Bust council forcing tax rise up by 21%!

Birmingham City who have been declared bankrupt have been given the go ahead by Tory, Michael Gove to increase the council tax by 21% over the next two years with £300m in tax cuts to boot!

How the hell do they get away with this when the limit introduced was 5%?

This is directly going to hurt families that are already struggling due to the cost of living bullshit, let's call it what it is, greed.

It will hit them directly in the pocket and not from general taxation.

Whilst i'm not sure who is directly to blame whether it be the Tories fucking up everywhere which they seem to be doing great at unless it's London or the Birmingham Labour run council frittering money around like it's confetti.

Isn't it time people started fighting back more and more like those in Europe?

Here's the links: Daily Mail

Independant

Labour are the majority party i think? They've had issues spending 100M on a failed IT system which seems to happen across the public sector on a very regular basis.

In very simple terms the government (I can't recall which one) changed the rules on how councils (Labour or Tory) could borrow money and how they could invest it.

At the time the interest rate was so low that it was cheap to borrow money - which many councils did and invest the borrowed money in schemes that in theory would make them a profit.

However the shit hit the fan and interest rates shot up and Covid came along and many people started to work from home and lots of councils had invested in office buildings which no one now wanted - so no money coming in but repayments of the loans to be made and at a higher rate because of the interest rate hikes.

A perfect storm so to speak.

The 'uncalled' for relaxing by the government of the rules had intended to allow councils to self fund rather than the previous government funding (known as the block grant).

The intention by all concerned was well meant but it simply went badly wrong.

Leaving just these council's having to apply year on year 10% rate rises (the maximum allowed under special measures) until they dig themselves out of the mess each particular council is now in.

There's dozens and dozens of councils in this hole both Tory and Labour so it isn't a party political issue as such, its simply because the government of the day that 'unregulated' the control on local government finance simply didn't plan for a series of circumstances which actually did happen.