At last nights Full Council meeting Tamworth Borough Council finalised the last segment of the council tax bills for the people of Tamworth and council tax bill are set to remain as they were last year. Before I go on to raise a few feelings about last nights comments I must remind anyone who is struggling to pay bills there is help out there. . . (TamCan and Credit Union on King St . or TBC benefits, housing and council tax teams). .
So whats behind the 0% council tax rise?
Some say it's only been done because the government has said it should and have given a grant. The fact of the matter is that yes the government have said if a council freezes council tax they will provide a grant of the equivalent to what 2.5% would have been, but at the same time they also said you could increase council tax by up to 3.5% before being capped. So there was still a choice and a decision to be made. In Tamworth we are in a fortunate position as the council could afford to accept the 2.5% grant and 0% council tax without any direct cuts to front line services and so did not need to consider a rise between 2.6 and 3.5%.
There is one myth that needs killing and that is the myth that "the last government increased the grants to TBC general fund by millions", what actually happened was a benefits grant that used to be included in the housing account moved to the general fund but still went straight through the council from government to benefit claimants, it just showed up in a different place.
The next question that arises must be how can the council achieve this?
In my humble opinion it has been achieved by years of constant reviewing of how services are delivered. Examples of this include lease and management schemes for the golf course (135k saving per year) and the transfer of Peaks (£600k savings per year) but there are also examples of services being brought back to the council after 25 years of private contractors, here I am referring to the waste management arrangement with Lichfield which returns the control of the bin collections to the council and also generates a saving. the reason I include this is that often the council are accused of simply acting on ideology and currently outsourcing everything this is simply not the case and the bin collections moving back into the Public Sector is further evidence that the current controlling group do not act on impulse but act as a result of review and drive to improve services and gain savings.
To an extent there is a little element of ideology included in what the council group does and that is simply based on getting the right and best people to deliver services while the council acts to facilitate this and ensure better services are delivered, this does not mean the council has to deliver them, some of the best people to deliver services are private companies, volunteers or other public services operating in similar areas.
The Borough Council (has 30 members) has over the years gained huge amounts of income by taking advantage of higher interest rates and this has been part of the way in which the council has now put itself in the position of being able to afford no council tax increase and NO direct cuts to services. The council has always put our money into banks who have had the correct level of rating, on one occasion this advice proved to be problematic and some finance is still frozen however the income achieved contributes to the day to day running of the council, this isn't about gambling this is about storing our money till its needed. The example i use is if we have a grant at the start of the year we can't give the staff all of their wages in one go for work they haven't done yet so we store the money, Tamworth has been lucky to have received such good income for years now which has put us on this even keel for the medium term plan.
We all want better services and in this climate it is great that in Tamworth there are no cuts to services, no library closures, no compulsary redundancies at the borough, 24/7 concessionary fares, £1 travel for young people, free swimming at Wilnecote, constantly improving outdoor events, better customer services in housing allocations . . the list goes on.
This seems too long now so I'll Stop, may come back later.
Well done to all those who have brought us a freeze in my council tax bill.
