the Institute of Fiscal Studies called Value for Money. His decision was not based upon the deficit since he first sought to scrap it in 2004. (here)
51. Michael Gove has left Britain with the most over-crowded classrooms in Europe (here).
52. Michael Gove has cherry picked the best schools for “converter” academy status, the schools with poorer OFSTED records have been held up in their applications (here) & (here).
53. Michael Gove has actually closed more than 200 schools at a time when class sizes are rising (here).
54. Michael Gove halved the funding on school meals after which Jamie Oliver attacked him for decreasing the quality & health of children’s nutrition (here).
55. Michael Gove cut £860m from the Children & Families budget and used it to bribe schools to switch to academy or free school status (here).
56. Michael Gove cancelled Labour’s plan to roll out free school meals for middle-class families at a time when evidence shows more families are in desperate need of the meals (here).
57. Just 454 Affordable Homes were built a 6 months spell under Grant Shapps, as reported by the ONS in November 2011. This was a 97% decrease (here).
58. Jeremy Hunt has ordered every Primary Care Trust in England to put 3 further chunks of its NHS out to tender under AQP by September 2013. This follows on from the 456 forced tenders this year. In total, 912 pieces of our primary NHS services are being flogged.
59. Infant mortality rates have started to rise again after a long period of them failing.
60. In Sheffield elderly patients have to pay £5-17 for foot treatment. For a time Sheffield was also charging patients £25 for whiplash tests. In the East of England major health providers are limiting courses of physiotherapy treatment.
61. In each of the 2 years of Tory Rule, private rents have grown by more than 4%.
62. Ian Duncan Smith is forcing public sector workers to accept a 3% tax hike in theirpension contributions against their will or any proper consultation.
63. Iain Duncan-Smith penned one of the most heartless letters I have ever read to the family of a suicide victim (here).
64. The government have been slammed by the leading experts in the Housing Profession who published a Housing Report concluding that the Tories, and in particular Grant Shapps as Housing Minister, were failing tenants.
65. Half of England’s Ambulance Stations are being shut down and sold off. In total, 591 hectares of NHS land is up for sale.
66. Gove now famously refused to discuss Ofqual’s letter of concerns about the E-Bacc in front of the Select Committee. The one-off 3 hour replacement of GCSE English has been labelled dangerous, unequal, unaccountable and unprecedented (evidence).
67. George Osborne signed a record number of PFI deals in his first year in power that will cost the Tax Payer £33bn.
68. George Osborne raised an extra £41bn in taxes in 2011 at a time when the economy was struggling but cut taxes for the rich.
69. Gas Prices are up 31% under the Tories & 40% of families are on the brink of fuel poverty (evidence, evidence).
70. Food Banks have grown every year of a Tory government as Child poverty has also increased. The Tories have responded in various ways from trying to claim this as a success of the Big Society, to denying poverty even exists in the UK.
71. Female rates of redundancy are climbing at a faster rate than men. More than 80%+ of workers losing their job in the NHS are women. Huge wage differentials still exist between men and women (here).
72. Despite violence against women climbing, and domestic abuse jumping 20%, one Tory MP drew parallels between the allegations of sex crimes, and smoking a joint (evidence).
73. Despite having the consultation period required for redundancy notice halving from 90 to 45 days, the Tories persisted with blaming workers for their declining rights. One Tory MP cruelly judged that British Workers were among the ‘Worst idlers’ in the World (evidence).
74. David Cameron has now abolished Equality Impact Assessments thus guaranteeing less equal services for disabled, elderly, LGBT, and BAME voters.
75. Michael Gove cancelled a plan to rebuild 715 crumbling schools thereby ensuring that all Labour’s great advancements in updating our school infrastructure were put on hold (here).
76. 10% of A & E Wards are shutting. Dozens of District General Hospitals are facing downgrade or closure.
77. Chris Skidmore co-authored a book that labelled UK workers among the most “idle” in the world. He called for Unemployment payments to be repayable loans (here), and proposed that benefits such as tax credits and child benefit be capped to just two children (here).
78. Chris Grayling forced an eventual 350,000 young person’s (50,000 of who are disabled)to work unpaid for multi-national firms.
79. Cameron has spent 2 years bullying, mocking & insulting women, disabled & the elderly (evidence).
80. At least 570,000 more households (1.2 million people) were forced into fuel povertyin a single day (here).
81. As a portion of GDP UK state spending in Education is set to fall far behind the USAmaking us more neo-liberal than the state we love to mock for its laissez-faire approach (here).
82. Andrew Lansley & David Cameron ignored a Tribunal Ruling to publish Risk Register.This Risk Register if published could have saved lives as it would have led to an improved mitigation response to the Tories new NHS impositions.
83. After mucking up the security arrangements for the Olympics, and wasting taxpayers’ money in still paying a company £80 million+ for failure, a Tory MP had the audacity to mock the Olympic Ceremony as Leftie Multi-Cultural Crap (evidence).
84. According to the UK Statistics Authority, the Tory Manifesto Commitment on page 45 has been broken. There has not been a year on year increase in NHS spending (real terms).
85. According to the National Audit Office, Gove has overspent by £1 billion on his Free School & mass academisation experiment. Gove is making up the shortfall by taking £1bn cash from state school children (evidence).
86. A&E Waiting Times at 8 year high. Things have not been this bad since 2004.
87. A proliferation of the same fast food premises in and around schools mark this a sorry year for those trying to improve school food standards (evidence).
88. A Bedroom Tax on families with wounded soldiers, disabled or elderly who require extra space for their treatment is callous.
89. A 20% VAT rate has added 0.7% to inflation that reached 5% in 2011 while wages grew at less than half rate (here). This had a dramatic effect on the misery index.
90. 95 Academy & Free School bosses now earn more than MPs & up to £300,000 a year (evidence, evidence).
91. 74% of GPs say that there has been a reduced entitlement on the NHS this year (here).
92. 600,000 people will go bankrupt under this government (here & here).
93. 250,000 Disabled People have been forced onto Unpaid Workfare with a 2% job success rate (evidence).
94. 2012 will forever be remembered as the year where Academy Bosses salaries accelerated to more than double the pay of the Prime Minister. There are now hundreds of Academy bosses raking in more than Government Ministers earn (evidence).
95. 2012 saw record high Clinical Negligence payouts totalling more than £1.2 billion. This is a £500 million increase than payouts under Labour. Each claim takes on average 1.3 years, so the 2012 payouts were for errors in 2010-11.
96. 25,000 businesses have already gone bust under this government (here).
97. 2 Trusts have been placed in administration with one judged ‘bankrupt’.  A Further Trust was told it was facing bankruptcy
98. 2 NHS Acute Secondary Hospitals are either a) privatised or b) the formal process of franchising has begun.
99. 11,000 Hospital Beds have been axed in 2 years. We now have the lowest number ofhospital beds in our NHS in living memory.
100. 10,000 students GCSE English Results were debated in a High Court as Michael Gove oversaw a belated altering of the grade boundaries that unduly punished some students by as much as 2 grades (evidence).

Twitter: @DrEoinCl | Website: The Green Benches

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