Leader – Mayor Pipe’s policy is Pickles’ dream
So, the worst is behind us. George Osborne’s cuts have bitten and the economy is on the up.
Well, not exactly.
When it comes to local government, the worst is unfortunately yet to come.
Hackney Council will next month set its budget for 2014-15. Cuts – and uproar from the Left – can be expected.
Our Labour-run council has protested at local government secretary Eric Pickles’ parsimony.
At last month’s full council meeting Councillor Philip Glanville said Pickles’ financial slimming regime had held up improvements to housing under the Decent Homes scheme – but the council’s actions are inconsistent with such tub-thumping.
Hackney’s political leader is, for example, implementing populist Tory tax policies – an odd state of affairs given our borough’s status as a safer-than-safe red rosette stronghold.
Council tax in Hackney is being frozen for the ninth consecutive year, and Mayor Jules Pipe’s continuing failure to raise it in line with inflation means it has fallen in real terms. Other Labour-run councils, and even some Conservative administrations, are proposing modest council tax rises to shore up services and mitigate the worst of the cuts.
It is rumoured that as many as three quarters of county councils and a third of other councils have indicated they plan to increase council tax in a show of frustration with the government’s seeming desire to eviscerate Town Halls.
Meanwhile, government cuts to means-tested benefit means some of the poorest households will now have to pay council tax (thousands of households in Hackney are currently exempt). Councils have the right to raise council tax by up to two per cent without holding a referendum, but Green-led Brighton Council has decided it needs to raise council tax even more and looks set to hold a referendum on a tax increase.
However, Mayor Pipe seems fixated on a rolling freeze on council tax. He evidently sees this policy as a vote-winner and a measure of his success.
The bottom line is this: those who can pay (i.e. everyone but the poorest) should pay, and local councils should be able to raise money for local services.
Will Hackney Council see sense and reconsider its peculiar stance?
Blimey, so that’s a 22.56% real terms cut in council tax compared to the rate in 2006 (or so this calculator tells me http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html). Is that right, or have I misunderstood? If so, that is a pretty hefty tax cut.
So if council tax had just remained constant in real terms, Hackney could have made a much larger dent in its massive housing waiting list – surely a very important ‘front-line service’.
Hackney Labour moan about the government-imposed cuts, but if they are going to cut council tax themselves, they are just as much to blame as the Coalition.
As I have been quoted it seems only fair to comment on this.
The cuts to the Decent Homes programme made by this Government have very little to do with the levels of Council Tax in the borough given the strict rules separating the Council’s General Fund budget (funded by Council Tax, Business Rates and Central Government Grant) and the Housing Revenue Account (funded by rents, service charges, land sales and grants like those for the Decent Homes programme). I am sure you were just making an illustrative point, but felt it was worth a correction.
Indeed even with a collapse in social housing funding from this Government, Hackney’s Labour Council has embarked on one the largest Council homes building programmes in London that will deliver over 1,200 Council social rented and shared ownership homes for local people.
Alongside this we are making good our promise to Hackney Homes residents and back filling this cut in Government funding, and completing the Decent Homes programme and commiting to a further multi-million pound investment programmes in homes not included in the original programme.
Hackney have also brought down severe overcrowding from 1,214 families in 2004 to 222 families by the end of August 13 – by working with our social housing partners, before we were allowed to build our own homes, to develop over 4,700 new affordable homes since 2002.
This has all been whilst freezing Council Tax. Yes, we would want to do more, but it is the Government’s borrowing rules preventing us investing even more in building new homes, not a freeze that has seen improved services and static bills for hard press residents.
I suppose I should also add that any Council Tax rise would also raise bills for those who previously didn’t pay Council Tax because of the Government cuts to Council Tax benefit.
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In addition to housing (where as of the beginning of 2013 a third of council housing in Hackney still failed to meet Decent Homes minimum standards), other areas of under-performance in Hackney that could have been alleviated by council tax increases include:
– Adult social care services
– Library opening times
– Recycling (5th worst in London)
– Sports provision on Hackney Marshes
– Processing of planning applications (Hackney is ‘worst performing’)
– Grants to voluntary sector organisations
– FOI response rates/times