While much of the recent debate on Welfare Reform has been centred on the Benefits Uprating Bill and demise of DLA, an altogether more insidious change has slipped through with little comment. This is surprising because, if my view from the public gallery of a council chamber somewhere in the West Midlands yesterday evening is in any way representative, Thatcher's successors have exacted cruel revenge on their political foes without them even noticing.
They've got them to reintroduce the Poll Tax.
The problem is this. Central Government has devolved responsibility for devising and implementing a Council Tax Support scheme to Local Authorities, given them 10% less money with which to fund it but attached conditions ensuring that pensioners cannot be worse off under the new scheme than the existing national one. Councils are therefore faced with either funding the shortfall by a general rise in Council Tax, by cuts in services, by borrowing or by making their scheme for working-age claimants less 'generous' than at present. A fairly simple calculation tells you that if you are a Council with a better-off population, a 10% cut in subsidy for Council Tax Benefit is fiddling small change, whereas if you've got a lot of unemployed, incapacitated and low-waged residents, the position is very different.
And where do we find the latter disadvantaged communities? That's right: overwhelming in Labour-run Local Authority areas, and disproportionally in the Midlands and the North.
The grim truth is that you can't square this circle: unless they are willing to pump in funds from another pot, Councils are going to have to cut benefits in actual terms to some claimants. Arguably, other pots could have been raided - even the most cash-strapped Councils still get fleeced for more in a day's pay for 'experts' and 'consultants' than a year's Band B - but locally, that was rejected. Core principles of the new scheme were that 'everybody should contribute to the cost of local services' and that it should 'encourage people to find work.'
I'll come back to the second point later. Let's look at 'everybody should contribute to the cost of local services'. That was precisely the argument behind the Poll Tax - the Thatcherite Government arguing that if people receiving benefits didn't have to pay 'the rates' (as they were then) they wouldn't hold their Council to account when it put them up to fund dreadful things - like the fabulously low bus fares we enjoyed in Sheffield in the early 1980s, for example. You might just persuade me that there was some merit in that if national rates for Social Security benefits were being increased by a sum equivalent to the 'ideal' contribution an unemployed person would make towards their Council Tax, but they aren't. On the contrary, it's almost inconceivable that they will rise by more than 1% in the next few years, unless a few more LibDem MP's find the 'conscience' app on their Smartphones and vote against the Benefits Uprating Bill. But at present benefits contain no allowance at all for Council Tax, so every last penny a Council chooses to demand from its unwaged residents comes directly from money that should be providing them and their families with food, clothes, and fuel.
So the 'fair' principle isn't 'everybody should pay': it's everybody who can afford to should pay. And because some can't afford to pay anything, those who can afford most should pay more to compensate - I think it goes something like 'From each according to their ability...' I would be curious, for example, to see how the sums worked out applying a slightly steeper 'taper' to claims from people with incomes above subsistence level while accepting that anyone whose income was at or below their 'Income Support' equivalent should be exempt.
Still, the good old Poll Tax was only asking for 10%. The meeting I observed last night didn't go for 10% - it set the minimum payment for the majority of working age claimants at 30%. That was down from the 35% initially outlined. Not that there was a debate or anything silly like that. The motion was proposed and seconded; not a single Councillor of any political complexion spoke against and on a show of hands, no-one indicated dissent.
This was in stark contrast to a debate which raged for almost three hours on the pros and cons of relocating the Council offices to a new building intended to be the centrepiece of a new Central Business District. I watched that as a 'neutral'; there's no question that something needs doing to regenerate the City Centre and I admit to quite liking the funky design for the new building, but I can't help thinking that if those businessmen who supposedly think so highly of this scheme had any real faith in it, they wouldn't be waiting for the Council to make the first move, they'd build their own new HQ on the site - but I digress. The relevence of this debate to the Council Tax issue is the claim that this scheme will create something in the region of 4,500 new jobs.
Now, even if every one of those new jobs goes to someone from this immediate area currently out of work, it still leaves half of them without a job and either missing a meal, leaving the heating off even in weather like we've had this week (ie rarely above freezing) or playing dodge the bailiff because they've defaulted on that 30% Council Tax payment.
So if there aren't enough jobs here, and even the rosiest predictions don't provide enough for all, making even the poorest pay 30% of their Council Tax doesn't help them find work, it simply forces the unemployed deeper into poverty, takes income out of local shops and businesses, dumps a greater burden on overstretched Foodbanks and underfunded charities, or even compels people to leave an already depopulated city in search of somewhere they can live more cheaply.
When certain London Boroughs were proposing to move their homeless residents to areas of cheaper housing, the phrase 'Social Cleansing' was coined for it. I wish I didn't feel that the same game is being played here.
