Valuation bands are too high across the country but in particular the council tax that homeowners over the age of [say] 60-65 are required to find is a disgrace and impoverishes them to the point of destitution.
In the very near future [a couple of years or more now] there will be a large number of this age group wanting to move/downsize and live in a semblence of respectful retirement however the regular bills they will face paying will provide such a stressful existence many will just die,frightened,scared and poor.
Whoever forms the next government has to get a grip on this and bring revolutionary thinking to this massive and real problem.I would be very interested to know what David C has to say on this and his ability to deal with it from a moral and humane viewpoint.

Excellent idea, on one condition: only council tax payers get to vote.

(That is to say, nobody whose tax is paid for them by the Social)

Something else to consider is that Central Government will normally require more statutory duties to be performed for less money each year.

Is it because most local Councillors are Conservative that you are trying to hide the fact that they are not capable of actually running the organisations they are so keen to grab power in?

Thanks Alan

If you don’t do as we say, we will withold our Funding from you.

The Council will then need to go to the electorate with a far higher increase in Council tax to raise more revenue to cover the Governments share/grant which is being witheld, and thus become unpopular and get voted out.

In any other situation this would be blackmail.

In addition if the Council were to raise its own funds by increasing Council tax above the suggested Governments limit, it would get Find by the Government.

They call it Democracy, you probably have a better word for it.

Which will be futile unless you restrict the right to vote in the referendum to those who actually pay the council tax.

Why would anybody invest in shares, the profits on which are heavily taxed and then pay CGT when he sells if he can make tax free capital gains through home-ownership? Well, the answer is they don’t, which is why we have house price bubbles and chronic under-saving and under-investment in the UK.

Robert, if three adults share a house and next door one adult lives alone, do the three adults ‘use’ three times as much streetlighting? Does their bin need to be emptied three times a week? Don’t they pay three times as much income tax and VAT as the single person?

Remember always that council tax only covers about a quarter of council spending, the bulk is out of redistributed income tax etc. If we have, allegedly a housing shortgage in this country and apparently no new houses may be built, then isn’t it better if people use available houses more efficiently?

It seems typical of today’s council that I, a small business owner, get a mailing with business tips from the commercial branch of Wealden District Council.

Now I didn’t canvass their opinion when I started here, nor when I expanded, or even when I bought the company.

Why do they think I need this guff – especially when Business Link do exactly the same, for free, or I can join one (or all) of the many business clubs locally.

Councils – and many other public bodies – need to rein in and remember what their core purpose is, excel at that first then maybe look at expanding.

As I also live within the council’s border I know they can improve in so many areas, but does anything look like changing?

* * *

If you want to get the building industry moving then reduce VAT and at the same time kill off the cash (black economy) cowboys who do not pay tax.

I personally think it is far better to pay for the VALUE of what you get than to be forced to pay towards the COST of what they decide to do with your money.

If the council does a bad job, house prices go down, taxes go down and vice versa. So the level of the tax in each area is dictated by how much people are prepared to pay for houses in that area, part of which relates to bricks and mortar but a large part to factors under the control of the council e.g. quality of local schools, crime levels, how clean and well lit the streets are, and so on.

In my opinion there are way too many non-elected officers and staff and a huge proportion of them get paid too much, some Way WAY too much.

I’d like to see a massive cull of the numbers and the wage levels. I’d like to see them run like a private company would run its business, being tough on endless ’sick days’ and getting ridiculously overgenerous holidays and other forms of benefit. Then I’d like to see the elected councillors able to hold them to account immediately, without hassle and without the impossible morass of legislation.

If they aren’t doing the job as requested… warn them… then sack them if they don’t improve. No massive ’severance’ pay, just the standard minimum redundancy benefit. And if the law doesn’t allow this sort of dismissal for poor performance then change it so it does. If a council can’t control its officers and does not have the respect of its officers, its not going to be able to achieve squat. As far as I’ve seen, most officers have no respect (at best), or at worst are actually adversial with their elected ‘bosses’ (I use the term lightly.)

Other large unfunded schemes are teachers, NHS, police, fire, and armed services, so it’s not really accurate to say that the civil service scheme is ‘the large unfunded one’ – it’s one of several large unfunded ones.

So, councils must be forced to canvas and ACT ON council tax payers’ views on what’s core; keep this; and what’s peripheral – stop doing it now.

It simply won’t work to expect unaccountable vested interests to make decisions in the best interest of council tax payers – turkeys don’t vote for Christmas!

This government has employed an additional three quarters of a million additional civil servants – breathtaking public sector inefficiency is rife.

An interesting piece.

However, there is one issue that you haven’t mentioned. In recent years, one of the main reasons for Council Tax increases is the rising cost of local government employees’ final salary pensions.

Local Government pensions differ from almost all other public sector pensions in that they are backed by an investment fund, i.e. they are funded. Because the projected cost of LG pensions has been increasing so fast, we have had to pay much more Council Tax in recent years in order to top up the funds so that they can meet future liabilities (whereas with the rest of the public sector the full horror of the cost won’t be felt for decades).

Now we have a situation where not only is the cost of LG pensions rising fast, but the the value of stock market investments, on which the funds rely, is falling through the floor. This means that local government will be forced by the auditors to contribute much more still over the next few years to top up the funds. This can only come from Council Tax payers since the central government sure isn’t going to give them more.

Would I be right to expect even larger council tax increases in the next few years for this reason alone?

reply: yes, quite right. Pensions escalation is one of the further reasons we need them to employ fewer people.
Otehr public sector schemes like MPs are also funded.The civil service one is the large unfunded one.