I read the other day that they’re going to have to increase it later this year. We’re already paying £160 a month where we live. The leader of our council is paid over £163,000 per year.
You get sick of being rinsed at every turn. How about they go after some of the serial tax avoiders instead. It does my head in that this is never even a consideration. It’s never even mentioned, let alone discussed and debated.
They will have to increase it pretty much every year, and probably the maximum until something changes.
The Tory's have underfunded councils for years - Stockton gets something like £100m a year less than it got in 2010, think what a council can do with 100m a year.
And it's not just reducing the funding - they added the adult & social care burden to councils, and when they set council budgets they build in an assumption that councils will max out the increase for social care in budgets so if councils don't increase council tax by that amount, they've got to fund it from elsewhere.
Then consider that inflation has been high, but even when it's 2-3%, if they increase by 5% that's only a 2% gain, but when inflation was 9%? It's going up but they're getting less spending power due to inflation, and their wage bill goes up as they're a big employer.
Posting executive wages is a red herring. These are large and complex businesses, you can't get someone in on 35k to run a council and be responsible for 300m spending. It's the same with charities, the responsibility and impact is huge, pay peanuts get monkeys. The 100k saving is swallowed up in 2 pothole repair schemes. It's much bigger than that. The good people would just leave and work for private firms with less responsibility and cash bonuses instead.
This is why we are seeing councils going bust or warning they are deleting reserves. And it's why places like Stockton are doing stuff like the globe and the Hilton, because once the costs are out of the way they should be annual income streams.
So don't be surprised when council tax goes up each year, because it will, it's been designed to and it's the perfect system because it deflected blame from the government itself and put not at the councils doorstep. Long gone are the days of 2% rises, and councils can rarely afford to do under 5% because they don't have the money to fund it. Anything above 5% requires a local referendum, and how will that go down? How many would vote for more council tax? Even if it's needed it would be rare. Yet everyone acts like councillors are rolling in it - they're treated worse than dogs online and get 7-10k depending on authority, plus expenses which no one dares claim due to scrutiny and the cost implication.