How can councils possibly justify another tax rise?
COUNCIL tax is set to rocket across the country and yet we seem to be getting fewer and fewer services for it. Refuse collection is becoming a rare sight as councils go for fortnightly or longer gaps between collections. They say they are doing it because recycling saves money so they can avoid being fined by the EU but this is a totally artificial cost which will be swept away with Brexit.
Constantly putting out mixed messages, councils say they have little money for social care and yet they spend millions on unwanted park-andride schemes and gold-plated pensions for their armies of bureaucrats.
For years councils had to keep any increase to two per cent or they had to have a referendum on the rise. Now we’re all being alerted that councils want an inflation-busting six per cent increase. The only problem is that while our councils are asking for more and more money we really seem to be getting less back from them.
When it comes to garbage I may as well buy myself a hi-vis jacket as I find myself making increasing visits to our local refuse centre to get rid of rubbish that I can no longer dispose of with a weekly council collection.
We recycle as best we can but a family with a school-age child does occasionally produce more rubbish than our council is willing to pick up. It is no wonder that fly-tipping is going up across the nation, a very unwelcome side effect of councils picking up less rubbish.
OUR local police station has disappeared too and I rarely see policemen patrolling our streets. As a result crime is up across the city and senior policemen say they are no longer prosecuting what they consider minor crimes such as shoplifting. Our shops now have to employ private security firms to look after them and their customers.
Where does our already high council tax go? Certainly with an ageing population we do face a crisis in social care which someone has to pay for but I’d feel a lot more convinced by this argument for more money if councils weren’t wasting so much of it. More than 2,000 council staff are paid over £100,000 a year and this figure is going up every year.
Your council probably has at least 10 managers pulling in over six figures with chief executives frequently pocketing more than £200,000. And that’s without thinking about their enormously comfortable pensions.
Then come the supposedly important council infrastructure projects that swallow up millions. Our council has an obsession with building parkand-ride schemes despite many of them not exactly being overused. Not long ago they wanted to build one in pristine countryside. This provoked two years of protest by campaigners who eventually saw off the threat to their landscape.
The cost to the council – and taxpayers – of working towards this scheme was £3.3million and after all that expenditure it was rejected. Millions of public money spent without a single blade of grass being touched.
And now our council wants to carry on with more parkand-rides but somewhere less contentious.
To be honest I’ve never seen people marching in the streets with banners demanding our local authorities spend money on these frequently empty slabs of tarmac.
Twenty-mile-per-hour zones have sprung up across our city at a cost of £871,000 and yet the latest figures show that serious traffic accidents have actually gone up in these areas. It would now cost a similar figure to remove these zones and make our streets safer so they are keeping them.
Similarly bus and cycle lanes costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to instal are now causing higher levels of congestion which lead to greater pollution which then needs more council expenditure to meet central government demands for cleaner air. It never ends and the bill for all this wrongheaded nonsense ends on your doormat.
The great curse of much of this waste is local government departmental ring-fencing. Councils may make millions out of charging motorists for parking but then say they can only spend this on transport related projects. So we see millions wasted on pointless infrastructure when there are so many more important services they should be supporting.
Not only is our council tax projected to go up but also the fees councils charge for basic services such as burials, parking permits and garden waste collection. Frequently muchappreciated services such as libraries and public toilets are cut back or lost.
THE rising cost of social care is such a major national issue that this should be dealt with by central government and it should not shift the blame for this rise in costs to local government.
That is a political decision to keep general tax down but council tax up so local councillors take the electoral heat rather than MPs.
But local government must play its part by spending less money on projects we don’t want, cutting back its administrative expenses and getting better value for its essential services.
Otherwise I am going to demand a rebate on my council tax bill as I don a hi-vis vest, buy a van and take my own and my neighbours’ rubbish to the dump, cutting out the costly middle man.
‘Millions are spent on pointless projects’