Home What's New Speeches & Articles Newsletter - Apr 2008 Biography Diary Contact Information Photo Album Parliamentary Highlights Publications Links MEPs' Transparency   Conservative Party Latest News from Conservatives.com Conservative Party Website
		No more Council Tax hikes! Leicester Mercury - September 12 2005 Prisoner number MX8993, 71-year-old Alfred Ridley of Towcester, a retired vicar, is languishing in Milton Keynes prison. His crime? Refusing to pay more than an inflation-rate increase on his council tax. Many pensioners will feel he deserves a medal, not a prison term. Millions of people have spent decades paying off their mortgages, and looking forward to an easier time when the payments finally end. But now they find that council tax is as big a burden as the mortgage used to be. Year after year, the tax rises outpace inflation and income, a burden for everyone, and most of all for pensioners. If we go on at this rate, council taxes could exceed average incomes by the end of the century. We have to get it under control. In some US states, notably Colorado, they’ve come up with a solution. It’s called the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, or TABOR. This says, quite simply, that state taxes may not increase by more than inflation (plus any increase in population). Instead of giving the state government a blank cheque, the voters have given it a fixed budget. This is simple common sense. Businesses and households have to live within limited spending budgets. Why shouldn’t the state government or the local council do the same? Councils will argue that they have to fund a torrent of statutory obligations imposed by Whitehall. But tax-payers are entitled to respond: “That’s your problem. You sort it out with government. But we’re not paying above-inflation increases”. Again, Councils will say that most of their funding is determined by Whitehall. Typically only a fraction comes from the local council tax, so small changes in government funding can lead to huge hikes in council taxes. And this Labour government prefers to favour urban areas and deprive the leafy suburbs and country towns. This is a genuine problem and one we need to address. Under the present system, the Town Hall blames national government and vice-versa. No one is sure where responsibility lies. There’s a simple solution. It happens that the total revenue raised nationally by VAT is about the same as the total Whitehall subvention to local authorities. Let’s have local councils, not central government, collect VAT (or better still, let’s simplify it and have a local sales tax). Then local councils become genuinely responsible, and accountable, for local revenue and spending, and tax-payers can insist on expenditure limits. I’m convinced of two things. First, we can’t afford to go on forever with inflation-busting council tax hikes. And second, Prisoner MX8993 deserves an OBE.