LABOUR’S RATES REVIVAL PLEA
MORE than 30 Labour council leaders want Theresa May to bring back the old rates system.
They say eight years of Conservative austerity has put them in financial straitjackets and destroyed services.
So they are urging the PM to
A week after the police visit, the trust declared Debbie, of Bounds Green, North London, medically fit and discharged her. But within a day she had a fall and scrap council tax and replace it with variable rates they can set.
Salford mayor Paul Dennett, who is leading the campaign, said: “We’ve got our backs to the wall. We have one of the most centralised systems for local government funding in the Western world.”
Cuts to local authority spending and council tax caps mean half of all authorities have had to make cuts. Eleven, nine under Tory control, are struggling. Northamptonshire has had to ban all new spending.
Twenty-four Labour council leaders and 11 in opposition have put their names to an open letter to the PM, published today, demanding the change.
Councils will have lost 77 per cent of their budgets by 2020, leaving a £5.8billion black hole, according to Local Government Association estimates. The answer, say the Labour leaders, is to go back to the system in place before Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous Poll Tax in 1990.
Rates gave councils the power to charge households based on the nominal rental value of their homes. Mr Dennett added: “The new system has never worked as well as the old and it’s time we went back to the drawing board to give councils the autonomy they once had.”