Its consultation, which runs until 10 August, asks whether taxis and private hire vehicles should be regulated at airports in a similar way to those at railway stations.

Airports are not public places and are consequently not at present covered by normal taxi regulations.

The commission argues: “Airports are now mainstream transport hubs and market failures in airport settings are, if anything, more extreme than those at railway stations.

“Consumer transport options at airports for onward travel can be limited and some do not have rail links.

“Particularly vulnerable consumers, such as tourists, are a significant part of the customer base. This makes information deficits [about vehicle options] a particular problem.”

Another consultation question asks whether, where an airport has a concessionary agreement with a specific car provider, airports should “be obliged to allow a shuttle service for passengers who have prebooked with other providers, or to the closest taxi rank?”

Some airport owners enter into contracts with chosen taxi and private hire companies and so restrict access for all other providers, the commission noted, allowing other vehicles to park only some distance from the airport terminal.

Other proposals in the consultation paper would see local authorities lose their power to regulate the number of taxis that operate in their area.
At present, councils can do this based on their own assessment of whether there is ‘unmet need’.

The commission, an official body that reviews the operation of laws, suggests this power should go and that taxi numbers can be left to the market to decide.

It said: “If there is un-met need, we would expect new entrants to come into the market until the point at which needs were met. It is difficult to see a justification for determining demand on the basis of a survey and a subsequent bureaucratic decision, rather than a market mechanism.”

Ministers should set national safety standards for taxis and private hire vehicles, the commission also proposed.

In a procurement pledge for the local government sector, the Conservative-controlled LGA said: “Public procurement is highly regulated particularly by the European Union and over the years the European procurement rules have become more and more complicated.

“We need help from government to put the power of procurement back into the hands of local government.”

The LGA last month refused to sign the Cabinet Office’s procurement pledge, arguing that it was inappropriate for the local government sector because it was aimed at big business, rather than small and medium sized enterprises.

Council spend more than £62bn a year with private sector business, the LGA said

They must must both seek best value for money in their purchasing, and also use their procurement power to encourage local businesses, since they are responsible for promoting economic growth in their areas.

These objectives can conflict, for example where a national company offers a better deal than a local one, and the LGA pledge seeks to avoid this by making it easier for local businesses to bid effectively.

One notable feature is a call to councils to drop pre-qualification questionnaires for contracts worth less than £100,000, a move that would go some way addressing the long-standing objections of smaller businesses to the complexity and expense of public procurement processes.

Councils should also use “procurement processes that are less bureaucratic and burdensome”, build their procurement skills and engage with suppliers through market days, pre-procurement dialogue, and transparent feedback, the pledge said.

The pledge commits local authorities to:
• deliver value for public money
• drive local economic growth and regeneration
• provide inclusive services through a diverse supplier base
• greater collaboration and joint procurement by local authorities, to exploit economies of scale.

It has voiced concern that the pledge is aimed at benefiting big business and would do little to encourage procurement from small and medium sized enterprises.

The Cabinet Office issued the pledge on 26 April. which has been signed by all central government departments and their executive agencies, and by a number of business organisations including the British Chambers of Commerce, the Business Services Association and the Confederation of British Industry.

But the LGA, which represents local authorities, is unconvinced by this new approach.

Peter Fleming, who chairs its Improvement Board, said: “When it comes to stimulating productivity and growth what doesn’t work is to have our hands tied by central prescription, which is why the Improvement Board is not going to sign up to the Government’s ‘Procurement Pledge’.

“Ostensibly designed to stimulate economic growth, it fails to recognise the strength of councils’ current procurement practices.

“It would put the sector at a severe disadvantage and it would, in our view, do nothing to help us stimulate SMEs locally.”

The LGA objects in particular to the pledge’s call for public bodies to “publish pipelines of planned future procurements together with an indication of the likelihood of the procurement taking place to give potential providers greater confidence to invest for future business”.

It said: “There is no evidence that ‘pipelines’ work better for the goods and services local authorities buy, and the existing procurement portal and buyer events already provide suppliers with access to the market.

“Local authorities are better placed to engage with customer and suppliers early rather than [through] the bureaucracy of predicting spend in five years’ time for government returns.”

The pledge also calls for all but the most complex procurements to be completed within 120 working days.

“Nationally imposed targets have not proven not to work in the past,” an LGA paper stated. “Local authority effort is better used to achieve the best quality outcomes rather than focusing on targets.”

The LGA said it would develop its own procurement advice, which would emphasise ‘lean’ procumbent, earlier engagement with customers and support for local SMEs.

After lengthy planning, disputes with the local business community and struggles to gain Government approval, Nottingham City Council finally imposed a levy on parking spaces provided by the city’s employers for their staff.

All employers with 11 or more parking spaces will be liable for the levy which will be £288 per space per year. This is expected to raise £8 million in 2012/13, which the Council is legally required to devote to public transport.

The levy is scheduled to increase quite sharply – to £334 in 2013/14, £364 in 2014/15, £381 in 2015, and thereafter in line with inflation.

So far employers have registered 45,500 spaces, of which some 28,000 are chargeable.

Nottingham is the first council to introduce such charges despite local authorities having had the power for 12 years.

Everywhere else has faced such uproar from business and motoring lobbies that local politicians have backed down.

But Nottingham says it has no other way to finance three vital pieces of work-related local transport upgrades: an extension to its tram system, a major refurbishment of the main railway station and the Link bus network, all of which serve major employment areas.

The levy will raise part of the money needed, but the City Council also has another objective. Nottingham City Council believes that companies will create green staff transport plans which in turn will stem the growth of traffic congestion.

Most employers are expected to pass the levy cost on to their staff, a move which the council expects will encourage an increase in the use of feet, bicycles and public transport.

Jane Urquhart, the Council’s portfolio holder for transport and planning, says: “The workplace parking levy provides a vital funding stream. Without it we wouldn’t be having two more tram lines, or indeed the railway station redevelopment.

“Many of the major employers in the city are taking proactive steps to introduce parking management schemes. This is helping to slow the likely growth of road traffic congestion while raising money for further investment in our transport infrastructure.”

Public sector employers – including the council itself – are liable to the levy, with the exception of frontline NHS workers.

One such is the University of Nottingham, which did not previously charge for parking.

It will now charge users according to the emissions rating of their car, whether they are a student or staff, and additionally for the latter by pay grade.

This produces a complicated charging structure, ranging from a £44 a year for a student with a car that emits up to 120g of CO2 per kilometre, up to £490 for a senior staff member with gas guzzler emitting in excess of 200g CO2 per kilometre.

A University spokesman said it was “committed to improving transport for its staff, students and visitors and promoting more sustainable forms of transport”, with measures that include free inter-campus buses, bike hire and discounts at cycle stores.

Not everyone is happy. A spokesman for the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce, long an opponent of the levy, condemns it as “not a business friendly way to pay for transport infrastructure”.

Alliance Boots, one of the city’s largest employers, “continues to be opposed to the tax on car parking which affects around 7,500 colleagues,” according to a spokeswoman.

Boots will part-subsidise the levy, with staff paying between 30p and 70p a day, in proportion to their salary and working time.

A Council spokesman says it feels that businesses want things both ways – supporting the transport improvements but not the means to pay for them.

“Business continues to oppose it. It is not happy, and never has been, but it supports the transport improvements and can’t say how else the money would be raised,” he says.

“Some companies are passing the charge onto their employees who may therefore be thinking about walking, cycling or public transport.

“We don’t think it will solve congestion in Nottingham but the expectation is that some employers will use green travel plans or that employees will decide on other ways to travel.”

Workplace parking levies have crucially lacked a live UK example until now.

Nottingham taking the plunge may inspire other councils to try it.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said the NAO’s report showed the business case for HS1 had been based on “dodgy assumptions and bad planning”.

In a review for parliament on whether taxpayers received value for money from the project, the spending watchdog said they were in fact “exposed to an ongoing liability to support the project”.

It found that in 2011 there were 9.7m passenger journeys on Eurostar services and that since the service to St Pancras opened in 2007 passenger numbers had on average been one third of the level forecast by London & Continental Railways when it bid to build the new line in 1995.

Although the line was built on time and within budget – something the NAO noted “compared favourably” to the West Coast Main line upgrade – the low passenger numbers and consequently lower revenue left the Department for Transport to guarantee the project’s debt.

“The project demonstrates the impact that over-optimistic key assumptions at project initiation, in this case demand forecasts for international passengers, can have if the business case and financing are dependent upon them,” the NAO found.

“The cost to the taxpayer is higher than originally expected because the department is now responsible for servicing and repaying the project debt. We estimate that net taxpayer support may reach £10,200m.”

Auditors said that on this basis the high speed line was “not value for money”, but said that including other benefits, such as time savings for business travellers and regeneration around St Pancras “some of which are unmeasurable, we accept that such a clear conclusion is not possible”.

“The department, however, would need to demonstrate that these benefits are going to be at least £8,300m, to achieve the benefit-cost ratio of 1.5 to 1 estimated in 1998.”

While not explicitly referring to the impending start of work on the High Speed 2 line, the auditors warned that more robust forecasts were needed for future major rail projects.

The NAO said: “Departments should ensure that demand forecasts are subject to rigorous scrutiny and scepticism.”

Hodge, to whom the NAO reports, said: “I am yet to be convinced that HS1 will prove to be value for money.

“Yet again we hear that value for money will depend on uncertain benefits which have not been quantified. We will want the department to do all it can to realise the benefits and turn this sorry story round.”

She added: “Compared to the staggering mismanagement of the West Coast Mainline upgrade, the department did relatively well with the construction of HS1.

“But that is damning with very faint praise indeed. It’s a sad state of affairs when it comes as no surprise that HS1 was based on dodgy assumptions and bad planning.”

Chancellor George Osborne made clear in today’s Budget that the duty would rise as planned, to a maximum of £184 for flights in excess of 6,000 miles, other than in economy class, where the rate would be £92.

The cheapest rate, for flights of less than 2,000 miles in the lowest class of travel, will be £13 from 1 April. The new rates can be seen here.

Air passenger duty will also apply to business jets from April. The duty has been lower in Northern Ireland since last November because it faces competition on long haul flights from those originating in the Republic of Ireland. Control of APD will be now be fully devolved to the province.

In other measures, the Chancellor increased company car tax rates by one percentage point for cars emitting more than 75 grams per kilometre of carbon dioxide in 2014-15 and by two percentage points in the following two years, rising to a maximum of 37% in 2016-17. From April 2015, the tax exemption for zero carbon and ultra low carbon emission vehicles will end, and from April 2016, the reduced tax on diesel cars will go.

On rail, the Budget offered hope substantial improvements to services in northern England, with a £130m investment in the Northern Hub rail scheme.

This would improve transport links between Manchester and Sheffield, Rochdale, Halifax, Bradford, Bolton, Preston and Blackpool, and increase capacity on the Hope Valley line between Manchester and Sheffield, doubling the number of fast services.

Ministers will also consider whether Government support is needed to improve mobile phone reception on trains.

It said departments still pointed to a 1998 report that had found card transactions were on average £28 cheaper than other procurement methods.

That figure was “based on procurement processes that are no longer used. This outdated figure can no longer serve as the basis of a business case for using the card,” the report said, noting that research in the Ministry of Justice suggested the average saving was just £5.

The study also revealed that civil servants spent £132m on travel and accommodation through government procurement cards in 2010/11.

Parliament’s spending watchdog found that travel and accommodation was the largest single category of spending through the cards, though definitions of this varied between departments.

The report said use of the cards was generally good value for money but called for tighter controls to prevent waste and fraud.

There were 23,998 cards in circulation as of October 2011, and the NAO looked only at purchasing cards issued to an individual or team and virtual cards ‘lodged’ with one supplier for a particular category of spending.

Central government spent £322m through the cards in 2010/11 of which 41%, equivalent to £132m, was on travel and accommodation.

The Ministry of Defence was by far the largest users of the cards, accounting for 74% of all such transactions across Whitehall.

Departments set their own rules on who may use the cards and for what, and the NAO noted, “approaches are inconsistent and this is not entirely justified by business need”.

NAO head Amyas Morse said: “The taxpayer needs to have confidence that departmental staff are using [cards] appropriately.
“There is a risk of this confidence, and the reputation of departments, being undermined where there is inconsistency between departments in the controls on the use of the cards and a lack of central guidance.”

Some departments had large backlogs of unapproved transactions, while others had systems too weak to properly monitor the cards’ usage.

Cards were most often used for “low-value, high-volume transactions, such as travel, hotel accommodation and office supplies”, the report said.

This created a large number of transactions for departments to check for probity, but the auditors found wide variations.
Greatest scrutiny was in Department of Health, which required card transactions to be checked by three separate people.

By contrast, the MoD, despite its high number of transactions, and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills did not even require their first level approvers to review all transactions.

Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge said: “This report has uncovered evidence of unauthorised transactions and a culture of complacency in some departments.

“Given the risks of fraud and poor value for money, I am concerned that neither departments nor the Cabinet Office know enough about the use of procurement cards in government.”

The entire relocation of certain BBC departments to Salford has cost £189.3m, and within that sum the corporation set aside £19.9m for ‘migration’.

According to a BBC statement in response to PST’s Freedom of Information request, that sum covered the move of staff and departments from London to Salford (and a few already in Manchester that also moved into the complex) between May 2011 and April 2012.

“The BBC budgeted in advance to allow for an expected increased staff travel and hotels which were necessary during the dual running of departments between London and Salford,” the corporation stated.

“As departments complete their migration, the amount of travel between our new base at Media City UK and London will decrease and therefore we anticipate that travel and hotel costs will also drop.

“As BBC North is still in the process of moving to a fully operational base it is too early to estimate the cost of supporting guests and performers.”

However, the BBC anticipates that the establishment of the Salford operation will ultimately reduce its costs through a combination of greater operational efficiencies, more cost efficient buildings and improved ways of working.

It also points out that one of the objects of the move was to use established and new talent in northern England, and so it will decreasingly rely on transporting TV stars to and from London.

The latest available figures published by the BBC for its travel spend give an indication of the cost of BBC North only at its outset, as they cover the year to March 2011.

These show that in that period the operation spent £3m on hotels, £2.9m on flights, £1m on taxis, £476,000 on rail and £434,000 on hire cars.

To put that figure into perspective, in 2010/11 the BBC spent £19.6m on hotels for all its purposes, £15.5m on flights, £12.5m on taxis, £7.5m on rail and £4.9m on hire cars.

The relatively low spend on rail, compared with air, is explained in part by change in its expenses policy in December 2010 that is yet to show up in a full financial year.

This now stipulates that rail is now the default mode of travel for journeys in the UK and to Eurostar destinations, except where flying is cheaper or a train journey would be impractically long. The ‘rail first’ policy had previously applied only to England.

Opening the BBC North base in Salford has not changed the requirement for travel and accommodation be booked through the BBC’s appointed suppliers.

At present these are: coaches (Kings Ferry); lease vehicles and fleet management (Lex Autolease); hotels and conferences (Access Bookings), UK private hire transport (One Transport), rail (thetrainline.com); travel services (American Express Business Travel).

As BBC North develops on its 200-acre site, it should generate custom from BBC staff for nearby Manchester airport.

The departments that have moved to Salford are BBC Children’s, BBC Radio 5 live, parts of future media and technology, BBC Learning, BBC Sport and BBC Breakfast. It also houses a number of support services, including marketing, training and human resources.

The BBC’s travel and accommodation spending data over the next few years should reveal whether, in these respects at least, it has achieved its ambition of serving the north better while also saving money.

Consultation is in progress with staff at North Warwickshire Borough Council, but the Unison trade union has said it fears this is part of a trend for councils to seek economies by cutting these entitlements.

North Warwickshire has said it wants to change contracts so that no more staff car leases are authorised and all existing ones will end at latest by 30 April 2015, though car loans will be available to those with expired leases.

It also wants to make staff responsible for their own car insurance from 1 June this year, either through a council policy or by arranging their own insurance.

Essential user criteria are to be changed, though the council has not yet settled the details, and once that is done, “only staff meeting the new essential user criteria will be entitled to an essential car user allowance”, a council report stated.

There is also a proposal from June to change all mileage rates to the HMRC’s approved level of 45p. These at present vary from 36.9p to 50.5p for essential users and 46.9p to 60p for casual users.

The council report said the changes were intended to “reduce costs, due to pressure on the council’s budget”.

North Warwickshire has declined to comment further, though council leader Mick Stanley said in a BBC interview that the changes were expected to save some £254,000 a year.

It said that if staff did not agree the changes by 8 May “their contract be terminated with the appropriate contractual notice and re-engagement offered on [the] new terms”.

Unison regional organiser Sonia Burgher said there appeared to be emerging trend for councils to seek savings by reducing car entitlements, though the union had yet to quantify this.

“This seems to be going round the country as councils talk to each other,” she said.

“People are not happy. There are clearly members who have to have cars for their council business.”

She warned that Unison could take legal action against attempts by any council to reduce car entitlements without a reasonable transition period, based on a 2007 court case known as Wetherill versus Birmingham City Council.

Greater Manchester’s local authorities own MAG, with Manchester City Council holding a 55% share, while the other nine councils have 5% each. Manchester serves some 23m passengers each year.

The councils said they had undertaken a strategic review of MAG and would explore the possibility of buying another “quality airport” and also of bringing in “new equity investment as part of the deal”.

It said in a statement: “Both of these recommendations are interdependent and one will not happen without the other.”

No airport was identified for potential purchase by MAG, but operator BAA is selling Edinburgh after being told by the Completion Commission to dispose of either that airport or Glasgow.

The commission has also told BAA to sell Stansted, but it has lodged an appeal against that.

Private investment would make new governance arrangements necessary for MAG, which the statement said each council would consider in the coming weeks while possible investors were approached.

The statement said no further explanation would be given of revised governance or private investors until those processes were complete.