Have you ever looked closely at your Council Tax bill to see who gets your money, what proportion they get, and what percentage increases have been added to the different elements since last year?
In what is known as two-tier Local Government, your Council Tax will be shared out, in varying amounts, between Central Bedfordshire District Council, Bedfordshire Police Authority, Bedfordshire & Luton Fire Authority and Biggleswade Town Council. In Local Government jargon, the amount paid to each of these bodies is known as a precept.
Each body sets its own precept every year and the total of all the precepts determines how much your total council tax bill will be.
The District Council is responsible for collecting all the tax and then distributing it to the others. Due to there having been some horrendous increases in council tax in recent years, and in an attempt to limit the increases in the individual precepts, the previous Government specified a maximum percentage increase that could be applied. This was known as a cap. This cap was applied to the precepts demanded by each body with the exception of Town Councils! This means that Town Councils could increase their precepts by whatever percentage they wish. This still applies in the current situation where Central Government has reduced the amount of grants to our District Council.
Being well aware that the cap does not apply to Towns , a growing number of District Councils are offloading some of their non-statutory duties onto Towns.
Councillor Tricia Turner MBE, Leader of Central Bedfordshire Council has said "We are presenting a balanced budget that protects vital services while ensuring that for the first time in a generation, householders in Central Bedfordshire will not have any increase in the demand from the council in their annual council tax,"
When you get your Council Tax bill for 2011/2012 just have a look at how much the Biggleswade Town Council element is.
NOTE: It was proposed at the District Council meeting on 24th February 2011, that the Biggleswade Town Council element would be reduced by 1.78%. Go to page 8.
If this is true that County Councils are in effect outsourcing services to smaller authorities at a micro level it's doubly disappointing that Biggleswade's recreation centre is shutting (at a poultry saving of £35k to Central Beds) that neither council supplying services to Biggleswade thinks it's a service worth saving
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