Biggest ever council tax cut

Author: Daily Telegraph - Jan 21, 2010

Windsor and Maidenhead council will announce today a four cut per cent in the charge from April.

This will bring the average council tax for a band D property to £996 2010/11, down by £41 from 2009/10.

The Local Government Association said that Windsor and Maidenhead’s tax cut was the biggest ever.

Most councils are set to increase the charge by between 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent from April.

The Government said it would cap any increases of above 3 per cent. The RPI measure of inflation is currently 2.4 per cent.

The local authority has cut more than £1million off the local authority’s budget between 2009/10 and 2010/11 - and handed the saving directly onto council tax payers.

Windsor and Maidenhead councillors, who agreed the cut in secret earlier this month, said they were hoping that the radical overhaul of its finances could form a blueprint for other councils across the UK to cut council tax.

The cut is remarkable because Windsor and Maidenhead’s average Band D council tax bill has risen by 1.9 per cent to £1,018 and 2.5 per cent to £1,037 for the preceding two years.

David Burbage, the council’s leader, told The Daily Telegraph: "We are showing that council tax can go down as well as up. For too long council tax bills have inexorably risen, and there is no correlation between high council tax and good services.

"Our council has proved that we can make public services better and cut tax at the same time. There’s a huge amount of waste in the system and we should never forget that it’s taxpayers’ money we are spending."

Savings include a new car pool service for staff (saving £25,000), slashing perks such as the £25 meeting attendance fee (£150,000), centralising printing and posting costs (£150,000) and shorter menus at a leisure centre’s cafe (£25,000).

Others include a renegotiated mobile phone contract (saving £30,000), retendering a school transport contract (£207,000), streamlining the planning department (£73,000) and putting long term agency staff on to permanent contracts (£25,000).

Some £70,000 was also saved by introducing smart metering. Half of this saving came from changing energy saving habits among staff by logging heating and energy spending hourly on the local authority’s website.

Go to the original article here