The one single issue above all others that really gets under the skin of almost every one of our residents is council tax. That’s perfectly understandable given the iniquity of a system that punishes the poor at the expense of the rich, and essentially forces council tax bills to go up every year without any visible improvement in local services in return.
That contempt hardens when people come to realise that the council tax regime is a scam. It’s nothing more than a racket designed over 30 years ago by Thatcher’s reactionary Tory government hell-bent on putting greed before need and syphoning public money out of working class areas and into the pockets of the wealthy. And it’s been sustained by successive governments ever since. This is largely because none of them can hold their nerve long enough to review property values from their 1991 benchmark prices, and partly because the council tax regime always benefits the Tory vote share in the leafy Home Counties and suburbs of southern England.
The penny-pinching way the government funds our local councils and services each year simply entrenches those inequalities.
Let’s use an example to illustrate how the council tax scam actually works, and how it’s used to rig the system to favour wealth and prosperity in Tory areas at the expense of communities and local services in working class towns and villages:
In simplified terms, when the government carries out its annual assessment of local needs in a council area it might estimate that a particular council requires say £100m to deliver its services for the coming year. However, rather than fund the council properly by handing over the full £100m needed, the government will award it just £40m instead and tell the council that if it needs the extra money it’ll have to cover the gap at local expense by either ramping up fees and charges, slashing services or putting up council tax - or a combination of all three.
But there’s an additional factor that reinforces the unfairness and iniquity of the council tax regime in places like County Durham. By far the biggest pressure on local council budgets in our area comes from adult and children’s social care costs. So when the government slashes essential funding it’s much more harmful in areas like County Durham where more than a decade of damaging austerity and persistently high levels of deprivation, combined with health needs linked to the county’s industrial legacy, disproportionately ramps up health and social care costs.
Compare that scenario in County Durham with somewhere like Surrey where health needs are comparatively low, or Westminster where their local authority can raise sufficient revenue from visitor and tourist parking charges alone to keep their council tax bills to an absolute minimum.
A comparison of the examples above gives us a real insight into how council tax works, and how it’s been manipulated over the years by successive Tory governments to shore up their vote in healthier and wealthier areas, at the expense of our own here in County Durham and across the rest of the North East of England.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Along with Labour colleagues in county hall I’ve campaigned to scrap council tax altogether and replace it with a Proportional Property Tax - a system that would lift a significant number of our residents here in County Durham out of the local taxation system altogether, leaving them free to spend their own money as they wish and at the same time giving our local economy a much needed boost. Background details can be found here: https://robcrute-blackhall.blogspot.com/2023/01/durhams-tory-led-coalition-turns-its.html
Unfortunately for us though Tories much prefer the council tax regime to an alternative system that would help our own here in County Durham. They would rather see prosperous areas in their Tory heartlands prosper at our expense, as long as it helps to distort the local and national vote in their favour. After all, the iniquities of the council tax system have helped to deliver and sustain successive Tory governments in office for most of the last 40 years.
As if to prove the point, every councillor in the Tory-led coalition* currently controlling Durham County Council voted last month to increase our council tax bills by a record high of 5%, even though they knew full well that ordinary working people and hard-pressed households across County Durham were struggling through the worst cost of living crisis in a generation that’s seen inflation and energy prices soar while wages are pegged back: https://robcrute-blackhall.blogspot.com/2023/02/tory-led-coalition-hits-residents-with.html
Until someone in government listens we’ll continue our campaign to replace the hated council tax regime with a fairer Proportional Property Tax system, but in the meantime we should demand as a minimum that any incoming government freezes council tax levels immediately and replaces the lost revenue with the proceeds of a windfall tax levied on profit-rich energy companies.
However, this isn’t the perfect solution to the council tax con. We need to consign council tax to the dustbin of history for good if ordinary people and hard-pressed households are to get a much needed break from the persistent hardships of the last 12 years of punishing Tory rule. But at least it’s an acknowledgement that the current system is broken - and at long last it’s a step in the right direction.
*The coalition at Durham County Council is led by the Tory Party and is made up of an overwhelming number of so-called 'Independent’ councillors, alongside every Lib Dem, Green and North East Party councillor. Each and every one of them voted in February to raise your council tax by a record 5%.
