Well researched article, Mr Booker. Pity is that you were not at the Tower Hotel (Tue, 4 Oct 2011) to listen to the Ministry of Justice brief their mercenaries on how to extort the maximum money from struggling citizens, nor to witness a brace of these thugs harangue and belittle victims of their illegal handiwork. Nor, alas, to witness the organisers put their hands on a petite demonstrator and victim, a descendant of a Victoria Cross holder.
So much for Heroes (sic).
We shouldn’t let our councils cheat us out of £25 billion a year
We have become familiar, for instance, with the practice whereby we must now
pay for planning applications, anything from £150 for a garden shed to
£250,000 for a large housing estate. We all know about the cost of parking
fees and penalties, which earn councils £2 billion a year. And businesses
must now pay billions to have their waste collected.
In 2007, the Lyons report on local government found that more than a quarter
of councils were already earning more from such charges than they were from
council tax. This has now risen to the point where “sales, fees, charges”
and “other income” now yield some £25 billion a year, much the same as
council tax.
Most of these alternative sources of revenue are sanctioned by central
government, but in some instances the “dash for cash” has led councils into
activities that are outside the law. Two weeks ago, I reported how many
councils have outsourced their collection of unpaid council tax to private
firms of bailiffs, who then charge much more than the law allows for
practices such as “phantom visits” – merely pushing letters through doors –
which both the Government and the police state are criminal offences under
the 2006 Fraud Act. This followed my colleague Richard North becoming the
victim of such illegal charges after paying his council tax in full to
Bradford council, which set him off on an investigation that has brought to
light just how many local authorities are abusing the law by grossly
overcharging council tax debtors for the issuing of summonses and liability
orders.
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