Wednesday 4 February 2009

The Wages of Spin

Richard Willis has picked up a report published by the unofficial Conservative pressure group the Tax-Payers Alliance stating that the number of Council workers earning high wages has increased unjustifiably in recent years.

The claim is that Reading currently has 139 employees earning over £50,000pa and 52 on more than £60,000pa - and that this is the cause of recent large Council Tax rises.

However questions of partiality and bias hang over the paper; without providing information on the number of workers who earned just less than the threshold in 2006 it is made impossible to judge whether the increase is a result of excessive wage inflation or if it has been caused by a huge influx of new middle managers.

Reading Chronicle reports Conservative MP Rob Wilson arguing recent rises in Council Tax are not being spent on frontline services, as Labour claims.

And yet when council tax rises have been lower in Reading's Labour-dominated council than in local boroughs run by Conservatives they have faced criticism of "selling off the family silver" in order to do so.

Oranjepan asks:
why is it that according to Conservatives our council taxes are in all cases both too high and too low - except where they are being set by Conservatives?

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Here is a list of Council Tax rises for most Berkshire local authorities in the past two years.

Reading - 3.5% (07/08), 1.9% (08/09)
Bracknell Forest - 4.94% (07/08), -(08/09)
Slough - 4.99% (07/08), 4.85% (08/09)
West Berks - 2.9% (07/08), 3.9% (08/09)
Wokingham - 3.24% (07/08), 4.94% (08/09)
Windsor & Maidenhead - 3.8% (07/08), 2.3% (08/09)

[07/08]
[08/09: Reading; Slough; West Berkshire; Wokingham; Windsor & Maidenhead]

Windsor & Maidenhead have announced that in the year ahead (09/10) Council Tax there will rise by an average of 2.9%. They are the first local authority in Berkshire to publish figures.

NB. Rises are capped at 5% by central government. The headline figure is generally calculated as the rise of tax on Band D properties. Council income from Council Tax amounts to about 1/4 of the total (Berkshire borough councils each budget on incomes around the £100m mark).

I would be grateful if any reader could provide the comparable figure for Bracknell Forest in 2008/09 to complete the list.

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Click here for a full comparison of Council Tax rises in the different local authorities across Berkshire.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous5 February 2009 at 11:00

    Reason being is that Conservative held councils receive less funding from the Government... duh!

    Party politics influences everything... just as big capital schemes such as new hospitals, schools etc., tend to be built in marginal Labour constituencies, or Labour heartlands.

    Your journalism is just as bad as the Evening Post's!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oranjepan5 February 2009 at 11:31

    Thanks for the comment, Alex.

    Firstly, it's a bit of a sweeping statement to say Conservative-run councils receive 'less' in their central grants, whether in real or relative terms. Conservative-run councils also happen to be in areas where less deprivation exists, so there is generally less need for spending on essential services.

    However I was making a slightly different point, namely that the Conservative case being built around this subject could carry more weight if it was able to show more detail. As it is their argument for lower council tax rises across the board does not address the full range of problems, even though it strikes a populist note.

    ReplyDelete

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