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My council tax has gone up by a whopping 20%, only a year after a not dissimilar Tax hike. This has resulted in me having to shell out £95 a month for the privilege of living in Runnymede.
There are two well known reasons for this. The first is that our borough council is determined to fulfil the governments ideal of "education, education, education", and hence more than 50% of the £95 a month I spend to live where I do goes on an education budget which, as somebody with no children, I object to mightily.
Ah, the council argues, the education of today builds the people that you will rely on in future years.
To this I say "bullcrap". The people currently flinging themselves through modern education will tomorrow be the snotty little upstarts that threaten to steal my job from under my feet direct from school or college or what not. I don't want these people to succeed. By all means throw them on the sports field and create a generation of sporting behemoths, but I'll be damned if I want a whole generation of people given better opportunities than I ever was.
When I have kids, I'll bloody well teach them myself if I have to.
The second reason, which irritates me even more than the first, is government spending policy. The government has decided that, since the south is a fairly "affluent" part of the country, they don't need to spend any money maintaining our services. So they're pumping more and more money up north and ignoring us, leaving people like me, who pay more tax than some people up north earn am consequently seeing nothing for my money, and being made to pay yet more so that people I really don't care about can have better services.
And as for being in an "affluent" area. That's crap. Yes, wages are high around here, but so is the cost to live. My monthly rent is more than I'd be proud to be earning if I were living in Wales. If I could live on the North Wales coast and rake in £800 a month after tax, I'd be laughing. But instead I'm made to carry a tax burden so that others can make good.
And then the few services I DO get for my council tax quids are nothing short of bad comedy.
Refuse collection, where I have to wheel my own bin outside every tuesday morning, and wheel it back again when I'm done? No thanks, I'm just leaving it out the front permanently. If the people getting paid to take it away can't be bothered to actually get it themselves, then I really don't see why I should help them out. They're getting paid to perform a service, and by hellfire they should be doing it themselves. Next they'll be ringing on the doorbell and asking for a quick brew before they move onto the next street. Wasters.
Then onto the police, who reside scant few metres from my doorstep, yet on the one occasion I've required their services, they took 20 minutes to arrive, when I could have walked to the station myself, paced around the building for quarter of an hour and walked home again while I was waiting. Of course, they arrived far too late to be of any use. A domestic dispute in the flat below me having raged, broken furniture made children scream and cry, have extremely loud abuse screamed at full lung capacity at 2am and then finally halted 5 minutes before the police arrived when the bloke left the house and drove away on his bike, probably drunk.
What else, one is forcved to ask, do I get for £95 a month? Clean streets? Not likely. Broken bottle glass has littered practically every step from my flat to the train station for the last two weeks. If someone is cleaming the streets, I think they're due for a review.
Do I get anything else? Because if I do, I'm not seeing it.
Damn children and their education. Damn the north and its supposed poverty. Damn public services which don't perform. Damn council tax and damn the blasted government.
Damn you all.
There are two well known reasons for this. The first is that our borough council is determined to fulfil the governments ideal of "education, education, education", and hence more than 50% of the £95 a month I spend to live where I do goes on an education budget which, as somebody with no children, I object to mightily.
Ah, the council argues, the education of today builds the people that you will rely on in future years.
To this I say "bullcrap". The people currently flinging themselves through modern education will tomorrow be the snotty little upstarts that threaten to steal my job from under my feet direct from school or college or what not. I don't want these people to succeed. By all means throw them on the sports field and create a generation of sporting behemoths, but I'll be damned if I want a whole generation of people given better opportunities than I ever was.
When I have kids, I'll bloody well teach them myself if I have to.
The second reason, which irritates me even more than the first, is government spending policy. The government has decided that, since the south is a fairly "affluent" part of the country, they don't need to spend any money maintaining our services. So they're pumping more and more money up north and ignoring us, leaving people like me, who pay more tax than some people up north earn am consequently seeing nothing for my money, and being made to pay yet more so that people I really don't care about can have better services.
And as for being in an "affluent" area. That's crap. Yes, wages are high around here, but so is the cost to live. My monthly rent is more than I'd be proud to be earning if I were living in Wales. If I could live on the North Wales coast and rake in £800 a month after tax, I'd be laughing. But instead I'm made to carry a tax burden so that others can make good.
And then the few services I DO get for my council tax quids are nothing short of bad comedy.
Refuse collection, where I have to wheel my own bin outside every tuesday morning, and wheel it back again when I'm done? No thanks, I'm just leaving it out the front permanently. If the people getting paid to take it away can't be bothered to actually get it themselves, then I really don't see why I should help them out. They're getting paid to perform a service, and by hellfire they should be doing it themselves. Next they'll be ringing on the doorbell and asking for a quick brew before they move onto the next street. Wasters.
Then onto the police, who reside scant few metres from my doorstep, yet on the one occasion I've required their services, they took 20 minutes to arrive, when I could have walked to the station myself, paced around the building for quarter of an hour and walked home again while I was waiting. Of course, they arrived far too late to be of any use. A domestic dispute in the flat below me having raged, broken furniture made children scream and cry, have extremely loud abuse screamed at full lung capacity at 2am and then finally halted 5 minutes before the police arrived when the bloke left the house and drove away on his bike, probably drunk.
What else, one is forcved to ask, do I get for £95 a month? Clean streets? Not likely. Broken bottle glass has littered practically every step from my flat to the train station for the last two weeks. If someone is cleaming the streets, I think they're due for a review.
Do I get anything else? Because if I do, I'm not seeing it.
Damn children and their education. Damn the north and its supposed poverty. Damn public services which don't perform. Damn council tax and damn the blasted government.
Damn you all.
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I have to agree, mines gone up 17% and i'm thinking what for? Our refuse collection is going to happen once every two weeks now rather than 1, so way to go to sort out the countrys rat problem! An we're going to get a Wheely bin also, and theres no way I'm getting up at 6am just to put it to the front of my driveway
My Council Tax panflet said that they are then going to keep the roads and paths in good repair, yet isn't this what i fork out £160 a piggin' year for in car tax (The roads that is, i try not to drive on the paths)!
Other than that they say they need to pay themselves more to retain staff? I don't give a monkeys if they can't keep staff, it's probably down to their poor management and not the pay!
It makes me wanna scream...aaaaaarrrrgggggggHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
My Council Tax panflet said that they are then going to keep the roads and paths in good repair, yet isn't this what i fork out £160 a piggin' year for in car tax (The roads that is, i try not to drive on the paths)!
Other than that they say they need to pay themselves more to retain staff? I don't give a monkeys if they can't keep staff, it's probably down to their poor management and not the pay!
It makes me wanna scream...aaaaaarrrrgggggggHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Indeed. I'm only a student so I don't pay tax yet, but I find a lot of government services are shockingly prehistoric in the way they operate. I don't underestimate the difficulty in administering local or national services like the tax office or whatnot, but they could make an attempt at hauling them out of the 1960's. If banks can stay at the cutting edge of technology to reduce their costs and improve their services, why can't government departments? It's the lack of competition not driving them to improve.
Although I don't envy the difficulties beaurocrats face when trying to implement a scheme like ID cards. Bloody civil liberties.
Although I don't envy the difficulties beaurocrats face when trying to implement a scheme like ID cards. Bloody civil liberties.
Council tax: they should streamline the council first, before making us pay for their shoddy services. Firstly (and I can say this because I am one) they should get rid of 90% of the temps that they employ, especially in places like London. A temp on £8 an hour costs the council £12 an hour due to agency mark up, at £10 an hour you're looking at £14-15. Temps are lazy basts on the whole, I know from personal experience. They just cost us all money. Also there are too many stupid jobs, like Healthy walking co-ordinators and Community involvement officers. Again a waste of resources. Also stop giving everyone council homes, allocating great sums grant money to them for decorating and home improvement and then letting them sell the homes for huge profits. Right to buy! My parents work hard to pay their mortgage off, I'm sure they will happily pay more council tax for no good reason.
Councils are very poorly run and although they have budgets allocated by Central Government, they don't think through their business decisions properly. They only have one other source of income and lo and behold it's us mugs. They even lost our council tax payment once, we paid the whole lot in one go, they then denied this after sending us a summons (which they charged us for) and we had to pay the whole lot again. This took place months after we paid so we didn't have a receipt....
I agree with IB. I don't want a better education service as I don't have kids. In fact the council tax should reflect this: single people would pay 40% less, those with kids in the household pay the new rate. That would be fairer. Having kids is a responsibility and this might encourage people to think about the true cost of raising them. Anyone trying to con the system , by claiming they have no kids etc, would receive very large fines. This model may not be applicable to all living arrangements but surely we cannot be expected to pay for little Timmy's education, if indeed we don't have any little Jonnies of our own.
You should only pay for the council services you actually use, it's like asking a non-driver/car owner to pay road tax.
So now we have higher income tax, VAT on everything apart from gambling, higher National Insurance, higher council tax, higher road tax and a friggin war to pay for.
Labour, I **** em.
Councils are very poorly run and although they have budgets allocated by Central Government, they don't think through their business decisions properly. They only have one other source of income and lo and behold it's us mugs. They even lost our council tax payment once, we paid the whole lot in one go, they then denied this after sending us a summons (which they charged us for) and we had to pay the whole lot again. This took place months after we paid so we didn't have a receipt....
I agree with IB. I don't want a better education service as I don't have kids. In fact the council tax should reflect this: single people would pay 40% less, those with kids in the household pay the new rate. That would be fairer. Having kids is a responsibility and this might encourage people to think about the true cost of raising them. Anyone trying to con the system , by claiming they have no kids etc, would receive very large fines. This model may not be applicable to all living arrangements but surely we cannot be expected to pay for little Timmy's education, if indeed we don't have any little Jonnies of our own.
You should only pay for the council services you actually use, it's like asking a non-driver/car owner to pay road tax.
So now we have higher income tax, VAT on everything apart from gambling, higher National Insurance, higher council tax, higher road tax and a friggin war to pay for.
Labour, I **** em.
Ha ha!
It was good anger. A typo like could be be horribly misconstrued...
It was good anger. A typo like could be be horribly misconstrued...
I got the gist.
The hardest bit to understand was the first two words "Goo danger". I was thinking, WTF?
The hardest bit to understand was the first two words "Goo danger". I was thinking, WTF?
Half of what I said didn't make sense because my fingers were trembling with rage as I typed that out!
But you get the general gist of what I'm trying to say ok?
But you get the general gist of what I'm trying to say ok?
Goo danger and so true. Labour promise not to put up income tax is a complete fabrication when they put up Council Tax at 6-7 time the rate of inflation. And that's not before the extra 1p hike in national insurance. When I lived in Chiswick, Council Tax (last year) cost me £100 per month. This year it would cost. With the extra 20% rise, it would be a massive £120 per month. That's £30 a week. Oh, don't forget the travel cost as well. After food, rent, bills and travel costs, you end up having less disposable income that someone living up north on 10k less than you would have!
That gets me into a seething rage.
That gets me into a seething rage.
My council tax has gone up by a whopping 20%, only a year after a not dissimilar Tax hike. This has resulted in me having to shell out £95 a month for the privilege of living in Runnymede.
There are two well known reasons for this. The first is that our borough council is determined to fulfil the governments ideal of "education, education, education", and hence more than 50% of the £95 a month I spend to live where I do goes on an education budget which, as somebody with no children, I object to mightily.
Ah, the council argues, the education of today builds the people that you will rely on in future years.
To this I say "bullcrap". The people currently flinging themselves through modern education will tomorrow be the snotty little upstarts that threaten to steal my job from under my feet direct from school or college or what not. I don't want these people to succeed. By all means throw them on the sports field and create a generation of sporting behemoths, but I'll be damned if I want a whole generation of people given better opportunities than I ever was.
When I have kids, I'll bloody well teach them myself if I have to.
The second reason, which irritates me even more than the first, is government spending policy. The government has decided that, since the south is a fairly "affluent" part of the country, they don't need to spend any money maintaining our services. So they're pumping more and more money up north and ignoring us, leaving people like me, who pay more tax than some people up north earn am consequently seeing nothing for my money, and being made to pay yet more so that people I really don't care about can have better services.
And as for being in an "affluent" area. That's crap. Yes, wages are high around here, but so is the cost to live. My monthly rent is more than I'd be proud to be earning if I were living in Wales. If I could live on the North Wales coast and rake in £800 a month after tax, I'd be laughing. But instead I'm made to carry a tax burden so that others can make good.
And then the few services I DO get for my council tax quids are nothing short of bad comedy.
Refuse collection, where I have to wheel my own bin outside every tuesday morning, and wheel it back again when I'm done? No thanks, I'm just leaving it out the front permanently. If the people getting paid to take it away can't be bothered to actually get it themselves, then I really don't see why I should help them out. They're getting paid to perform a service, and by hellfire they should be doing it themselves. Next they'll be ringing on the doorbell and asking for a quick brew before they move onto the next street. Wasters.
Then onto the police, who reside scant few metres from my doorstep, yet on the one occasion I've required their services, they took 20 minutes to arrive, when I could have walked to the station myself, paced around the building for quarter of an hour and walked home again while I was waiting. Of course, they arrived far too late to be of any use. A domestic dispute in the flat below me having raged, broken furniture made children scream and cry, have extremely loud abuse screamed at full lung capacity at 2am and then finally halted 5 minutes before the police arrived when the bloke left the house and drove away on his bike, probably drunk.
What else, one is forcved to ask, do I get for £95 a month? Clean streets? Not likely. Broken bottle glass has littered practically every step from my flat to the train station for the last two weeks. If someone is cleaming the streets, I think they're due for a review.
Do I get anything else? Because if I do, I'm not seeing it.
Damn children and their education. Damn the north and its supposed poverty. Damn public services which don't perform. Damn council tax and damn the blasted government.
Damn you all.
There are two well known reasons for this. The first is that our borough council is determined to fulfil the governments ideal of "education, education, education", and hence more than 50% of the £95 a month I spend to live where I do goes on an education budget which, as somebody with no children, I object to mightily.
Ah, the council argues, the education of today builds the people that you will rely on in future years.
To this I say "bullcrap". The people currently flinging themselves through modern education will tomorrow be the snotty little upstarts that threaten to steal my job from under my feet direct from school or college or what not. I don't want these people to succeed. By all means throw them on the sports field and create a generation of sporting behemoths, but I'll be damned if I want a whole generation of people given better opportunities than I ever was.
When I have kids, I'll bloody well teach them myself if I have to.
The second reason, which irritates me even more than the first, is government spending policy. The government has decided that, since the south is a fairly "affluent" part of the country, they don't need to spend any money maintaining our services. So they're pumping more and more money up north and ignoring us, leaving people like me, who pay more tax than some people up north earn am consequently seeing nothing for my money, and being made to pay yet more so that people I really don't care about can have better services.
And as for being in an "affluent" area. That's crap. Yes, wages are high around here, but so is the cost to live. My monthly rent is more than I'd be proud to be earning if I were living in Wales. If I could live on the North Wales coast and rake in £800 a month after tax, I'd be laughing. But instead I'm made to carry a tax burden so that others can make good.
And then the few services I DO get for my council tax quids are nothing short of bad comedy.
Refuse collection, where I have to wheel my own bin outside every tuesday morning, and wheel it back again when I'm done? No thanks, I'm just leaving it out the front permanently. If the people getting paid to take it away can't be bothered to actually get it themselves, then I really don't see why I should help them out. They're getting paid to perform a service, and by hellfire they should be doing it themselves. Next they'll be ringing on the doorbell and asking for a quick brew before they move onto the next street. Wasters.
Then onto the police, who reside scant few metres from my doorstep, yet on the one occasion I've required their services, they took 20 minutes to arrive, when I could have walked to the station myself, paced around the building for quarter of an hour and walked home again while I was waiting. Of course, they arrived far too late to be of any use. A domestic dispute in the flat below me having raged, broken furniture made children scream and cry, have extremely loud abuse screamed at full lung capacity at 2am and then finally halted 5 minutes before the police arrived when the bloke left the house and drove away on his bike, probably drunk.
What else, one is forcved to ask, do I get for £95 a month? Clean streets? Not likely. Broken bottle glass has littered practically every step from my flat to the train station for the last two weeks. If someone is cleaming the streets, I think they're due for a review.
Do I get anything else? Because if I do, I'm not seeing it.
Damn children and their education. Damn the north and its supposed poverty. Damn public services which don't perform. Damn council tax and damn the blasted government.
Damn you all.
Page: