Pay more, get less: Birmingham City Hall, where Council Tax will be hiked by 20% over two years and even the dead are being forced to pay more for public services
It could be worse. You could live in Birmingham.
It not only rains more in England’s second city, but their council has, like Croydon did in 2020, issued a Section 114 notice and, also like our own benighted town hall, they have has been given special permission by Michael Gove to impose a Council Tax hike without going through the legal niceties of a referendum first.
In Birmingham, Council Tax will go up by 10% in April and by another 10% in April 2025. Croydon’s Council Tax went up 15% a year ago, and will rise by 5% this year, so over two years a compound increase of 21% – so much like Birmingham will experience, too.
Birmingham City Council set out this week that, alongside the eye-watering hike in Council Tax, residents there will face massive cuts to their local services, as well as asset sales worth £1.25billion. Workers for the council have been told there will be 600 redundancies.
This privatisation of public assets is not only a theft of public property – assets that the people of Birmingham have paid for collectively over decades – but may also result in a wave of evictions of charities and voluntary organisation service providers that has been going on in Croydon.
The Birmingham cuts already announced for this year include £75million to adult social care and children’s services. This will endanger already vulnerable people in need of care.
Here in Croydon – with a population one-third of Birmingham’s – we have suffered cuts to adult social care budgets of £12million this year, and further cuts are scheduled to take effect from April, when there will be more cuts to children’s services on top of that.
Bin and gone: fortnightly bin collections, as are endured in Croydon, are to be introduced in Birmingham to save costs
As in Croydon, in Birmingham street lights in the city will be dimmed and waste collections will become fortnightly. Even the dead will be forced to pay more: burial costs will also increase in Birmingham. What an area of service provision, at such a harrowing time, to use as a revenue-raiser.
Across the country, people’s valued local services are being slashed. Birmingham and Croydon are, of course, by no means unique. Today, the Government has sent in commissioners to run Nottingham’s council, including Tony McArdle. McArdle is the chair of the “improvement and assurance” panel in Croydon, where he’s been paid £1,000 per day since he was installed in 2021. Fees paid for by local residents.
Neither Birmingham nor Croydon are in the top 10 most-indebted councils in the country.
In many areas, severe cuts are being proposed to avoid a Section 114 notice being issued, while Council Tax will be increased routinely by the maximum allowable (5%) without special permission from the Secretary of State (Gove) or a local referendum.
That 5% increase this year is an above-inflation increase in Council Tax. By April, inflation is forecast to be around 3.5%. Such a Council Tax increase will be yet another hit for households that are already struggling to make ends meet.
Across the country people are paying more (in Council Tax) to get less (in terms of public services). Since 2010, £15billion of central government funding has been removed from councils in England. That is one factor in the collapse of councils around the country. As in Croydon, Birmingham, Thurrock, Woking and others, local mismanagement – often over decades – has also played a role.
The increasing demand for local services is a third factor: in an ageing society there is more demand for social care. The scale of NHS waiting lists also mean there are more people who have needed care for longer while they wait for operation.
Children’s services are also increasingly under pressure, as a study by the University of Huddersfield shows “rising child poverty is the key factor in the growth in care numbers”.
Homelessness has risen and councils have a statutory duty to house those in need, despite the fact that here in Croydon, our council has wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds it doesn’t have seeking to avoid that responsibility through losing court cases.
As time goes on, Croydon is looking less like an isolated basket case and more like the canary in the coalmine.
It’s the same across the country: you pay more and get less.
Enemy of the States: Julian Assange is being pursued by the US because he exposed its government’s actions
Assange pissed off the right people. His journalism should be lauded
In a week when much of the media has rightly criticised Russia for the imprisonment and suspected murder of one of Putin’s political opponents, Alexei Navalny, there has been relative silence about the ongoing imprisonment of a man who has now spent five years locked up in London’s Belmarsh prison without charge.
Through the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange exposed the lies, corruption and crimes of governments across the world. This has made enemies of the United States government, which is seeking to extradite the whistleblower and charge him for what American lawyers called “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.
In the High Court in London on Tuesday, Assange’s lawyers said the case brought by the US was “state retaliation” for the uncomfortable truths their client had brought to light.
If extradited to America, Assange could spend the rest of his life in jail.
Assange’s lawyers argue he is being prosecuted for an “ordinary journalistic practice”, supporting whistleblowers to get the truth out about inconvenient facts that governments would rather keep hidden.
We need to defend independent and robust journalism – it is a vital part of our democracy and helps us, the people, to know what our leaders are really doing. The word “democracy” literally translates as “the people rule”. Governments are accountable to us, and rule only with our consent. They – and we – would do well to remember that more often.
And let’s bring this back to Croydon. How much less would we know about the shameful machinations at the Town Hall and elsewhere in our borough were it not for whistleblowers getting the truth out via Inside Croydon?
Many good journalists are hated by those in power, and should wear that badge with pride.
Julian Assange has pissed off all the right people. But we, the people, know more about the (sometimes illegal) actions of our governments as a result.
He should be freed and his journalistic work lauded.
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes regular columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- It’s an F grade for Keegan over nation’s apprenticeship failings
- Thank you, Mark Serwotka, for decency, principle and service
- Gove’s extra cash barely touches the sides of Croydon’s debts
- Perry struggles with numbers to offer us: Pay More, Get Less
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
