The TaxPayers' Alliance - Campaign

Westminster Bike Tax Protest: The Movie

Following Tuesday's massive protest against Westminster City Council's new stealth tax on motorbikes and scooters, the No To The Bike Parking Tax campaign have produced an excellent video, featuring the speeches in Trafalgar Square, the mass drive down Whitehall and the carnival atmosphere outside Westminster City Hall. If you keep a look out, you can see the TPA's Axe the Bike Tax placards, and catch the speech I made to the assembled 4,500 protestors:

People power on show in Westminster: Axe the Bike Tax!

The campaign against the new parking tax in Westminster reached a new high last night, and the TaxPayers' Alliance was there fighting for an end to stealth taxes. 1,000 protestors were expected, but well over 4,000 showed up.

After speeches from me on behalf of the TPA, Peter Roberts of the Drivers' Alliance, Dr Leon Mannings from TransportCrucible.com, Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg of Westminster (who opposes the charges) and Warren Djanogly, Chairman of the excellent No To The Bike Parking Tax campaign who organised the protest, we headed off down Whitehall, round Parliament Square and down Victoria Street to park up outside Westminster City Hall.

It was an amazing sight, seeing 4,000 bikers riding down Whitehall honking their horns and revving their engines:

 

The support from passers by and the public was massive (Westminster were forced to reveal in the later committee meeting that not a single Westminster resident has supported the scheme in the recent consultation). This was people power in action - no longer can councils simply slap stealth tax after stealth tax on different groups of people in the hope that no one will notice.

I will provide a further update with more photos and a report on the Scrutiny Committee meeting at which I gave evidence later today, but for now here are some more photos of Westminster as you've never seen it before - and it was made this way by people power:

 

 

     

 
and finally...

Say no to the Westminster Bike Tax next Tuesday

This is a call to arms: next Tuesday 31st March at 5pm in Trafalgar Square, and then 6.45pm outside Westminster City Hall on Victoria Street, the TPA will be joining a mass protest against one of the most poorly thought out, unfair and misguided stealth taxes in British local government. Full details can be found here.

Westminster City Council's decision to tax motorbikes and scooters for parking in the Borough when it was previously free is harming the local economy, punishing commuters and residents unfairly and contravening the Mayor of London's stated intention to get more people on two wheels instead of four in order to help reduce congestion.

It's unbelievable that any council, with the economy in the grip of a severe recession, could think it is justified or desirable to suck millions of pounds out of the local economy with a stealth tax. By comparison, Kensington and Chelsea have introduced free parking to try to boost local trade. Westminster seem happy to be raking in revenue at the expense of local jobs.

As taxpayers, we should all rally round to oppose this greedy stealth tax. As we can see from the boom in stealth taxes on all sorts of different activities in recent years, if councils think they can get away with picking on particular groups, they will do so. Some of Westminster's councillors seem to think they can not only disregard economic reality and public opinion, they can actualy respond to petitioning from the public with abuse. Well no longer.

At the protest on Tuesday there will be over 1,000 bikers, local residents and taxpayer activists showing WCC that it is totally unacceptable to slap stealth taxes on anyone. We will start off with speeches in Trafalgar Square, the protest will move down to Victoria Street. Once we arrive, a group of us will go inside to give evidence to the council's Scrutiny Committe about why the new tax should be ditched. I'll be giving evidence on behalf of the TaxPayers' Alliance, and there will be evidence given by representatives of road users and local residents, all united to ditch the bike tax.

As well as the speeches in Trafalgar Square, when we reach Victoria Street the meeting will be piped outside to the massed protesters. Do come along to show your opposition to stealth taxing councils - this effects all of us, and if Westminster get away with it, then other councils will certainly follow suit.

No-one can afford higher taxes in the current economic climate, and the TPA is proud to be working with the campaign against the Westminster Bike Tax. The No To The Bike Parking Tax campaign are an energetic, self-starting group of grasroots protesters standing up against something they believe to be wrong. It's refreshing to see more and more taxpayers getting active and fighting back - I'm delighted to report that this excellent group are officially becoming part of the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Here's their latest campaign video, to get you really fired up:

Good work in Tower Hamlets

It's often said by local councillors that the idea that there is waste in Town Halls or that council tax can be reduced is "simplistic" or foolish - it's impossible, they cry, if the TPA were councillors then you'd understand that. There's a great example out of Tower Hamlets today that shows that simply isn't true. The Opposition there have done  great job of producing an alternative Budget which would cut waste and cut taxes by 1%.

Cllr Tim Archer's article is well worth a read and demonstrates the real potential for savings to be found when some thought and imagination are put into the task. Unsurprisingly, council publicity is high on the list of areas where sizeable savings can be made.

Imagine the difference this kind of thinking would make to ordinary people. When was the last time most of us got a council tax bill that was lower than the previous year's? Too many councils have got lazy and greedy, and we need more groundbreaking tax cutting proposals like this to shake them out of their stupor and get a good deal for taxpayers.

Dinosaurs are not extinct after all

Stop the presses! It turns out that despite mainstream scientific consensus, dinosaurs are not extinct and in fact live in the obscure habitat of the National Executive of UNISON.  Jon Rogers, a member of that body, has posted a very revealing piece on his blog about public sector pensions which draws some conclusions so blinkered and outdated they can officially be dated to the Jurassic period.

The article, in response to the Evening Standard's welcome campaign on the staggering cost of the Local Government Pension Scheme, gives us a window into the world of those who are committed to simply rejecting outright any suggestion of reform of public sector pensions.

For a start, it's amusing that Mr Rogers is so worried by the effectiveness of the TPA that he has assumed that the Standard's reports, which reveal a £10 billion deficit in the pension schemes of London's councils alone, are generated by our research. In fact, it's the Standard's own work using the undeniable figures provided by the councils themselves.

The cost of council employers' pensions contributions is a massive £4.5 billion a year already, and yet these contributions are nowhere near enough to cover the liabilites for the council pension schemes - hence this gigantic black hole. Taxpayers, who have little or no access in the private sector to such generous pensions themselves, are being expected to pick up the bill, despite the fact that many are increasingly struggling to afford their council tax bills as it is.

In the face of that reality, though, Rogers refuses to acknowledge the need for any reform of the Local Government Pension Scheme. In fact, he threatens strikes to defend the status quo. So he would like to see his members picketing council offices and denying services to the public in order to maintain the status of public sector workers as better paid, more secure in their jobs and more generously provided for in retirement than the general public who labour under the burden of record council tax bills - so much for socialism helping the worse off.

Even more interesting to political palaeontologists is his conclusion. No way should we reform the Local Government Pension Scheme - no, it is the whole economic system that must change to fit the LGPS!

"If capitalism cannot afford decent pensions then the answer is not to get rid of decent pensions but to get rid of capitalism"

Capitalism isn't perfect but whilst it cannot afford or sustain these gold-plated pensions, it does at least have the benefit that it can afford things like food, housing and indeed council services - all things that Mr Rogers' preferred alternatives, be they centrally planned socialism or outright Communism, have notably failed to provide.

Agreeing with the LGA

It's a rare occasion - indeed an event for the diary - today. I agree with something the Local Government Association have said. Yes, the people who normally spend their time arguing for higher council tax and more town hall bureaucrats have produced an eminently sensible piece of work. They are calling on councils to ditch the use of jargon and management gobbledegook.

The report lists 200 examples of jargon that the LGA wants to see the back of, such as "indicators of beaconicity", "coterminosity" and my personal bugbear "actioned" (used instead of saying "done").

Whils there are certainly some words on the list that seem to have been added to pad it out to 200, and I certainly wouldn't want the words "democratic mandate" to vanish from town halls, this is a good step in the right direction. It's a pity that local government has got into such a state that it needs slapping round the face and telling to use plain english, but it clearly does.

Scarborough set a good example on pensions

Further to my earlier post about the greed of some local councillors, and the Councillors' Commission's shoddy call for snouts to dig deeper into the trough, I'm glad to see that one council at least is doing the right thing.

According to the Local Government Chronicle, Scarborough Borough Council - which looked like it was going to vote for gold-plated pensions for councillors - has instead voted not to give councillors access to the scheme. Good on them!

In case anyone suggests this is a small or insignificant bill, it's interesting to note that the Borough's democratic and administrative manager calculated that the cost of all councillors joining the scheme in full would add 0.65% to council tax. That's quite a bill, and one that Scarborough's councillors were right to avoid.

Wake up and smell the discontent...

It has been reported in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere today that council tax is set to rise by a staggering 3% in April. The LGA issued a somewhat contradictory statement, announcing the rise and then saying that councils were working 'flat out' to keep council tax down and that they understood that 'everyone was feeling the pinch'.

What's wrong with this picture?

Firstly, this rise is far above inflation. Current RPI index shows inflation lying at 0.1% - putting this rise at around 30 times inflation. At a time when people need every spare penny to make ends meet, how can councils put this kind of additional burden on them? It is morally indefensible.

Further, it is totally unnecessary. Councils have so much fat in their budgets, they could easily implement a council tax freeze, if not cut. They need only look to the TPA's Ten Per Cent Challenge, and our Council Spending Uncovered series to find ready-made, common sense policies that will deliver real savings to taxpayers and enable councils to start cutting that sky-high council tax, right now when people need it most. 

Far from working 'flat out' to keep council tax down, many councils are so out of touch that they have not reined in spending at all. A prime example of this is Kent County Council's decision to award over £100,000 in bonuses to senior employees. This, despite the fact that they lost £50 million of taxpayers' money in the Icelandic banking crash. Time after time, we see public sector employees being rewarded for failure, at a time when they should be institutionally and personally eschewing any pay increases or bonuses.

Once again, we see councils' rheotric to be at odds with their actions. They are out of touch with the very people they are supposed to represent. Council tax has doubled over the last ten years, and taxpayers are now starting to wake up and tell their councils: no more.

As the self-titled 'voice of reason' from Gillingham wrote: "It's about time these senior council officials, like the bankers, accepted their moral responsibility amd immedately waived their right to any bonus in the light of their poor performance.

"They are getting paid market rate public sector salaries, and I believe it's totally unacceptable that these people should be receiving bonuses out of public money at all, let alone in the current climate. If they are so worthy let them find alternative, if they can!"

Quite.

TaxPayers' Alliance welcomes Tory local government plans

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has welcomed the Conservatives’ new green paper on local government, which propose greater powers for local people over council tax levels and the way councils are run, improved transparency in local government spending and the effective abolition of the Regional Development Agencies.

Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“These are excellent measures that will increase the power of the people to decide how much tax they pay and how their money is spent, whilst reducing the power of highly paid, ineffective bureaucrats in town halls and regional quangos. If councils have to answer to the people who pay the bills, then we will see better services, less waste and lower taxes. For too long power has shifted from the people to officials in the Regional Development Agencies and Town Halls. It’s high time the centralisation of our government was reversed.”

Several of the Conservatives’ key proposals are inspired by TaxPayers’ Alliance research and campaigning:

1) Councils will be required to publish detailed information on a wide range of their expenditure.  Last year, the TPA launched its groundbreaking Council Spending Uncovered campaign, which revealed, council by council, the true scale of town hall expenditure on publicity, pensions, middle management and senior executives, putting the case for greater transparency in local government. The huge public interest in the research made clear taxpayers’ appetite for more information on how their money is spent.

2) Councils will be required to publish the pay and perks received by senior council staff. Since 2007 the TPA has campaigned for full transparency of the remuneration of senior council staff, and we have published an annual Town Hall Rich List, which in 2008 featured 818 council staff with remuneration packages over £100,000.

3) Regional Development Agencies will be effectively abolished. In August 2008 the TPA published “The case for abolishing the Regional Development Agencies”, a detailed economic survey that revealed the £15 billion spent on RDAs had produced little or no benefit to the regions themselves.

For further comments or to arrange broadcast interviews, please contact:

Mark Wallace, TPA Campaign Director, on:

07795 084 113

mark.wallace@taxpayersalliance.com

Cut back? But everyone loves council Chief Executives...say council Chief Executives

There's one of those classic news stories today that raises your eyebrows and then explains itself all in one sentence. The kind that starts off "that's politically interesting" and ends up feeling slightly more predictable than "dog bites postman". This time, it's all to do with Eric Pickles' laudable proposals to help councils reduce the number of high-paid Chief Executives.

Here's the first bit:

Conservative plans to reduce the number of council chief executives lack support among grassroots Tories...

Sounds interesting, no? If there is a genuine movement amongst Tory councillors to support the existence of this well-paid (and rising) class of senior executives in local government, many of whom earn more than the Prime Minister, then that is a serious issue. Who has revealed this startling split?

...the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives & Senior Managers has claimed.

Ah.

This isn't just dog bites postman, it's "Postman likes being bitten by dog and wants more of it, says dog".

Still, let's look at the story - what's the detail? Actually, there is none - it's literally just on their say so - there are no numbers, estimates or even an anonymous survey. As it happens I have spoken to a lot fo councillors (and not just Tories) who support this plan to the hilt or would go further and abolishing the post altogether to make clear that the elected council are meant to run the local authority. Interestingly, even the quote from the group, which calls itself SOLACE (presumably in reference to their shared emotion when the pay cheques land on the doormat), is notably vague:

"On the one hand you have got Eric Pickles [the shadow communities secretary, saying this] and on the other you have got local Conservatives saying nothing of the sort," said Graham Taylor, director of communications at Solace.

Leaving aside that there even is a director of communications for SOLACE, it's interesting to note he isn't even willing to actually say that "local Conservatives oppose this", just to imply it. Boil it down and what have we really got? The group representing Council Chief Executives releasing their own, vaguely worded, totally unsubstantiated opinion that local councillors actually all like them really. As Cilla Black would say, surprise, surprise.