Your council tax bill is rising, but you won’t get better services
By Graham Grant
CAN you remember the last time a local authority candidly confessed that it had more than enough money to be getting on with?
How often, under any government, has a council told ministers: ‘You’re okay, we’ve got it covered – just let us get on with filling in the potholes’?
No, I can’t recall any such occasion either: instead, every year, there’s the ritual of shroud-waving councillors threatening to slash services and put up council tax.
True, we got a break when council tax was frozen, but that measure was introduced only because previous years had seen successive inflation-busting hikes.
Now there’s a double whammy ahead, as income tax is about to soar – the Holyrood vote approving the move happens today (Tuesday, February 20) – while council tax is also set to increase.
Years of fat cats, waste and non-jobs – diversity co-ordinators and clipboard-wielding ‘recycling advisers’ rummaging through bins – have made us wary of councils warning of apocalypse.
But this time around there is a sense that local government is in an unenviable position as a result of the SNP’s draft Budget, which included removing the cap on public sector pay.
Councils are to be given an additional £170million to cover the ensuing costs, but umbrella group Cosla believes this isn’t enough – and ‘any pay rises for council workers can only come from cuts to services or council tax rises’.
As a result, council tax bills are set to rise by up to £92 a year from April to help fund a 3 per cent increase for most staff.
You can safely bet that whatever happens in future years, there are no more tax freezes on the horizon.
That said, the freeze came at a cost, and a Cosla report shows councils have been forced to slash spending on roads by more than £130million in the last decade, while libraries and museums have also suffered cuts.
For his part, Finance Secretary Derek Mackay insists that ‘in spite of continued UK Government real terms cuts to Scotland’s resource budget, we have treated local government very fairly’.
But it seems clear that – having thrown £170million at the problem (one of the SNP’’s own devising) – Mr Mackay now has his fingers firmly in his ears: the traditional pose adopted by Nationalist ministers at a time of looming crisis.
It is galling for workers in the private sector, whose salaries in many cases have been frozen for years, to look on as their counterparts in the public sphere are rewarded with an increase in pay.
Historically, the quid pro quo for lower pay in councils and quangos was a better nest-egg in retirement.
But now taxpayer-funded salaries are much-improved – and the pensions apartheid is a bitter pill to swallow for those in the corporate world.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the gap between public and private sector pensions in Britain is the widest in the developed world.
The OECD found UK civil servants’ pension promises were so generous that an average worker joining the workforce two years ago will receive a 6 per cent pay rise when they reach retirement.
Yet councils have lost no time in devising innovative ways to raise extra funds – not content with proposed council tax rises, they are devising other sneaky methods of extracting more of your cash.
In Perth and Kinross, where councillors will vote on the local authority’s budget on Thursday, one of the proposals is a £25 charge for a garden waste bin, while some rural recycling centres are also facing the axe.
This could well be the thin end of the wedge, paving the way for councils to charge for services that were largely hitherto ‘free’, and marks quite a reverse for local authorities that until now had been hell-bent on promoting a ‘green’ agenda.
But if councils are expecting more sympathy for their predicament, they may have a lengthy wait on their hands.
After all, more than £1.2billion of council tax across Scotland remains uncollected – if it had been, the case for a tax rise would be untenable.
But money is only part of the problem: even when their finances were not in turmoil, councils made a spectacular hash of ensuring key services were delivered.
In Glasgow, residents are encouraged to take a smartphone picture of dog dirt and email it to the council using a special app, which in theory triggers a visit from a street cleaner.
It might be unsporting to point out that if the streets were regularly cleaned in the first place, this kind of hi-tech wizardry wouldn’t be necessary.
In the event when I tried it out, there was no response whatsoever from the council.
When I rang the cleansing department after a few days had passed, it took nearly 10 minutes to negotiate a maze of automated options designed to sap your will to live before reaching a human being – who sounded like her own will to live was something of a distant memory.
About £90,000 of dog-fouling fines (no, I’ve never seen one handed out either) are uncollected in Glasgow alone – so it’s hardly a shock that the problem is out of control.
Well over a week later, the offending dog dirt remains in situ – still, there’s a nice souvenir of the experience in the image archive of my phone…
Councils are also supposedly leading the fight to close the attainment gap between the best and worst-performing schools, which the Scottish Government insists is ‘poverty-related’.
And of course, it is, but in 2014 Audit Scotland found that, in 30 per cent of local authorities, education performance reports were ‘either approved or noted with limited discussion or scrutiny recorded’.
Slipshod monitoring of standards might help to explain the state of our schools, yet councils continue to pretend that they should be taken seriously on education reform.
Then there are the Spanish practices that have taken root over decades.
In 2016, it emerged that Falkirk Council had paid hundreds of employees for hours they did not work , despite facing a financial black hole of more than £60million.
For a decade, Falkirk Council had been paying some workers for 37 hours a week, even though they have been working only 35 hours, costing taxpayers £1.4million a year.
‘Golden goodbyes’ of more than £100million were paid out to council officials across Scotland in the space of less than three years, according to figures published in 2016.
Two years ago, it emerged that a now-retired principal libraries officer at East Lothian Council had earnings of £214,512 in a year – and still claimed expenses of £95. (Remember that next time you’re fined for an overdue loan…)
It’s no wonder that for years the complaints of cash-starved councils fell on deaf ears, and public trust was corroded.
Local authorities which presided over unjustified waste while imposing eye-watering tax hikes shouldn’t be surprised if they are accused of crying wolf.
But the current mess is an SNP creation, and yet another example of its ham-fisted economics – for which taxpayers will foot the bill.
