"SCOTLAND'S most affluent households should face rises of up to £4,000 a year in their council tax bills, according to the conclusions of a powerful independent review group into local government finance.
The Scotsman has learned that an Executive-commissioned report by Sir Peter Burt, the former chief executive of the Bank of Scotland, will call for new estimates of the value of Scotland's 2.2 million homes to be carried out as the first step towards modernising council financing.
Sir Peter and his group are understood to favour a system similar to the controversial revaluation of rates which has been introduced in Northern Ireland and will see the bills for some households rise by up to £4,000 from next spring...
Sir Peter's group, set up in June 2004, is understood to have accepted that there should be a revaluation of the property values which form the basis of the council tax. The valuations being used today date from 1991 and, with rocketing house prices, bear little relation to properties' market worth."
In the 1980s, it was the prospect of a property revaluation, with all the consequent winners and losers, that led to the demise of the domestic rating system and to the introduction of the community charge, also known as the poll tax. This time around, it will be the council tax which is under pressure; and a local income tax will be hailed as the answer.
Regular readers of this blog will know my views on local income tax (see here) but there is a certain inevitability to the course of local government finance. I fear that we are doomed to see history repeating itself.
3 comments:
instead of soaking ordinary people for more and more money, why don't they abolish half of these useless councils and the even more useless councillors? amalgamate most of these councils, sack all councillors, stop them wasting out hard earned cash on 4 star hotels for teacher CPD junkets, giving a useless director of education a 90,ooo pounds payoff for 16 months service (Aberdeenshire Council) the list is endless, I for one, are getting angry about the waste!
Can someone explain why there is always pots of money available for war? e.g. Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan etc and yet there is apparently never enough money for essential services and so taxpayers are fleeced to within an inch of their lives? why do we put up with these useless politicians such as Blair et al? what is wrong with people in this country?
wake up you dozy pillocks!!!
I think the journalist in the Daily Mail has the right idea which is, come the election(ANY ELECTION) instead of voting for some useless politian, we all write "NONE OF THE ABOVE" on the voting paper. This perhaps would send a clear message as to what we, the long suffering electorate, really think of "so-called public servants"
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