Three vote moving policies

Policy announcements were fairly thin-on-the-ground this week but three, in particular, will be powerful ammunition for the campaign trail:

1. Council tax is Britain's most unpopular tax and the pledge to freeze it for two years (for those councils that make economies) will be a vote-winner.  Over on the local government blog Harry Phibbs notes how Labour and Liberal councils are preparing to undermine the policy.  Harry thinks we should name and shame those councils.  He's begun to do so.
2. The £121m commitment to restore weekly bin collections is also a doorstep-winner.  The restoration (which will be voluntary for local authorities) will be funded "by scrapping funding for a range of inspectorates, regional assemblies, Labour's new planning superquango and forcing councils to spend less on promotion."
3. It's not a funding commitment I would have made in these 'cupboard-is-bare' times but there's no doubt that Andrew Lansley's promise of 45,000 extra single beds will be very welcome to all those millions of patients and their relatives who are deeply uncomfortable with noisy and infection-prone wards.

Hat tip to Eric Pickles for providing two of those three policies and another hat-tip to CCHQ for producing a good overview of party policies: Reconstruction, Renewal, Repair.  A PDF of it is here.

This is the fourth of eight reflections on the Birmingham Conference by Tim Montgomerie. The previous looked at the suspension of green tax plans.

Comments

[Edward Huxley]

On council tax, which is only paid by about 30% of us. To freeze it for 2 years is a small step in the right direction, but I fear will not be much use. Reason - the EU again, which with the threat of huge penalties for non-compliance, has forced councils into costly recycling schemes and the building of huge and dangerous incinerators.

So the tax will continue to rise.

[Smith Keighley]

I attended a couple of fringes that Eric Pickles spoke at. He mentioned an about to be published Green Paper on local government and that it would contain reforms to give councils a “vested interest in their tax base.” If this is the case councils will have a means to break through the current state dependency of the council tax

[Bernerlap]

Why not add a fourth vote-winner. The biased BBC has become a national disgrace. Propose to abolish the licence fee. The process can be phased in as the analogue system is phased out.
Anyone in an area where the analogue system had been switched off who had a satellite/cable system would be allowed to opt out of BBC programming. Anyone who bought a new system would have to opt in. The licence would remain for those with a free view box or analogue.
This would leave the BBC with a declining licence revenue so it would have to become more efficient and less biased.

[resident leftie]

This is big government micromanagement in local government affairs. These are piffling, pathetic commitments. So much for a broad scope of vision.

It's no business of central government how often councils collect rubbish. It they want to save money and energy by collecting every fortnight - good luck to them, and let the voters chuck them out if they don't like it. Likewise, different councils have different needs which vary year on year.

If the local people want to vote for tax increases, let them. If another party (presumably the Tories) is standing on lower taxes - the voters can always pick them. Really, you are targetting the poor once again. Poorer people are more likely not to vote Tory (I wonder why?) and this is a way of getting at them.

[M Dowding]

I stil preferred passing leftie, as in passing off into the sunset!