Council finds money to fight expenses tax ruling

Perhaps we ought not to be terribly surprised that while Kent County Council pleads impoverishment in many areas, there are always things it can find money for. When it came to the issue of whether members ought to pay tax on their travel allowances from home to County Hall, the authority saw fit to pay independent tax advisers more than £5,000 to see if they could contest the ruling by HMRC.

In the context of County Hall’s £1.6 billion annual budget, £5,000 might not seem much, but it does indicate a rather strange sense of priorities.

We do not know whether the council thought the bill would never see the light of day. Thanks to Freedom of Information legislation, it has.

What is equally strange is that the county council pays the same financial advisers a £3,000 yearly retainer for “other” tax advice.

Strange because Kent County Council has its own well regarded finance team who generally know all there is to know about the murky world of local government finance.

Maybe it was asked for advice but gave an answer the politicians did not like.

It is rare for the UKIP leader Nigel Farage to withhold from ventilating his views about any subject.

But he is uncharacterisically coy about the prospects of contesting a Kent seat at the next general election, saying that he hasn’t made up his mind and to do so would distract from the party’s European election campaign.

One factor that might influence him is his love of sea fishing. Kent has a number of coastal constituencies that may appeal. As a regular visitor to Dungeness with his rods, perhaps Folkestone and Hythe will take his fancy.

Rumours swirl that companies with an interest in shale gas are circling the county and are poised to pounce with a plethora of applications for exploratory drilling licences.

Kent County Council is clearly a bag of nerves over the prospect – as the relevant “minerals authority”, it will have the tricky job of deciding whether to give the go-ahead to any that come its way.

Three exploratory licence applications are on planners’ desks, but we are firmly told that none are related to fracking for shale gas.

But as the applications have yet to be “validated”, the authority says it cannot tell us what they are for.

Maybe there’s gold in them hills…