Your taxes spent on putting local companies out of business
Posted by wonkotsane on October 21, 2006
Advantage West Midlands (AWM) is spending taxpayers money funding an IT venture at Wolverhampton University to provide websites and other IT solutions to small to medium enterprises (SME’s).
The service – IT Futures – is deliberately pitched to compete against the smallest and most vulnerable IT companies in the West Midlands, offering IT work at a subsidised cost with 5 days free consultancy and free equipment loans.
The AWM logo at the bottom of the IT Futures website claims that they are “the regional leader for developing economic prosperity”. How does using taxpayers money to put small companies out of business develop economic prosperity? By engineering the market so that only big multinationals can afford to operate in the area? The money these large corporations make doesn’t stay in the area – they pay peanuts and their profits usually go straight out of the country to a foreign-owned parent company.
West Midlands NO! 
Wonko's World said
[…] The loan would be paid through increases in our council tax bills but the people of Telford & Wrekin haven’t even been consulted – the decision has been made (without even talking to the hospital, I might add) and announced in the local press. This is exactly how the decision was made to subsume Telford into the Birmingham, Black Country and Coventry City Region and to hand over much of the council’s executive functions to a private company jointly owned by the council, Advantage West Midlands and local businesses. […]