Monday, January 05, 2009

Council tax rise?

Latest story from the Shuttle reveals that our County Lords and Masters are thinking of increasing our tax by 3.5%; um why?

The Government has confirmed there is no change to the amount of grant being received for the coming financial year,
Oh so you're getting the same amount of money last year and you need more?
[...] with an increase of 4.2 per cent.
Ah so obviously you need even more. Now it's a well-worn truism that things cost more tomorrow then they did yesterday; unless it's a DVD, or an electronic gadget or come to think of it pretty much everything (except rail tickets and energy prices and we all not the score there).
"But that could mean cutting services that would be directly accessed by those who could feel the credit crunch most acutely."
Um why? If you're paying £X for ServiceA why has the cost of providing ServiceA increased. Energy bills I can understand, but the past few years haven't you been fitting all council buildings etc. with various energy saving schemes? Are staff asking for more money? Hard to claim that cost of living has gone up with every store running around cutting prices.

If this increase is just to keep us standing still I've some questions about where it's all going.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, my electricity rates have almost doubled in the last few months, and my rent has gone up. The prices of my grocery items have increased slightly rather than decreased. I know retailers would have us believe that everything is getting cheaper, but inflation has been at its highest in 15 years.

FlipC said...

And yet one of the first pieces of news I heard this morning was that supermarkets (and other stores) were cutting the price of thousands of items in order to entice customers back in as due to the cut in petrol prices they weren't afraid to have to drive about to shop elsewhere.