Labour Mayor’s bid to put up Council Tax by Ten per cent

Labour Mayor’s bid to put up Council Tax by Ten per cent

Liverpool Labour’s  ‘Elected Mayor’ Joe Anderson wants to put up Council Tax by over 14 per cent in the next two years. Faced with increasing cutbacks in government cash support for the city, Mayor Anderson will be pushing up Council Tax by the maximum allowable this year (3.99 per cent) and he wants to raise the tax by a further £174.22 on a band D property the following year.

To be legally allowed to raise council tax in this fashion, Joe Anderson has to win a referendum of city residents which will cost his local council taxpayers £350,000 to run.

Sefton Council’s Labour boss Peter Dowd spent £20,000 on a massive survey of public opinion in 2013 about increasing Council Tax. The public voted one way but Cllr Dowd chose to go the other.

Mayor Anderson has not always been in the vanguard of cash-saving. He was elected on the back of a firm promise to keep weekly bin collections throughout the city but had to drop this pledge like a hot potato to save £5.5 million per year. He’s also famous for spending public cash on lavish offices within the Cunard Building and using the council coffers to pay for his own lawyer’s fees after he was exposed for taking £20,000 from a Sefton school for which he was doing no work.

According to Mayor Anderson this week, Liverpool City Council now has “no funds left, even for basic services.” which has led him to dream up his Council Tax rise referendum plan.  He is publicly speculating about possibly closing all 19 libraries in the City, every single sports centre and plunging hundreds of unswept unmaintained roads into darkness by switching off thousands of street lights. The council of the recent ‘City of Culture’ would spend nothing at all on culture and would still not make ends meet.

Mayor Anderson plans to use a survey on the internet to give him some idea  if Liverpool people back his tax rise plans. He says:

“I accept people may say: “We elected you as Mayor to find a solution” but it shouldn’t be just left to me and my group alone, given the serious choices”

If both of Mayor Anderson’s propose tax rises go through, then Band D council tax payers would end up paying an annual total bill of £1,916.54.

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