Rents and taxes

At last night’s Rugby Borough Council meeting it was my role as Housing Portfolio Holder to present budgets for management of the Council’s housing stock for 2007/8. The general fund budgets which will set Council Tax will be debated at the next meeting in March. The most important aspect of the housing budget is the setting of rents for the coming year.

In this role I likened the council to the army being controlled by the Grand Old Duke of York having to march to the Government’s tune with often contradictory directives. One driver is a process called rent re-structuring with an agenda for council house rents to rise to the level of Housing Association rents by 2012. In Rugby this would mean a rise of 6.9%. But another directive imposes a cap of 5% so 5% it is. The one calculation the Government doesn’t ask Rugby to do is the one which shows what the rise would be without all this interference, probably around the rate of inflation.The difference between what is needed and what the Government is forcing the Council to charge goes to Gordon Brown and is effectively another tax which this time is levied on council tenants who are often the poorest members of our community

Rugby has a proud record in the management of its housing stock and doesn’t need micro managing. Why can’t this government trust people locally to get on with delivering the services that local people want?