Bower's Blueprint #1 - Keep Down Council Tax

This is the first of a series of posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

Keeping down council tax
Council tax has more than doubled since 1997 when Labour came into power.

More and more obligations have been passed on to local authorities, without adequate funding (such as the 'fully-funded' concessionary bus fares scheme that is now costing city taxpayers £1.5m per year).

We also have whole areas of activity that never used to happen - or not to the same extent. 'Partnership working' between authorities and quangos is now a massively bureaucratic activity, consuming vast amounts of senior management time. The whole process is given fancy names like Comprehensive Area Assessment and Local Area Agreements, but the result is less accountability for individual authorities and greater emphasis on meeting government targets. Costs are vast and unquantifiable, benefits are almost non-existent.

Whole new areas have opened up, like community engagement as a separate exercise, rather than just an intrinsic part of what the Council does (witness the city council's area committee's costing over £100 per member of the public who attends). And the climate change agenda pursued by councils could be seen as more about feeling good and being seen to be concerned, than tackling the real issues of climate change and energy security (like how we make the major technological changes required to the production, distribution and use of energy to avoid dependence on fossil fuels at a national or international level).

Councils are governed by targets - with councils monitoring hundreds of targets, many of which are only to help meet the latest eye-catching government initiative, so that more ring-fenced cash can be 'won' as local councils become ever more like branch offices of Whitehall.

As if this wasn't bad enough, many local people are now losing their jobs (we are coming across people on the doorstep whose main concern now is how they are going to pay the mortgage). The last thing they needed was the 4.5% council tax rise from Cambridge City Council. The county council responded to economic concerns by making savings and reducing the planned council tax rise to below 4% but we need to go further. The Conservatives have promised that if councils can keep rises to 2.5%, the government will match this from cuts in central advertising and keep council tax rises to zero. Keeping council tax rises below 2.5% should be the minimum we aim for.

Enough is enough! It is time for local councils to say we do NOT need to waste our money on armies of bureaucrats ticking boxes for a dying government’s targets.

Our Councils need to focus on basic provision of services, like social services and direct funding of schools. We desperately need more money going into potholes and highways maintenance.

This can be achieved by acting now to reduce resources spent monitoring and meeting hundreds of government targets, that no-one wants and no-one needs, and ruthlessly finding real efficiency savings. Councils like Conservative-run Hammersmith and Fulham have proved this is possible - they have just cut council tax again.

Labour just doesn't get it. Britain cannot afford the size of the state that Labour has created. Difficult decisions need to be made both nationally and locally, to balance the books - this is the only way to get us out of the terrible economic mess that Gordon Brown's boom and bust has created.

Labour's candidate in Coleridge is also Labour's parliamentary candidate in South Cambridgeshire - his job is to support Gordon Brown and his approach to government: carry on spending regardless of the economic consequences. This is the last thing taxpayers need from the county council.