Town hall are banning staff from facebook!

A council has banned its staff from using Facebook after they spent up to 572 hours a month looking at the website instead of working.

Portsmouth City Council blocked access to the social networking site for its 4,500 staff with computers after finding they were logging on up to 270,000 times a month between them.

During the past year its employees have spent an average of 413 hours a month on the popular site - which has four million users in Britain - while at work.

The usage peaked in July this year at 572 hours and 38 minutes, the equivalent of 71 working days.

The council says staff can apply to have the site unblocked if they can prove they need it for their job - such as benefit fraud staff carrying out checks on claimants' lifestyles to make sure their status is what they say it is.

Before the ban, staff were allowed to use Facebook and other sites such as Twitter or MySpace, but only in their lunch breaks or after work.

Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: 'Even if everybody spends even a small amount of time on the site it is still paid for by the taxpayer.

'It is a huge amount of work time, and therefore money, being wasted.'

Private firms started to ban Facebook in 2007 when the site became increasingly popular across the country.

A survey found the problem was particularly bad in London, where two thirds of leading companies had imposed bans or limited the use of such websites.

Some even treat excessive use as a sackable offence.

Alistair Darling promises to carry on spending through recession

The Chancellor said in a newspaper article that £5 billion has already been spent on helping people “off the dole". He promises that he will “consider further measures” before his autumn pre-budget report.

At the start of a crucial political month which will see the last party conferences before the General Election, Mr Darling attempted to paint Labour as the saviours of the British economy in the face of Tory opposition.

He said: “I am determined the recovery will be sustainable and lasting, that no one should be consigned to the scrapheap, like so many were in the 1980s and 1990s. The Tories were wrong then, just as they are wrong now.

“David Cameron and George Osborne appear to wallow in the prospect of swingeing cuts, unwilling to spell out their economic and social consequences.”

But while the Tory leader has admitted cuts will have to be made to address the record national debt built up by Labour, neither Mr Darling or Gordon Brown has said where Labour cuts will fall beyond piecemeal “efficiency savings".

A Cabinet split has developed about how honest Labour should be in terms of admitting how tight public finances will be squeezed after the next election with Mr Darling at odds with the Prime Minister over the issue.

A YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph found that more people trusted the Conservatives to run the economy than Labour.

Mr Brown will this week focus attention on the economy as he begins work back at Number 10 after his summer break. Youth unemployment has been highlighted as the key area of focus.

On Friday G20 finance ministers will meet in London to try and agree measures to accelerate the economic recovery.

Brown calls for a cap on bankers bonuses

Gordon Brown has turned up the heat on bankers by calling for an international debate on a possible cap on bonuses in the financial sector.

Mr Brown said that the countries attending the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh this month would debate whether "bonuses are, in general, too high a proportion of company revenues and profits".

"There’s a case for looking at some agreement about what would be a justifiable percentage," the Prime Minister added, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Mr Brown expressed frustration that the international community has not moved as quickly as the UK to reform the financial system.

He said that one of the main issues on the agenda at the G20 would be to create a new framework for remuneration and other issues relating to risk which would drastically reduce bankers' ability to create another dangerously unsustainable bubble.

"I think you’ve got to be absolutely clear that remuneration has got to be based on long-term success, not short-term speculative deals, that there’s got to be a claw back system.”

Mr Brown added: “We’ve also got to look at whether the capital requirements of individual institutions would have to be increased in situations where the regulator thought that risk was higher.

"These are principles that I think we can more or less agree and they came out of London in April. But they have not yet been implemented in the running of the institutions and they’ve got to be implemented as quickly as possible."

Bankers’ pay is also expected to be high on the agenda of this week’s Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in London, hosted by Chancellor Alistair Darling.

Meanwhile in the US, Mary Schapiro, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, warned chief executives at brokerages that offering up-front recruitment bonuses may lead them to mis-sell products to customers.

Ms Schapiro told brokers in an open letter that they should not offer compensation arrangements that may encourage brokers "to believe they must sell securities at a sufficiently high level to justify special arrangements".

"Those pressures may in turn create incentives to engage in conduct that may violate obligations to investors," she said.

Mr Brown said he hoped that G20 leaders meeting in Pittsburgh this month would agree a “global compact for growth” that would include co-ordinated steps to withdraw stimulus packages and government support for banks; a deal on “trigger points” where countries would be expected to act to address global imbalances such as excessive current account deficits and surpluses; and an agreement on climate change.

While Mr Brown raised the possibility of a cap on pay based on a percentage of profits, he did not endorse the France-led push for a mandatory cap on bankers' pay.

He also did not back comments by Lord Turner, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, that the financial sector was “bloated” and needed to be cut down to size.

Millions of student loans have their interest rates cut to zero or less

Millions of students and graduates will see the cost of their loans drop to zero or lower tomorrow, after falls in the retail price index this year.

While the majority of students – those who took out loans after 1998 – will see the interest on their loans set at 0%, a smaller number who took out loans before 1998 will have an interest rate set at -0.4%, so even if they pay nothing towards their loans, the value will have dropped by the end of the 2009-10 academic year.

The interest rate charged from 1 September each year on the 3.26m "income contingent" student loans taken out since 1998 is based on the lower of the retail price index in the previous March or the Bank of England base rate plus 1%. Until now, the interest has always been set at RPI, which would have meant a rate of -0.4%, but this year the government has used an option not to set an interest rate at all, in effect making the rate 0%.

A spokeswoman for the Student Loans Company said: "The decision has been taken because loans are already well subsidised and it would be difficult to justify to taxpayers a situation whereby students take out loans in 2009-10 and their balances are immediately reduced. This will affect those who have an outstanding student loan taken out after September 1998, as well as applicants for both maintenance loans and tuition fee loans in the current and next academic year."

However, loans taken out before 1998 are repaid through a fixed term mortgage-style scheme, and interest is linked solely to the RPI. This means the 390,000 still paying off loans pre-dating 1998 will benefit from an interest rate of -0.4%.

Repayments are treated differently for the two schemes. The repayment threshold for income contingent loans (1998 onwards) is £15,000, and borrowers repay 9% of their earnings above that figure.

The Student Loans Company says that if the government had set a negative interest rate this year, the threshold would have reduced and borrowers would have started repaying earlier and paying more.

But students who took out their loans before 1998 do not have to start repaying until they are earning £25,936..

The drop in interest will be welcomed by many students, but Aaron Porter, the National Union of Students' vice president for higher education, said: "Whilst this is the best deal we could have expected … graduates entering the toughest employment market for decades will doubtless feel a huge sense of injustice in comparison to their pre-98 counterparts.

"This whole mess underlines the need for a complete rethink on student funding. The constant tinkering by government with grants and loans … needs scrapping in favour of a simple, single student support scheme everyone can understand."