Council Tax
- Thread starter jrwagh333
- Start date
wow your so ignorant, perhaps you have never been in a situation where there is no money to pay for the cost of living, what i would do is to abolish people like you who live a bubble and have no sense on how the real world works
blimey.
So you would abolish hard working people who live off their own means whilst paying for the lazy members of society to live? Ok cool
How would these people live with no one to pay for them?
It works in a majority of other countries without fly tipping. In Ireland for example, it is also cheaper for many people as you pay for what you throw away, (dependent upon local authority) and has weekly rather than fortnightly collections (agains dependent on local authority or what you specify) with waivers for low income households. It is more expensive for heavy users, however there is no more incidence of fly tipping or rubbish burning in Ireland than here, less because of the heavy fines and penalties imposed for doing so.
Also private contractors are already doing much of the work in many regions in this country, simply getting under contract to the local authority. Your council is also doing well if your £1 per household (are you sure that is not per head..making it more like £3.50 per household?) figure is correct for everything and your local authority doesn't charge extra for bulky goods etc (ours charges about £25 for up to 6 items and £17 extra for white goods)...averages for normal waste collection only (not bulk or white goods) average at about £1.03 per week, per head. Overall the annual average costs are around £179 per household not including bulk, white goods or garden waste collection. This is comparable with other solutions in other countries (ROI average is €229 per household)
What local authority do you work for?
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So you would abolish hard working people who live off their own means whilst paying for the lazy members of society to live? Ok cool
How would these people live with no one to pay for them?
I didn't say that, i said about the guy who was living in a bubble, your doing the same saying lazy in your sentence, not everyone on benefits is a lazy scrounger.
Soldato
Not everyone has the same start in life so I still say it should be means tested. No good going all Daily Mail and saying low earners should get better higher paying job etc.
Are the cleaner streets because more council workers are used to clean them or because there is less fly tipping and dropping of rubbish? Are the nicer parks because things aren't vandalised as much or because they are changed more frequently. As you get higher up the income ladder you're actually likely to use less services, such as using private education and health for you and your kids, using private gyms and pools rather than subsidised council run ones etc. There are a multitude of other things that you won't use as much, yet you still pay more tax than those that use more, generally those on the bottom of the income ladder. This happens for local tax and national tax (some of the examples above transcend both brackets).
Soldato
I pay £1250 a year for my one bed flat in dundee 
edit: band B
edit: band B
Soldato
not single then ?
Life is a rip off, get used to it, or go to court / jail. Cost of living is going up constantly and wages are not, get used to it, at least we do not live in india, afghanistan or some dump like that. But I agree that the cost of living in the UK is getting ridiculous compared to the wages. A lot of jobs I see are around 10-12k, How anyone is supposed to survive on that I have no idea.
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Soldato
Wouldn't you be entitled to working tax credits if that was the case ? And Housing benefits?
I pay £1250 a year for my one bed flat in dundee
edit: band B
All those free prescriptions and universities have to be paid for somehow.
Soldato
- Joined
- 8 Mar 2007
- Posts
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Reverse the bus a bit. You suggested (and I replied to) the idea of a waste collection service totally independent of finance from local taxation, a completely private service paid for entirely from the receipts of people choosing to sign up for waste collections.
If my limited research serves me correct, that is NOT what they have in Ireland. Rather some counties (namely Dublin) add an additional charge for collecting your landfill bin which isn't quite the same, but the main infrastructure and the collection of recycling is "free" (or rather paid for via taxation).
Still paid for via local taxation, not offering the pay-as-you-go system you seem to want (which may save you a few pence a week at most).
Private contractors only ever win these contracts by offering a lower service also, they won't come back to rectify mistakes/errors so if your bin was missed then tough. They pay pittance and treat their workers badly and will cut corners at every opportunity. I'd like to see some data on public satisfaction with their waste collection service and see the comparison from authorities that run their own versus ones that contract it out. I would be amazed if the people who live in cities with private contractors were as happy with the service as ones who employ the collectors directly.
Regardless, whether the workforce itself is private or public is irrelevant to best way of paying for it which is what we were debating originally.
So now you're questioning my figures, I guess the fact I work in this industry everyday and often have to compile all manner of statistics for it means nothing. Yep, all the key players for the last 5 years at my local authority have been quoting the wrong figure in official reports and some bloke from OCUK with no research has caught them out....
Sorry for the roll-eyes but my this is my day job. We have 60,000 households in Oxford City, our operation costs around £58k a week when isolated to domestic waste collection only.
Our bulky collections partially finance themselves as one of those rounds is essentially a scrap metal round which makes some money back from the landfill stuff, and we are now starting to enforce a charge after two visits a year.
Ultimately waste collection are such a small part of your council tax, it's tiny so even if you could opt out of it, you'd be cutting such a pathetic amount of your bill it really wouldn't be worth it. It's not like someone who pays £150 a month now would drop to £120 a month, it would be more like £143 at best.
Besides how far do you take this idea, could I say that I am an ardent right-winger and don't wish to contribute to the cost of social housing? That's where most of your CT goes (not picking up rubbish) anyway. Or could I opt to have the streets lights outside my house turned off because I'm willing to install my own? I don't have any children so shouldn't I get a discount that amounts to the percentage my authority pays to children services?
Fact is, some things we decide as a society to club together and pay for as the collective for the benefit of the collective. There will always be people who claim it's not 'fair' they are paying slightly more to cover the poorer people in that society but guess what, TOUGH! If they can't see the advantage of paying into a system that benefits everyone in your locality (i.e making the place generally a nicer place to live) then they can at least take solace in the fact they own nice things (as the only people that moan about it are generally well-paid people who live in nice houses)
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I'd quite like to see some additional duty added onto sales of chewing gum... I mean increase the price by 100% if necessary as its hardly expensive in the first place - split the revenue with local authorities so they can employ people to clean it up from the pavements in town centres...
You think we have it bad here? Try the rest of western Europe, the USA, Australia, or virtually anywhere else developed. We have it just fine.
Associate
Ignore him, he lives at home with mummy, probably doesn't pay any council tax himself.
In most of Ireland there is currently no council tax...refuse is collected by private companies and is paid for as a separate service by the householder. Like I said, each authority does this differently and some are subsidised and some are not...this goes for a range of services such as public transport as well.
Not really the point...the point was that Private contractors already supply the services to local authorities in England. Whether people are happy or not is by and by..especially as people are rarely happy whoever supplies the service...including in Oxford.
I wasn't aware we were debating originally. I said that paying for services you use is an alternative to paying a single all encompassing charge, that is all. You stated that taking waste collections from local authorities and charging directly would increase fly-tipping etc...I said it hasn't in other countries where a different direct charge system is in place, so far you have not offered evidence to suggest this is incorrect..only begun arguing about something else.
So now you're questioning my figures, I guess the fact I work in this industry everyday and often have to compile all manner of statistics for it means nothing. Yep, all the key players for the last 5 years at my local authority have been quoting the wrong figure in official reports and some bloke from OCUK with no research has caught them out....
Rolleyes all you like....the figures you gave seem exceptionally good compared to the national averages and official figures given by various local authorities. I also didn't say it meant nothing, perhaps you should just get off your high horse and actually read what was written rather than what you think was written...like the figures I gave are from several local authorities for example and Govt. average figures from the ONS and DEFRA. So yeah, I did my research across several authorities..rather than just assuming yours was indicative of the national averages. Like I said, if the figure of £1 per household, per week for all comprehensive domestic collections (inc white and bulk as you said) is correct then your council is doing very well, for comparison Wiltshire for the last year 2012/13 the costs were just under £3 per household, slightly lower than the year before.
Your day job? working for the OWP? are your figures inclusive of the shared benefit of this partnership and the fact that some of the City costs are subsidised via this partnership and the County Council? (who interestingly said in a recycling missive recently that their environmental services cost each household approx £6 per week in 2012/13 when discussing the importance of increasing recycling rates.) Here is Wiltshire (exclusive of Swindon) we have 176,000 households and the costs for domestic waste collection last year were (according to my Council Tax breakdown) £30.1m, this means that each household contributed approximately £170 per household for Waste Collection, this compares with the figures given by the County for the costs of delivering their service (in partnership with several private companies under contract) per household.
Besides, as I said your figures are excellent as they are significantly lower than the national averages. If you are indeed delivering comprehensive domestic waste collections for less than £1 per week per household then that is far better than our council or the other councils I looked at. Like I said, ours costs more than that and we also get charged for bulky items and white goods...although not Garden Waste, which your council does.
So there are extra costs incurred..this was somewhat different from you said earlier..also your council is not indicative of everyone. I gave the figures for ours for example. Does not Oxford also charge for Garden Waste bins and so on? (£39 per year).
You are missing the point..It isn't about cutting just one service, it was but an example...but removing council tax entirely and funding some services such as Policing, Housing etc nationally and others individually, which really means the rest of your post is moot. Besides, is not the public currently complaining about the increases in Oxford council tax which are being justified by increased costs regarding waste collection amongst other things?
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Hi,
I pay 1/3 of our houses council tax out of my own worked for money.
Whereas your paying yours out of your benefits...
Nice presumptions
You don't get any of that stuff anymore since the government introduced "universal credit" basically making it 100% impossible to survive on benefits so you have no choice but to get a job.