Letter from Thurrock Council regarding the ‘service charge’ loophole rent increase

I received an e-mail from Thurrock Council in response to my e-mail/article I sent regarding the ‘service charges’ being levied on council residents in lieu of an overt council rent increase in flagrant disregard of their own Westminster brethren’s pledge to reduce council rents by 1%.  Below is the full text of that e-mail:

Dear Mr Cook,

Thank you for your recent enquiry about the grounds maintenance service charge.

As you may be aware this charge has been temporarily suspended pending a further review so will not take effect on October 2nd. At the end of the review the Council will decide whether to apply the charge and if so how much it will be and who will be liable.

All tenants are being written to individually with this information.  

Please contact me if you require any more information at this stage

Kind regards,

Michael Everest l Complaints and Information Governance Assistant I HR, OD & Transformation

And here’s the full text of my reply:

Dear Mr Everest,

Actually I think you’ll find that my covered all the ‘service charges’ the council wishes to increase the rent by so you’re factually inaccurate in your e-mail in the very first line.

Regarding the rest of your missive – the ‘Grass Tax’ may be suspended for a while but does that include all of the charges or not?  The whole debate around the ‘service charges’ seems to be dominated by the ‘Grounds Maintenance Charge’ (AKA ‘Grass Tax’) but seems to conveniently ignore the rest of the charges that are being levied on certain council residents.  Are they going to be suspended or not?

Also, my original e-mail asked for a response from Mr Gledhill to the article that I had attached to that e-mail.  I have received no such response.  As the suspension of the ‘Grass Tax’ does not, it seems, cover the other ‘service charges’ – the ‘Access Tax’ (AKA ‘Lift Maintenance Charge’), the ‘Safety Tax’ (AKA ‘Communal Lighting Charge’) and the ‘Security Tax’ (AKA Secure Door Entry Charge’) – Mr Gledhill still has to make a public announcement regarding these ‘service charges’ and still owes me a personal response to my original e-mail.

I expect his response very soon.

Regards,

Myles Cook

I shall, as always, post any replies I get.

Pre-emptive strike against Thurrock Council’s response to my article on the stealth rent increase

I haven’t heard back from Thurrock Council or Cllr Gledhill regarding my article savaging the statement issued by them defending the ‘service charges’ they intend to add to council tenant’s rent but I know they are going to use the “well, we don’t have the budget that we used to have” line.

This is a very true statement but let’s look at the evidence that Thurrock Council themselves posted on their website as a way of working out why they don’t have as big a budget as they used to.  Below I have included a screen grab of the funding document which is downloadable from the Thurrock Council website (https://www.thurrock.gov.uk/paying-your-council-tax/your-council-tax-bill-explained).

As you can see, the General Revenue Grant has decreased and will, according to the estimated forecasts on the table, continue to fall over the next couple of years; in fact it has been dropping consistently from 2012/13.  As stated in the document Revenue Grants are for the annual funding of services and while some must be spent on specific services, the rest supports the overall council budget.  The decrease in the General Revenue Grant would obviously put pressure on Tory-run Thurrock Council.  But we must look at where the Revenue Grants come from and the title of the above document gives us that information – it’s “funding from government”.  Given this piece of information, and bearing in mind that the current ‘government’ is also Tory-run, it seems that the current Tory administration is simply learning the truth that it tried to hide from people when it was in opposition that it’s difficult to pay for things when the Tory ‘government’ is insisting on slashing grants to local authorities in pursuit of their ideologically-motivated austerity agenda.

Are the council tenants of Thurrock cutting the level of funding from central government?  Of course not.

The Thurrock Tories wanted to increase council rents by 9%.  Who stopped them? 

Tory central ‘government’ who pledged to reduce council rents by 1% in a blatant attempt to buy the working class, council tenant vote.

Given this obstacle to their attempts to increase council rents, Thurrock Tories had to find another way to raise some extra cash so they came up with the idea of the ‘service charges’.  Original proposals would have added up to the 9% rent increase they wanted to institute in the first place but that was voted down by Labour and UKIP so new proposals were drawn up which brings us to the situation that Thurrock’s council tenants find themselves in now – an increase of between 5% and 7.6% in approximate terms.

However, given all this, we still have the Capital Grants to look at.  These are funding for one-off projects and investments.

According to the Capital Grants table, Highways and Environment is getting an estimated increased grant in 2017/18 of £9.796m (up from the £5.110m grant in 2016/17).

Now it is possible that the money has been earmarked for specific projects within that category, but as the “14 play parks, 50 hectares of green space, 13 hectares of footpaths, a further 30 hectares of hard surfaces and over 2,000 trees” that Cllr Gledhill referred to come under that category, one could suggest that Thurrock Council will have the money to cover it.

Given that those items are also already paid for by Council Tax revenues, one might argue that Cllr Gledhill and his administration don’t have a leg to stand on when trying to defend the ‘service charges’ argument.

Yes, the Capital Grant for Highways and Environment does drastically reduce in the following two years but they know who they can squarely point the finger at for that – their Parliamentary brethren.  Their council tenants have nothing to do with that decision (unless, of course, they help vote in a different administration at the national level).

And, for the Tory-voting members of Thurrock, you can’t keep blaming Labour for the financial mess the UK is in because the Tories have been in power for 7 years and have done little to sort out the problems in our economy.  All they’ve done is blame Labour and use the financial mess as an excuse to do what they would have done even if the UK was in better economic shape – cut services, slash budgets and attack the poor and disadvantaged.

My message to Tory voters – stop blaming Labour for your failures and lack of compassion!