Any Other Business

30 May 2009

I don’t give a toss about my MP’s flat, but I’m bloody livid about council tax

Next Thursday’s elections have been so overwhelmed by the scandal of Westminster expenses that candidates for the major parties have scarcely shown their faces in my part of the world. And voters, content to fulminate at the daily pageant of shamed MPs on their television screens, don’t much care whether county council and Euro candidates turn up on the doorstep or not. I have not heard a single word of discussion about, say, the balance between left and right groupings in the European parliament — an institution that could be seized by aliens and teleported to Uranus without most people in Britain even noticing. As for local government, we have sunk into apathetic acceptance of the fact that our council tax bills doubled over the past decade because council officers ceased to see themselves as public servants charged with delivering decent services at minimum cost, and were instead reinvented by Labour ministers as a kind of strategic local inspectorate, overseeing a half-baked master plan for the bureaucratic socialisation of Britain conceived by that titan of public administration, ‘Two Lavs’ Prescott.

All this was made vivid at a recent meeting of Helmsley Town Council — no member of which, I hastily interject, has claimed any expenses in living memory. A representative of Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency based in Wakefield, asked to speak: she had come to update us on the ‘Renaissance Market Towns’ programme, which was being ‘refocused’ in such a way that our chances of getting money out of it for local projects had just become slightly worse. At least I think that’s what she said, for she spoke in the special gobbledygook of regional officialdom. Leaving aside the matter of what it cost to have her deliver this message in person instead of sending an email, we were left to contemplate the grotesque folly of the Renaissance initiative, a five-year, seven- digit fountain of cash for consultants that has produced no major benefit to any market town I know, yet seems to have an unstoppable life of its own, wholly disconnected from parallel efforts by local planning and highways departments, which rarely talk to each other anyway. It is only when you wrestle — as I did, over many months — with one of these mad schemes to try to get something out of it for your own community that you realise just how extravagantly incompetent and unjoined-up our local government really is. It wastes billions of council tax and central government funding and it richly deserves a wave of public unrest: if you spot a council candidate before Thursday, pin him to a wall and tell him you don’t give a toss about the contents of your MP’s flat but you’re bloody livid about council tax and you want it cut by 10 per cent. That’s the one line of attack he won’t be expecting.

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