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Hollow words from Osborne as millions face massive council tax rise

October 8, 2012 5:17 pm

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As night follows day, so the Tories have used the opening weekend of their annual conference, to once again announce a bribe to councils if they ‘freeze’ council tax next April.

The bribe is nothing more than a political sleight of hand. It’s actually a cut veiled in a handout. Let me explain. Since the first year, the payments have been one offs. This means the amount doesn’t end up in your budget base for future years. So you can’t use the money for recurring spend – like ensuring bins are emptied.

So as inflation makes paying for the services we provide more expensive, if the money isn’t in the base for future years, this bribe is actually a cut to our budget for services in future years. This is now the third time the Government has done this.

But this year there is worse to come than this thinly veiled cut to councils.

Because next spring, what Osborne hasn’t told you, is that millions of people will have a massive rise in their council tax bill. Every single one of them will be among the lowest paid and poorest in our communities. Many of them will be paying the tax for the first time.

Only the better off will benefit from Osborne’s freeze.

In April 2013 councils become responsible for council tax benefit. But the money to pay the benefit is being subject to a 10% cut before it is passed on to local authorities. And the majority of local authorities will have little option but to pass it on to their residents. So people in receipt of the benefit – the thing that Tories under Thatcher said set the tax apart from the poll tax – will face a massive hike in council tax. Many will be paying the tax for the first time.

Council tax is an in work benefit. So many people who struggling in the lowest paid work will face a further pressure on their household bills. If you have a look at Camden’s consultation  you’ll see some examples in the background document based on real Camden cases. Normal people, just trying to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

We haven’t decided which scheme to go for yet but far from a freeze many of Camden’s lowest paid and least well off will face a massive rise in Council Tax while the Tories shout freeze.

Sarah Hayward is the leader of Camden Council

Related posts:

  1. Why we’re raising council tax
  2. The New Poll Tax – Millions will pay more while Millionaires pay less
  3. June 2010: Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Osborne face massive backlash on emergency budget
  4. Council reserves aren’t a secret stash
  5. The council tax conundrum
  • Serbitar

    George Osborne claims that he doesn’t believe in “divide and rule” or “demonising” anyone for political gain. He then immediately contradicts himself entirely putting both of these underhand techniques into play via some shameless black propaganda in which he spuriously contrasts the life of a hard-working shift worker with imaginary benefit-claimant neighbours who slumber comfortably behind closed curtains while he rises early to go to his job.  

    Plausible?

    To morons, yes, but not to you I’m sure.

    I’m sure you are intelligent enough to have spotted Osborne’s political sleight of hand.

    Because Osborne intends to slash the welfare budget, come what may, but doesn’t want to look too much the villain when doing so he seeks to divide one group of citizens (employed) against another (unemployed) by demonising the latter group via the scurrilous insinuation that all members of said group make a “lifestyle choice” to enjoy a secure leisurely existence funded from taxes paid reluctantly by the former “hard working” group who “do the right thing”. Osborne’s first deceit is to imply that all benefit claimants could be gainfully employed “hard workers” in the economy which is patently untrue:  the Chancellor’s second deceit is to implicitly deny that most of the people he seeks to thoroughly demonise for political gain would almost certainly love nothing better than to be hard-working shift workers, or similar, gainfully employed in the economy if given the opportunity. Sadly, because the Coalition’s economic programme is failing badly, rather than being given a genuine opportunity to escape unemployment sections of the demonised unemployed minority look set to be punished even further, in order to make the deficit reduction plan appear marginally less of a flop, by suffering further welfare cuts in order to reduce government borrowing. So, in a nutshell, people already struggling on the breadline are demonised to win the government license to impoverish them even further in order to partially disguise the economic failure of the coalition’s own policies. 

    Tricky, tricky, tricky.

    If I were a truly devilish person I would probably, almost certainly, admire George Osborne.

    • leslie48

      It is deeply, deeply  disturbing – but unfortunately its reality. The country is spending billions on benefits and they and their families are going to be those who will now bear the biggest burden of sorting out the deficit. Lets see how the BBC, the qualities, the unions and the Labour party or even the Christians combat this invidious Daily Express/ Sun propaganda. Personally  I do not hold out much hope even Radio 4′s Mr Mare was very respectful to  the Minister for work and pensions in total contrast to how he treated Harriet last week. Meanwhile the Labour Party has to say what it will do to bring down these massive benefit and housing benefit  bills . 

      • rekrab

        Leslie, the government is also paying Billions to prop up private transport, tax payers money being used to subsidise for profit industry.Transport will continue, concessionary travel doesn’t need to have a cost attached just to prop up the directors profits.It’s a total joke! Osborne has missed every one of his OBR forecast and wants to put the burden on those who have the least,Labour must come forward with an alternative plan.

      • Serbitar

        If the Labour Party had built hundreds of thousands of council houses and similar social housing, as they said they intended to in the run up to the 1997 general election, the housing benefit bill would not have rocketed in the way that it has. Its a problem of supply and demand. Too few units of affordable rented housing and too many people in competition in respect to tenancies, all made a million times worse by a housing bubble that encouraged private rents to soar. The only solution is to build more housing and rent it cheaply to the people who need it at rates commensurate with the minimum wage; privately financed initiatives announced by the coalition and the market will not do this as we are all going to see over the next few years. The coalition claimed that capping housing benefit would cause private rents to fall when in fact they have continued to rise inexorably. 

        Cutting housing benefit to the under 25s and capping child benefit for larger families in receipt of benefit won’t make £10 billion of saving in welfare, more like £2 billion max. So where is the remaining £8 billion of savings going to be made as far as welfare cuts go? Additionally there will have to be a whole host of exemptions as far as cutting under 25 housing benefit goes. For example orphans have no parents and so have no “childhood bedroom” to return to. What about young people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood home? Are they supposed to return home and forced to live again with their former abusers? What about families which have broken up and where the parents divorce, remarry, start new families with their new partners and have no spare room to offer accommodation to an adult child who has fledged the nest? What about young people estranged from families which won’t speak to them let alone shelter them? What about adult children from homes forced to downsize due to the “bedroom tax” who have no spare room to offer to a son or daughter denied housing benefit? I could go on, and on, and on picking holes in this latest madness forever. The point is that for many under 25s actually and factually there is no parental home to return to if their housing benefit is summarily cut: the future of these helpless young people will become one of destitution and homelessness at the behest of their government.

        As I said earlier the measures Osborne hints at will not raise anything near to the £10 billion in savings he says he needs to make in order to save himself the embarrassment of increasing the deficit by having to borrow more money on the wholesale markets because his economic plan has failed. 

        Even if these cuts are made this time around and we throw millions of fellow citizens to the wolves when Osborne’s plan continues foundering and the economy continue tanking what then? Another round of cuts… followed more cuts… followed by even more cuts ad infinitum? We’re collectively bleeding to death and trying to cure ourselves by more blood letting. The only way out of this mess is to get the economy going again. And the way to do that isn’t by George Osborne’s conspicuously ineffective and spectacularly inhumane Plan A.

        • Alexwilliamz

          But servitor, you are missing the point, the tories genuinely believe that the problem is that too many people are dependent on welfare, that these people will provide the cheap labour to make our economy competitive. Even if this impoverished and inhumane hypothesis were true and people could miraculously be transformed into the workers required they have not done the economic sums. We would still be undercut, in fact it would just have a knock on effect on other countries where rises in income would be frozen, holding back general development internationally. Sigh

        • Alexwilliamz

          But servitor, you are missing the point, the tories genuinely believe that the problem is that too many people are dependent on welfare, that these people will provide the cheap labour to make our economy competitive. Even if this impoverished and inhumane hypothesis were true and people could miraculously be transformed into the workers required they have not done the economic sums. We would still be undercut, in fact it would just have a knock on effect on other countries where rises in income would be frozen, holding back general development internationally. Sigh

        • Alexwilliamz

          But servitor, you are missing the point, the tories genuinely believe that the problem is that too many people are dependent on welfare, that these people will provide the cheap labour to make our economy competitive. Even if this impoverished and inhumane hypothesis were true and people could miraculously be transformed into the workers required they have not done the economic sums. We would still be undercut, in fact it would just have a knock on effect on other countries where rises in income would be frozen, holding back general development internationally. Sigh

        • Alexwilliamz

          But servitor, you are missing the point, the tories genuinely believe that the problem is that too many people are dependent on welfare, that these people will provide the cheap labour to make our economy competitive. Even if this impoverished and inhumane hypothesis were true and people could miraculously be transformed into the workers required they have not done the economic sums. We would still be undercut, in fact it would just have a knock on effect on other countries where rises in income would be frozen, holding back general development internationally. Sigh

        • leslie48

          Thanks for your reply – interesting. I hope more councillors in the more leafy areas will encourage more planning and development because around here in Herts/St.Albans- everyone seems to want to stop every dam development plan that is ever produced so just re-inforcing the status quo.

          On the growth I agree but I have read in the FT or thereabouts arguments that claim that regarding the decifit billions/cuts going forward who ever runs the economy there will have to do reductions in benefits/social transfers to help public money pay for technology growth, higher education/human capital , higher level skills , infrastructure ( including social housing)  in other words productive government spending that will lead to potential growth. I think  this leaves us with the view in the UK we have disproportionately and comparative to our competitors in Northern Europe/Germany/France   too many people staying on benefits of one kind or another.

          • Dave Postles

             There’s a difference between capital expenditure and revenue expenditure.  Capital expenditure impacts on revenue expenditure in debt charges, but they are different ‘pots’.

          • Serbitar

            Welfare rises during recessions and economic downturns because the number of people needing support rises as more of them lose their jobs and fail to secure alternative paid employment; simply cutting benefits does not create jobs and cannot force benefit claimants into jobs that do not actually exist. Cutting benefits in the way Osborne suggests will not make our country more competitive while there is a massive shortage of paid work; spasmodic, almost random, cuts like the ones proposed only cause suffering.  I suppose, if you want to look at it the dogma behind this agenda like a Tory, slashing benefits might persuade men and women to accept much lower wages and worse working conditions in order to have some kind of paid work, rather than have to live on benefits, which would lower a business’ payroll and social costs, making businesses more competitive at a dire cost to its employees. The folly is that such a brutal primitive socially-Darwinist programme can’t work while there are far too few, poor quality (part-time, minimum wage) positions available homogeneously, across the whole country, to “force” people into accepting, assuming that such a choice is possible in the first place. Indiscriminate and sweeping cuts to welfare, i.e., cut whatever and as much as you can get away with, won’t boost the economy but will cause enormous suffering to already put upon sections of society.

            Marie Antoinette syndrome let’s call it.

            Bill Clinton time-limited welfare to five years for all American citizens. As a result American welfare rolls and bills fell like stones, not because people were all moving from welfare into work, but because they stopped receiving assistance after a certain period of time and stopped being counted as welfare claimants as a result: many ended entirely destitute, living in tent cities, or sleeping in public spaces, under bridges, and whatnot, completely dependent upon the kindness of food banks and charities in order to keep body and soul together as citizens of the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known.

            And where is America now?

            After throwing so many of its children to the wolves?

            In the economic mire as deep, or deeper, as the rest of us.

            This isn’t the way a civilised European country ought to go.

        • leslie48

          Thanks for your reply – interesting. I hope more councillors in the more leafy areas will encourage more planning and development because around here in Herts/St.Albans- everyone seems to want to stop every dam development plan that is ever produced so just re-inforcing the status quo.

          On the growth I agree but I have read in the FT or thereabouts arguments that claim that regarding the decifit billions/cuts going forward who ever runs the economy there will have to do reductions in benefits/social transfers to help public money pay for technology growth, higher education/human capital , higher level skills , infrastructure ( including social housing)  in other words productive government spending that will lead to potential growth. I think  this leaves us with the view in the UK we have disproportionately and comparative to our competitors in Northern Europe/Germany/France   too many people stating on benefits of one kind or another.

      • Serbitar

        If the Labour Party had built hundreds of thousands of council houses and similar social housing, as they said they intended to in the run up to the 1997 general election, the housing benefit bill would not have rocketed in the way that it has. Its a problem of supply and demand. Too few units of affordable rented housing and too many people in competition in respect to tenancies, all made a million times worse by a housing bubble that encouraged private rents to soar. The only solution is to build more housing and rent it cheaply to the people who need it at rates commensurate with the minimum wage; privately financed initiatives announced by the coalition and the market will not do this as we are all going to see over the next few years. The coalition claimed that capping housing benefit would cause private rents to fall when in fact they have continued to rise inexorably. 

        Cutting housing benefit to the under 25s and capping child benefit for larger families in receipt of benefit won’t make £10 billion of saving in welfare, more like £2 billion max. So where is the remaining £8 billion of savings going to be made as far as welfare cuts go? Additionally there will have to be a whole host of exemptions as far as cutting under 25 housing benefit goes. For example orphans have no parents and so have no “childhood bedroom” to return to. What about young people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood home? Are they supposed to return home and forced to live again with their former abusers? What about families which have broken up and where the parents divorce, remarry, start new families with their new partners and have no spare room to offer accommodation to an adult child who has fledged the nest? What about young people estranged from families which won’t speak to them let alone shelter them? What about adult children from homes forced to downsize due to the “bedroom tax” who have no spare room to offer to a son or daughter denied housing benefit? I could go on, and on, and on picking holes in this latest madness forever. The point is that for many under 25s actually and factually there is no parental home to return to if their housing benefit is summarily cut: the future of these helpless young people will become one of destitution and homelessness at the behest of their government.

        As I said earlier the measures Osborne hints at will not raise anything near to the £10 billion in savings he says he needs to make in order to save himself the embarrassment of increasing the deficit by having to borrow more money on the wholesale markets because his economic plan has failed. 

        Even if these cuts are made this time around and we throw millions of fellow citizens to the wolves when Osborne’s plan continues foundering and the economy continue tanking what then? Another round of cuts… followed more cuts… followed by even more cuts ad infinitum? We’re collectively bleeding to death and trying to cure ourselves by more blood letting. The only way out of this mess is to get the economy going again. And the way to do that isn’t by George Osborne’s conspicuously ineffective and spectacularly inhumane Plan A.

      • Serbitar

        If the Labour Party had built hundreds of thousands of council houses and similar social housing, as they said they intended to in the run up to the 1997 general election, the housing benefit bill would not have rocketed in the way that it has. Its a problem of supply and demand. Too few units of affordable rented housing and too many people in competition in respect to tenancies, all made a million times worse by a housing bubble that encouraged private rents to soar. The only solution is to build more housing and rent it cheaply to the people who need it at rates commensurate with the minimum wage; privately financed initiatives announced by the coalition and the market will not do this as we are all going to see over the next few years. The coalition claimed that capping housing benefit would cause private rents to fall when in fact they have continued to rise inexorably. 

        Cutting housing benefit to the under 25s and capping child benefit for larger families in receipt of benefit won’t make £10 billion of saving in welfare, more like £2 billion max. So where is the remaining £8 billion of savings going to be made as far as welfare cuts go? Additionally there will have to be a whole host of exemptions as far as cutting under 25 housing benefit goes. For example orphans have no parents and so have no “childhood bedroom” to return to. What about young people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood home? Are they supposed to return home and forced to live again with their former abusers? What about families which have broken up and where the parents divorce, remarry, start new families with their new partners and have no spare room to offer accommodation to an adult child who has fledged the nest? What about young people estranged from families which won’t speak to them let alone shelter them? What about adult children from homes forced to downsize due to the “bedroom tax” who have no spare room to offer to a son or daughter denied housing benefit? I could go on, and on, and on picking holes in this latest madness forever. The point is that for many under 25s actually and factually there is no parental home to return to if their housing benefit is summarily cut: the future of these helpless young people will become one of destitution and homelessness at the behest of their government.

        As I said earlier the measures Osborne hints at will not raise anything near to the £10 billion in savings he says he needs to make in order to save himself the embarrassment of increasing the deficit by having to borrow more money on the wholesale markets because his economic plan has failed. 

        Even if these cuts are made this time around and we throw millions of fellow citizens to the wolves when Osborne’s plan continues foundering and the economy continue tanking what then? Another round of cuts… followed more cuts… followed by even more cuts ad infinitum? We’re collectively bleeding to death and trying to cure ourselves by more blood letting. The only way out of this mess is to get the economy going again. And the way to do that isn’t by George Osborne’s conspicuously ineffective and spectacularly inhumane Plan A.

      • Serbitar

        If the Labour Party had built hundreds of thousands of council houses and similar social housing, as they said they intended to in the run up to the 1997 general election, the housing benefit bill would not have rocketed in the way that it has. Its a problem of supply and demand. Too few units of affordable rented housing and too many people in competition in respect to tenancies, all made a million times worse by a housing bubble that encouraged private rents to soar. The only solution is to build more housing and rent it cheaply to the people who need it at rates commensurate with the minimum wage; privately financed initiatives announced by the coalition and the market will not do this as we are all going to see over the next few years. The coalition claimed that capping housing benefit would cause private rents to fall when in fact they have continued to rise inexorably. 

        Cutting housing benefit to the under 25s and capping child benefit for larger families in receipt of benefit won’t make £10 billion of saving in welfare, more like £2 billion max. So where is the remaining £8 billion of savings going to be made as far as welfare cuts go? Additionally there will have to be a whole host of exemptions as far as cutting under 25 housing benefit goes. For example orphans have no parents and so have no “childhood bedroom” to return to. What about young people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood home? Are they supposed to return home and forced to live again with their former abusers? What about families which have broken up and where the parents divorce, remarry, start new families with their new partners and have no spare room to offer accommodation to an adult child who has fledged the nest? What about young people estranged from families which won’t speak to them let alone shelter them? What about adult children from homes forced to downsize due to the “bedroom tax” who have no spare room to offer to a son or daughter denied housing benefit? I could go on, and on, and on picking holes in this latest madness forever. The point is that for many under 25s actually and factually there is no parental home to return to if their housing benefit is summarily cut: the future of these helpless young people will become one of destitution and homelessness at the behest of their government.

        As I said earlier the measures Osborne hints at will not raise anything near to the £10 billion in savings he says he needs to make in order to save himself the embarrassment of increasing the deficit by having to borrow more money on the wholesale markets because his economic plan has failed. 

        Even if these cuts are made this time around and we throw millions of fellow citizens to the wolves when Osborne’s plan continues foundering and the economy continue tanking what then? Another round of cuts… followed more cuts… followed by even more cuts ad infinitum? We’re collectively bleeding to death and trying to cure ourselves by more blood letting. The only way out of this mess is to get the economy going again. And the way to do that isn’t by George Osborne’s conspicuously ineffective and spectacularly inhumane Plan A.

    • AlanGiles

       What a great post.

      I felt Osborne had probably been listening to Blears (and certainly the Daily Express) with the ridiculous vision of the hard-working shift worker going off to work in the early dawn while the unemployed slumber on. But as somebody who spent a good deal of his life leaving for work at 5.30 in the morning, MOST people of course are still sleeping, whether they are civil service  pen-pusher, shopkeeper who open at 9 a.m. or the person – and there are over 2 million of them – who sadly find themselves unemployed.

      I doubt that Osborne even knows what 5.30 on a winter morning looks like.

      • Serbitar

        Cameron and Osborne are despicable liars.

        They talk about stopping the under 25s from “choosing” a life on benefits and getting council flats conveniently forgetting that from next April the only kind of Housing Benefit available to every under 35 year old will be for a non self-contained single room in a shared house! This has been true for under 25 year olds since the days of Thatcher and Major.

        Cameron once talked ceaselessly about fixing “broken Britain”.  Based on what we’ve recently heard the Prime Minister’s modus operandi as far as “fixing broken Britain” goes leave a lot to be desired, i.e., repair the country by dividing and breaking up the country even further than before.

        How broken must a country be to cruelly abandon its young? How rotten must such a country’s leaders be to choose to pursue such a brutal course, not out of necessity but deliberately by design? 

        History itself illustrates the Coalition’s incompetence and disingenuousness as related in the Guardian article associated with the link below:

        http://www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2012/oct/08/osborne-housing-benefit-cuts-homelessness?newsfeed=true

        I feel sad and ashamed that the United Kingdom should have come to this.

        • christinemelsom

          Years ago the young lived with their parents until such time as they got married or left home to take a job.  I think the expression was ‘stand on your own two feet’. Today many younger people are not doing that, they are relying on the state.  This is not only unaffordable but an unacceptable burden on those of us who do pay any taxes etc.

  • aracataca

    Shocking speech today. He may well have announced a death sentence for this government with his words.

    • Alexwilliamz

      I really hope that is how the british public respond to it. I am already sick of the repugnant logic that the tory party and its cultural scions are making:

      Problem: Look some dishonest people claiming for benefits the should not be getting.

      Tory solution: It is ok to cut benefits because it is only going to support a load of dishonest conmen/women.

      Problem: Not enough jobs.

      Tory solution: Get potential employees to sacrifice their employment rights in return for some questionable income (shares in non PLCs?) then somehow employers who have just been itching to employ people to do the work they presumably have wanted doing all the time but for the nasty employment laws have prevented, will employ more people somehow? 

      Problem: Tax evasion

      Tory solution: Cut highest rate of income tax then some how the rich will come forward and pay all that evaded tax because they are only evading due to moral grounds that no gvt should be taking ‘more than half’ of their income.

      Problem: Economy struggling, no demand.

      Solution: Give more money to banks and rich people who are already squirrelling it away and cut incomes of the poorest who would have no choice but to spend it anyway.

      Problem: Lack of confidence in economy, no one risking investing.

      Solution: Continue to bang on about cuts, austerity and no moving away from the plan or we might still all turn into Greece crushed by our debts. You know FEAR FEAR FEAR.

      Problem: Educational standards not keeping up with new competitors.

      Solution: Make exams harder.

      Problem: High youth employment. Young struggling to get started.

      Solution: Cut housing benefit for young people.

      Problem: NHS having to face cuts in budget.

      Solution: Impose complex and costly reorganisation, with dubious (no) evidence that it will even work.

      Problem: Foreign competitors have cheaper labour costs.

      Solution: Reduce labour costs by impoverishing the lowest paid, force them off benefits by cutting to a minimum, introduce new welfare system that will effectively subsidise companies paying minimum wages.

      ETC
      ETC
      ETC

      • aracataca

        Couldn’t have put it better myself Alex.
        I’m being privatised on 1st November- bye bye Public Service Pension that I’ve paid into for 23 years.
        They’ve declared war on anyone who isn’t a millionaire.

      • aracataca

        Couldn’t have put it better myself Alex.
        I’m being privatised on 1st November- bye bye Public Service Pension that I’ve paid into for 23 years.
        They’ve declared war on anyone who isn’t a millionaire.

      • aracataca

        Couldn’t have put it better myself Alex.
        I’m being privatised on 1st November- bye bye Public Service Pension that I’ve paid into for 23 years.
        They’ve declared war on anyone who isn’t a millionaire.

        • Dave Postles

           Everything is about cost, not value, service, experience and expertise.   It’s short-sighted, short-termism, and will end in tears for all of us.  I wish you well.

    • AlanGiles

       I think it was a desperate last throw of the dice. The speech was clearly aimed at the right wing of his own party, and rags like the Mail and Express.

  • Brumanuensis

    Perhaps Osborne’s crackpot ‘shares for employment rights’ scheme was meant to be cover for this appalling announcement.

    • Dave Postles

       It looks marginal at the best.

      1 You cannot, I believe, dispense with your rights against discrimination, so tribunal cases could still be initiated on those counts.
      2 Are the shares preference or not; voting or non-voting?
      3 Rights issues could diminish the value of the shares.
      4 Will dividends be paid?

      • Brumanuensis

        The consensus amongst employment lawyers, so far as I can tell, is ‘what is this s***’?

  • Dave Postles

    I can only say thank you for all you are doing and wish you luck.

  • Dave Postles

    I can only say thank you for all you are doing and wish you luck.

  • Dave Postles

    I can only say thank you for all you are doing and wish you luck.

  • christinemelsom

    Will there ever be a time when greedy councils consider that any freeze is a Godsend to the council tax payer instead of worrying about having to give up their Blackberry or laptop?  There are many things councils can cut before cutting services.  Why should we be paying for pensions for councillors? Why should they be able to claim for IT from both district and county council?  Councillors in our council cost us over £2million last year. How much is that acroos the country?  Are they really necessary? If they are, do we need all the management teams employed by councils?  Shouldn’t the councillors on their high salaries (allowances) be doing that job?
    Local government has a lot of saving to do before they start to force the electorate into even higher council tax bills.

  • Serbitar

    Nostalgia certainly but what exactly is your point?

    Years ago there was plenty of dependable work and a manual labourer could afford to rent a home and bring up a family without any help from the State on his wages; marriages often lasted lifetimes, often unhappily; Great Britain had an Empire and Britannia ruled the waves. Now, because wages have not kept up with prices, virtually no one doing a manual job on lowish wages can raise a family without top-up benefits from the State; marriages last about eleven years (on average) and therefore end well before any children produced can reach their majority, and Britannia no longer rules herself let alone any oceans of the world.

    To look backwards at a Britain that no longer exists in  hope of recapturing those days by pauperising citizens young or old is extremely foolish. If read my earlier posts above you will see plenty of reasons listed, plucked from my head after a few seconds thought, why tens of thousands of British young people cannot live with their parents into and beyond their mid twenties not least of which is that in modern unstable today a parental home for an adult son or daughter to return to and to live in may actually not physically exist for many. If the Coalition really are stupid enough and ignorant enough and cruel enough to try to implement a cut like this so many exemptions will have to be made, for so many reasons, that very little money will end up being saved.

    Which beggers the question?

    How can a further £10 bn be cut from the welfare budget in addition to the £18 bn of cuts pencilled in to begin biting from April 2013 onwards, without causing unendurable suffering?

    Cuts should be more diffuse and spread more evenly across government rather than trying to slash welfare, during a recession, when people are experiencing torment and difficulty and need support from the country through no fault of their own. To choose deliberately to make thousands of young people homeless in order to make savings when alternatives are available is wholly reprehensible and utterly disgraceful behaviour. Every poll that I have seen that has raised this question with the public has seen populations oppose this pernicious policy 2:1. The bunch of lying rogues currently masquerading as our government may find it harder to pull off this particular confidence trick, on the electorate, than previous scams and deceits it got away with far too easily.

    I believe that now, finally, the public are waking up.

  • Alexwilliamz

    Are councillors necessary? Depends if you believe in democracy or not I guess. At worst they are a necessary evil, but good councillors are absolutely fundamental to helping people access service, influence local government and connecting the people with those running services. They also have to spend hours of their lives listening to people moaning about this and that, often things they have no influence over. Sure sometimes they can get sidetracked in council meetings and sometimes they let the executive or council officers run rings around them but without them, we the people really would have no say in the plethora of services supplied by your local council (and there are probably a lot more services than you realise). 

    PS I am not a councillor.

    • christinemelsom

      I am continually surprised by the amount of money spent by councils on fripperies and yes I am very well aware of the services provided by councils.  I am the chairman of a campaign calling for the reform of the council tax system and therefore, we watch very carefully the spending of the councils.  Councillors (or the cabinet system) are a law unto themselves.  The IRP can only advise, but the Governance Committee determines the behaviour and remuneration paid to councillors.  As the leader of one council once said to me ‘They are no longer allowances, they are salaries’.  The cabinets can decide if their councillors can be part of the LGPS and remain members until the age of 75.  We as taxpayers contribute 19% compared to their 6% to this pension.
      I am also fully aware that we need councillors, but why so many? Why do we need three sets of councillors and above all, they should not be there to represent any political party. Years ago this work was done ‘pro bono’ but it is now very much a stepping stone on a career in politics.  Wrong, very wrong. 

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