L’austérité?
In contrast to Scotland’s cashstrapped councils, a French village is so rich it’s been told to scrap taxes, notes Jane Bradley
As a resident of the Edinburgh council area, where we have had to sign up to start paying for garden waste collections for the first time this week, it was somewhat galling to hear about the lucky villagers of Le Perthus in the south of France.
In a somewhat unprecedented move (in a country where local taxation is standard, at least), the tiny connurbation near the Spanish border has been told that its residents should not pay council or property tax next year – simply because it is too rich.
The village, which has just 586 residents, benefits hugely from its location, which in days gone by, made it a convenient centre of contraband trading. Today, thousands of people park there every year to allow them to cross the border into Spain on foot to take advantage of cheaper priced goods – à la Calais “booze cruises” of the 1980s – generating a massive £700,000 annual revenue for the local council, which is nearly £1,200 per inhabitant. In total, the authority is sitting on more than £900,000.
Despite the enormous income, residents are due to pay more than £320,000 in council and property taxes this year, which the local prefecture could now cancel, if it follows the audit office’s advice. Sounds wonderful.
Of course, we all know about countries where income tax stands at zero – the so-called tax havens of the likes of United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and the Cayman Islands.
For most of us, however, the requirement to pay up is standard in some form, whether through property taxes or residential one like our council tax. Local taxes date back as far as the Roman times, when people who owned land were made to pay the “tributum soli” tax.
Just two years ago, it was revealed that some UK councils were sitting on millions of pounds of funds, yet simultaneously cutting essen-