There are lots of votes in giving local people value for money

Writes Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance in his Sunday column.

By the nature of their jobs, commentators and players on the political stage pay a huge amount of attention to national political goings on. This is only natural - after all, Parliament is the seat of our democracy, the Prime Minister holds the most exalted position in the land and national politics does, inevitably, affect us all. It would be wrong and politically foolish, though, to ignore the importance of local issues in any campaign.

It may seem obvious, but the services which take place literally on our doorsteps, are provided by local government. For most adults, council services like bin collections, libraries, road repairs, street lighting and so on are their most regular interaction with the State. Similarly, the council tax bill is one of the largest monthly outgoings for any household, placing severe burdens on most families‘ budgets.

Bin collections and council tax bills may seem mundane when compared to Budget Speeches, PMQs and the Queen’s Speech but when they go wrong they can have just as direct an impact on people’s lives; often even more direct an impact, in fact.

For that reason, politicians neglect local issues at their peril. The sheer strength of feeling and depth of understanding people have about the quality of their local authorities is clear to anyone who knocks on doors or mans a political stall at a local market. Right across the country these issues resonate very deeply with people, and the public are extremely good at picking up relevant facts about the quality and cost of the service they get from their council.

Mark Wallace: Aberdeen City Council – a case study in bad local government

Mark Wallace writes this regular column for the Local government page of ConservativeHome.

Just about every council gets things wrong on occasion: it’s almost inevitable. Far worse, though, are those councils where mistakes and waste occur more regularly, threatening to become the norm rather than the exception.

In the TaxPayers’ Alliance press office it is interesting to note which councils crop up most often in media calls, public complaints and insider tip-offs. Of course, the regularity with which bad news emerges about one council or another is a relatively crude measure – they may just have an unusually energetic opposition or local newspaper – but there are some examples where no amount of mitigating factors can hide the fact that a council is in trouble and is failing to get back on track.

Aberdeen City Council is indisputably one of those councils.

The backdrop to all of Aberdeen’s activities is the severe financial difficulties that they have got themselves – and therefore taxpayers – into. With a reported budget black hole of around £50 million, this is a council which urgently needs to cut out the dead wood, tighten its belt and bring its finances back under control.

Rather than having made one or even a couple of mistakes, it seems that there is a serious failure of management and a culture of wasteful spending at Aberdeen that runs right through the council, leading to massive strategic errors, huge big-ticket bills and continual smaller wastes of money across departments.

If you stand up to poor service, high taxes or waste, it is possible to win

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance argues that standing up to poor service in local government can work.

Yesterday, the Leader of Herefordshire County Council published an apology on this site that is not only welcome but gives some encouragement to all those campaigning for better local government.

Councillor Phillips was apologising to a local resident, Mr Hubbard, who had been sent a threatening letter ordering him to stop cutting the grass verge outside his home. His public-spirited behaviour, the letter suggested, was harming the appearance of the street by showing up the poor maintenance of the other verges, which the council had allowed to become overgrown, and he was ordered to stop.

Mr Hubbard’s experience is unfortunately not an uncommon one. All too often council officials become too fond of throwing their weight around and find it easiest to throw it at law-abiding soft targets rather than at truly problematic residents. He should have been congratulated and thanked for his efforts to make the street a nicer place, not threatened.

The outcome of this case is a pleasing one, though – and Councillor Phillips is to be congratulated for having the good sense to set this right and the decency to apologise. There is a lesson for all of us, too: if you stand up and object to poor service, high taxes or waste in your council, it is possible to win.

The economic slowdown hasn't reached the Town Hall fat cats

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance says the credit crunch doesn't seem to have reached Council Chief Executives.

The salaries of senior council officers have become a bigger and bigger issue in recent months. Not only do some seem to be unreasonably high, but the allocation of pay rises and bonuses all too often seems to have little in common to the actual performance of the organisation they are running.

The most recent case to hit the headlines is that of Stephen Halls, Chief Executive of Three Rivers District Council in Hertfordshire. Mr Halls, who earns £116,000 a year, has just been allowed to reduce his working week from five days to four but has not seen any resulting reduction in his salary.

Effectively, he has had a 20% pay rise, added to which there will be a bill for outsourcing some of his previous responsibilities, but the councillors in charge don't seem to see anything wrong. Somehow, they have ended up feeling grateful on the basis that if they had refused to agree to the arrangement they might have lost Mr Halls altogether.

Taxing Times

In his first post for this site Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance looks back at a tumultous fortnight for local government - and exposes a £322,565 PR bill by Lambeth Council to relaunch their Council housing.

It would be a vast understatement to say the last couple of weeks have been a turbulent time in the local government finance debate. What with the news breaking of potentially massive losses for council taxpayers in the Icelandic bank fiasco, it seems an age ago that George Osborne laid out his proposals for a freeze in council tax in his speech in Birmingham.

The two issues – the Osborne tax freeze and the Icelandic bank disaster – are not unrelated. In fact, both have shone a spotlight on that crucial question: how can councils save money?

Osborne’s proposals combine large savings in Whitehall and restraint in spending at Town Hall level, and offer the prospect of at least some welcome relief from the continual rise in council tax. Obviously, a tax cut would be even better but a freeze is still far preferable to the recent interminable series of rises that have been the main feature of most councils’ tax policies for years. Finally a politician has openly recognised that local authority savings can be made.

Sadly, sixteen London Boroughs and a scattering of other authorities across the country immediately came out against the proposal, saying spending restraint was impossible. It was an unedifying display of the lack of initiative and kneejerk big government attitude that still infests so many council chambers, to the detriment of taxpayers.